I have in my hands a copy of the 2012 Interim Study Survey, a list of 20 policy topics proposed by various legislators and their committees for scrutiny and discussion over the summer. (Remember: legislators, like teachers, don’t really get the summer off; they spend their long break studying and getting ready for next year. The big difference: teachers do their summer prep for free, while legislators get paid $110 a day.)

Among the proposals is Item I, serendipitously for “Imagine”… as in “Imagine Learning”:

Study of education and student accountability

The owner and creator of the “Imagine Learning” program created this for student achievement and accountability by developing an environment that makes it easy and exciting for kids to “buy-in” to their education experience. The success rate is extremely high for all cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. This would be a great program to adopt in South Dakota—public, private, and reservation.

[Representative Patty Miller (R-16/McCook Lake), 2012 Interim Study Survey, Item I, sent to members of the South Dakota Legislature, 2012.03.31]

Given Rep. Miller’s votes and clueless advocacy for Governor Daugaard’s package of destructive education reforms, I’m not sure I’d take her word for any educational product being “great.”

But Rep. Miller’s language in this proposal sets off my sales pitch alert. Easy and exciting… education experience… I feel as if Miller is reading off a card handed to her by an Imagine Learning sales rep. It sounds like she’s asking the Legislature to convene a committee meeting not to comprehensively study the effectiveness of a variety of teaching tools and methods but rather to sit down for a sales pitch from one private company selling one specific product. Does Rep. Miller really expect the Legislature to sign a contract with Imagine Learning to buy its specific software and mandate that all of the teachers in the state use it in their classrooms?

Even if such an action benefiting one company fell within the proper jurisdiction of the Legislature (I’m pretty sure it doesn’t), on what basis does Rep. Miller pick Imagine Learning from the panoply of private players in the pedagogical market?

My research overnight is not nearly as thorough as the conscientious study our legislators would give Imagine Learning over the summer. But so far, I’ve learned online that this Utah-based company was founded in 2002 with a focus on computer-assisted English instruction worldwide. The company currently has a 92% renewal rate among over 2000 schools purchasing its software. It also sounds like Imagine Learning was able to get its Utah legislators to fund a statewide license for its product… after making a few campaign donations to local conservatives.

Imagine Learning has evidently made a successful sales pitch to numerous schools and legislators. The company offers lots of first-name-only testimonials. Its software pumps out plenty of music, cartoons, videos, and interactive games to keep students glued to the computer screen. But does it improve English skills?

Imagine Learning cites two studies affirming its ability to add value in the classroom, an analysis of early literacy test scores among customers/students at three elementary schools in one Illinois district and an analysis of English test scores in one California elementary school near the Mexican border. Both studies use the same methodology: add Imagine Learning English activities to some of the kids’ regular classroom activities but not to others, then compare their gains in test scores. Both studies show ILE users making greater gains than non-ILE users.

That sounds great… but both studies sound more like sales pitches than solid science.

Both studies appear to have targeted the lowest achievers. The kids who need the most help have the most to gain, and their gains will look numerically more impressive than those of kids already scoring high. Imagine you have two groups of kids, one with a test average of 40, the other with a test average of 80. You pour on the teaching and raise everyone’s test scores by 16 points. You can happily report that the first group increased its scores by 40%, while the second group improved by only 20%. Defining your subsets by ability clouds our view of whether the extra help you offered your low achievers really produced better-than-expected results or whether those percentages are just an artifact of your selective math.

Neither study addresses confounding factors. Neither study looks at other factors that may differentiate students within the small samples studies. Neither study mentions differences among teachers and teaching methods that may affect learning outcomes.

Neither study compares Imagine Learning to other educational interventions. Suppose x is standard classroom instruction. If our kids are struggling, we teachers understand that we have to add something to x. These two studies compare (x + 0) to (x + i). If we have extra resources to invest, we teachers want to compare (x + i) to (x + j) and (x + k). It seems obvious that some extra English practice will produce better results than no extra English practice. These studies cannot make clear whether the gains students achieved resulted uniquely from Imagine Learning’s product or whether the same gains would have come from extra practice in any other form, such as an extra 15 minutes each day of standing on our heads and yodeling our vocabulary lists. (Actually, I might have to try that with my French students!)

Both studies come from local private consultants. Both studies are labeled “Independent Assessment Study.” The Illinois study comes from ClearVue Research Inc. The California study comes from JointStrategy Consulting. Neither company has an online presence. Both were based in Utah at the time of the studies. Neither company has a substantial Web presence. The ClearVue research more so than the JointStrategy research is written as a sales pitch:

ClearVue Research, Inc does not hesitate, therefore, to recommend Imagine Learning English to public school administrators seeking a program designed to accelerate language and literacy skills in the early grades [ClearVue 2007].

