September is here! I need to get my scripts sorted out… which involves proof reading, updating the year (where the code might not be general) tweaking (because agencies may have changed formats and so on) and snagging all the bets out of the data base. In the meantime, the second “prediction” graph last year script generates is Sept NSDIC extent vs. the most recent months report and the method is a linear prediction. The most recent months report is… July. This is the prediction based on what we all know is fairly stale data. No uncertainty intervals are provided (yet!)
As you can see, based on July Extent data, we ‘expect’ the NSDIC ice extent to be the fifth lowest in the record. But this is not necessarily my best estimate. It’s just the simplest and plots early in the script.
Presumably, fresher data will be available shortly. (Heck, Labor Day weekend is over. Americans are back to work. So it could have happened while I wrote this!) In the meantime. I’m also going to plow through to check the uncertainty intervals and such like using all the various AIC criterion and different methods of fitting.
Ran across this tidbit
NorthWest Passage Blocked
Careful what you read.
Captain Grey Goose has all your direct Arctic adventurer news.
http://northwestpassage2013.blogspot.ca/
BarryW–
It’s cold in the Arctic!
Lucia –
It’s spelled NSIDC. I know that’s just a typo, and not worth a comment. Here’s what I found interesting: my mental “auto-correct” slid right over the instances in upper-case, but when I saw it in lower-case in the URL box, the mis-spell detector went off instantly. Perhaps the lower-case version being unusual made the circuitry pay more attention to it. I’m curious to know if others had the same experience.
I corrected in the title…. Now I have to look for it in the text. My spelling and typing is poor in general. But acronyms are a special problem.
Doesn’t the plot show 2013 the 6th lowest, admittedly by a very narrow margin?
I think that ties in with BarryW’s prediction based on the rankings for August 22nd on the previous topic.
You may have missed the year of about 9 million in July because it is a bit of an outlier.
BarryW,
Those yachtsmen are very selfish – they have evidently been hoping for less ice!
Jsut get the frist and lsat ltetres in the rghit odrer, we’ll udnresatnd waht yuor syanig.
Re freezing more seems to be due inpart to recent La Nina’s and may have a year or more of re freezing to go. Certainly hoping for a big