You don’t get language like that from independent scholars. We can assume these consultants were paid by Imagine Learning to write up these two meager studies. So far I can find no truly independent scholarly analysis of learning results from Imagine Learning. Nearly all of the information you’ll find online is press releases and other information from folks making money off this product.

Our local school districts can apply their own expertise to determine the educational materials on which they want to spend their scarce tax dollars. They don’t need legislators like Patty Miller making specific purchasing decisions for them. Legislators, you’ll want to focus your summer efforts on studying the impacts of statewide policies, not sales pitches from out-of-state profiteers.

A “pig in a poke” is a lovely idiom for “an offering or deal that is foolishly accepted without being examined first.” That’s not quite an accurate description of the Keystone 1 pipeline. But TransCanada needs to get a bigger poker to get a pig out of its pipe:

TransCanada Corp. will shut down its Keystone oil pipeline in April for up to several days to find and remove an errant “pig,” from the 500,000-barrel-per-day oil system, the company said Monday.

The piece of equipment, a pipeline inspection gauge (pig), was being used during a routine cleaning operation of the Hardisty to Cushing, Okla., line when it became disconnected, TransCanada spokesman Terry Cunha said.

“I can’t speculate on how long it will take to remove the pig but it should be completed within a few days,” Cunha said in an email [Dina O'Meara, "TransCanada to Shut Keystone Pipeline in April to Remove 'Pig'," Calgary Herald, 2012.03.20].

The pig broke away on March 15 somewhere upstream of the Steele City, Nebraska, pumping station but has not hindered a normal flow of oil through Keystone 1 at 500,000 gallons a day. With oil flowing at that enormous pressure, you fellows at the refinery in Cushing might want to check your oil for pig parts.

We can hope that waiting a couple weeks before shutting down the flow and cleaning out the pipes signals that there’s no need to be concerned about nuts and bolts zooming through the pipe and damaging or plugging a valve. But maybe TransCanada figures that tar sands oil is so acidic and abrasive that it will simply wear that pig down to nothing before they have to open the hatch and fish it out.

In positive Fourth Amendment news, the South Dakota Supreme Court this week reversed a drug conviction and declared that police need a warrant to use GPS transmitters to secretly track citizens.

According to the unanimous ruling in South Dakota vs. Elmer Wayne Zahn, Jr., police had plenty of reason to think Zahn was dealing marijuana. They’d found lots of spare cash and containers smelling of pot in the bedroom where Zahn’s wife died in June, 2008. In November 2008, police arrested Zahn for DUI and found marijauna and $10,000 in cash in his car. That stop resulted in Zahn’s pleading guilty to DUI and possession of pot and paraphernalia.

Then in March 2009, Aberdeen policeman Tanner Jondahl attached a magnetic GPS tracker to Zahn’s vehicle. Police tracked Zahn’s every vehicular movement for 26 days, including several trips to two storage units and a trip to Gettysburg, which was a bad idea, since Zahn was out on bond at the time and wasn’t supposed to leave Brown County. Oops. The police rearrested Zahn, got a search warrant for the storage units, and found in one of them a hidden freezen with pot. That evidence led to another conviction, including intent to distribute.

Zahn appealed that conviction, saying the court should have thrown out the evidence discovered thanks to the GPS tracking. Our justices agreed:

…The GPS device used in this case continuously transmitted the geographic location of Zahn’s vehicle to a computer at the Brown County Sheriff’s Department. It enabled officers to not only determine his speed, direction, and geographic location within five to ten feet at any time, but to also use the recorded information to discover patterns in the whole of his movements for nearly a month.

[¶28.] When the use of a GPS device enables police to gather a wealth of highly-detailed information about an individual’s life over an extended period of time, its use violates an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.  The use of a GPS device to monitor Zahn’s activities for twenty-six days was therefore a Fourth Amendment search under the Katz “reasonable expectation of privacy” test [South Dakota v. Elmer Wayne Zahn, Jr., South Dakota Supreme Court, opinion filed 2012.03.14].

Cops can still watch what you’re doing in public. They can still follow you down the highway in the cruiser. But the Court sees a problem with moving beyond observing individual public movements and secretly gathering a comprehensive picture of every move citizens make.

Police can still use GPS tracking devices; citing U.S. v. Garcia, the justices say that “The Fourth Amendment ‘cannot sensibly be read to mean that police [should] be no more efficient in the twenty-first century than they were in the eighteenth’ century.” However, to conduct such a thorough search, police must first get a warrant.

Gordon Howie and his right-wing echo chamber are having fun blaming government for driving doctors out of business. Authors David Houle and Jonathan Fleece say those doctors may have it coming. They contend that a third of hospitals will close by 2020, not because of government gone wild, but because of their failure to provide quality service:

…statistically speaking hospitals are just about the most dangerous places to be in the United States. Three times as many people die every year due to medical errors in hospitals as die on our highways — 100,000 deaths compared to 34,000.

…Currently in our non-transparent health care delivery system, Americans have no way of knowing which hospitals are the most dangerous. We simply take uninformed chances with our lives at stake.

…hospital customer care is abysmal. Recent studies reveal that the average wait time in American hospital emergency rooms is approximately 4 hours. Name one other business where Americans would tolerate this low level of value and service [David Houle and Jonathan Fleece, "Why One Third of Hospitals Will Close by 2020," KevinMD.com, March 2012].

What’s going to shut down these under-performing health care providers? Connectivity, electronic medical records, and transparency:

…any American considering a hospital stay will simply go on-line to compare hospitals relative to infection rates, degrees of surgical success, and many other metrics…. Inevitably when we are able to do this, hospitals will be driven by quality, service, and cost — all of which will be necessary to compete.

What hospitals are about to enter is the place Americans, particularly conservative Americans cherish: the open competitive market. We know what happens in this environment. There are winners and losers [Houle an Fleece, March 2012].

Ah, transparency and competition, producing better care and weening out failure. I wonder why Gordon’s friend Dr. Ed Picardi would be afraid of that?

The 1950s must have been an exciting time to be alive. Asimov and Heinlein were leading a golden age of science fiction. The new magic of television set homes aglow with technological wonder. And in South Dakota, the Legislature declared our state’s sovereign right to the moisture in the clouds and atmosphere. This declaration was part of Chapter 46-3A, Weather Modification Activities, created in 1953 and modified since to ensure the orderly development of rain-making technology.

Today South Dakotans can obtain a weather modification license from the Water Management Board for $25—upon demonstration, of course, of sufficient meteorological knowledge to keep from hitting the wrong button and making frogs or meatballs fall from the sky. Actually going out to make it rain requires a public hearing, a finding of public interest, and a $100 permit.

One might conclude that Governor M. Michael Rounds and his devout followers committed a Class 2 misdemeanor when the governor called on South Dakotans to pray for rain in 2004 and 2006. SDCL 46-3A-16 exempts “experimental and emergency activities.” The only emergencies specified are fire, frost, sleet, and fog, not the droughts the governor fought. However, the Madville Times legal team suggests the governor may appeal to experiment: ”We wanted to see if God was listening. It worked… sort of!”

Alas, the Legislature is preparing to strike this bit of 1950s techno-optimism from the books. House Bill 1013 strikes the Weather Modification Activities chapter from the books. The bill is one of several housekeeping rules proposed this year to clear out obsolete statutes.

So if the Water Management Board still has any dusty rainmaker licenses at the back of the file cabinet, they are about to become collectors’ items.

Bonus History: Weather modification took a hit in public perception right here in the Black Hills 30 years ago. On June 9, 1972, weather modification researchers at the School of Mines dumped 700 pounds of table salt into a promising band of clouds. High pressure way up by the Hudson Bay held those clouds in place, and they let lose the rains that caused the deadly Rapid City flood. Four years later, the state legislature blocked all state funding for weather modification activities. Whither that 1950s optimism….

Update 2012.01.08 06:28 MST: Europluvilasers! The French and the Germans still have that 1950s spirit: they’ve built a mobile laser bus that may be able to make rain and direct lightning. HB 1013 shows that Mitt Romney‘s campaign slogan, “We’re becoming like Europe,” is bogus!

Lots of tabs on the browser: let’s clear the green power queue!

Fossil-fuel frontman Mike McDowell says wind power advocates are full of hot air. He waves his hand at vague, unnamed, unhyperlinked “greens” and environmental groups, then proves them all wrong by pointing out that wind power can’t produce power as reliably as his preferred sources. One word, Mike: batteries. Batteries, batteries, batteries.

My friend Kelly Fuller doesn’t want to kill wind power. But she would like wind power to kill fewer birds. Her organization, the American Bird Conservancy, is petitioning the U.S. Department of the Interior to create a mandatory permitting system for wind power facilities to protect habitat and migration paths for birds (and bats!).

But who knows: we might not need any wind turbines if solar takes off. A Texas researcher is working on technology that may double the power a typical solar panel can produce.

Of course, we don’t need fancy technological breakthroughs to reduce fossil-fuel consumption. We just need more bikes! 70% of Americans’ car trips are less than two miles, well within bicycling range for mere mortals. Only 0.6% of Americans (including me!) ride their bikes to work. If Americans rode bikes for just one half of their errands for just four months out of the year (I’m not asking you to join me for a December ride in the snow), we’d prevent 1100 deaths, save $3.8 billion in fitness and fewer fender benders, and improve air quality. Your first year of bike commuting will also help you shed thirteen pounds of fat. (Of course, you’ll gain some of that back in monster thigh muscles! Hoo-yah!) Get on your bikes and ride!

The TechAmerica Foundation posts some mixed data on U.S. tech jobs. Our nation’s tech industry shed a quarter million jobs in 2009, followed by another 115,800 jobs lost in 2010. But in the first half of 2011, we regained nearly all of the 2010 losses. All four main tech job sectors showed growth from January to June:

1. Engineering and Tech Services: +3.6%
2. Software Services: +2.4%
3. High-tech Manufacturing: +1.1%
4. Communication Services: +0.3%

TechAmerica offers the following historical observation on how the U.S. can turn this apparent upswing into long-term growth, plus a warning that other countries are learning from that history:

The tech boom of the 1990s was built from a blueprint developed in the 1950s and 1960s that invested in future innovation. The United States made strong commitments to math and science education, invested heavily in public and private technology research and development (R&D), and welcomed the brightest minds in the world to our shores.

Even in the midst of a global economic downturn, countries around the world are now making similar investments to try to out-compete us and attract advanced industries to their shores. Fortunately, in many cases, so is the United States [TechAmerica Foundation, "Tech Industry Adds 115,000 Jobs in 1st Half of 2011," Competitiveness Series, October 2011].

Among TechAmerica’s specific policy recommendations:

1. Increase investment in technology in the classroom and math and science education (no mention of building bigger gyms).
2. “Simplify, strengthen, and make permanent the R&D tax credit.”
3. Exempt foreign earnings from taxation.

I’d love to break down the numbers for South Dakota, but TechAmerica doesn’t include our fair state in its featured press releases. We don’t appear to be worthy of mention on their sample page of “Leading Cyberstates”:

TechAmerica 2010 leading CyberStates -- sample page

Our own public jobs data suggest a recession in South Dakota’s tech sector—a phenomenon all the more noteworthy when we recall that the December 2007–June 2009 recession did not happen in South Dakota. South Dakota’s information sector jobs reached a peak of 7500 in June 2007. Since then, our tech jobs have dropped. For the last year and a half, South Dakota’s tech jobs have been hanging out in a doldrummy range of 6400 to 6600. That matches a brief low in the first half of 2005 and the yearlong average between 1997 and 1998.

With one university dedicated to high-tech education and with the high wages available, South Dakota should target the tech sector as a key area for growth. The economic development plan released by candidate Dennis Daugaard last year mentions health information technology as a potential area for growth, and it speaks of boosting math and science education. However, we need to make more progress in creating and keeping high-tech jobs in South Dakota.

Do you think it’s a hassle hauling that spare battery for your laptop? Talk to your friendly neighborhood U.S. infantryman. Armies still march on their stomachs, but nowadays, they also march on their batteries to run their radios, GPS units, night-vision rifle scopes, and other mission-critical electronics. (Surely some officer has an iPad app to call in Predator drone strikes… Angry Birds 2.1.0, right?) A soldier marching out on a 72-hour mission may need twenty pounds of batteries. That’s twenty pounds of bullets, grenades, and Spam crowded out of the pack. That’s a problem.

(click to enlarge)

Eggheads to the rescue! The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is calling for proposals to develop wireless power transmission devices. One possibility DARPA envisions is one rechargeable backpack power unit that would beam juice to all those toys.

U.S. Army/RDECOM "SPaRK": Soldier Power Regeneration Kit

They could talk to Intel, which demo’d a wireless power transmission prototype three summers ago. Perhaps they can piggyback with the Aussies, who are developing kinetic energy harvesters to draw juice on the march. Our guys are working on a similar boot-based kinetic charger. I could use that!

The Konarka company is working on camo-pattern plastics and textiles that can catch solar power. Integrate those materials into gear and garments, and G.I. Joe is recharging all day long (I know, I know: what about night vision gear?).

Want to serve your country? You can pump iron, get big, and go chase bad guys in the desert. But you can also hit the books, get that engineering degree, and save thousands of lives (not to mention flat feet) by designing better batteries and power-generation technology.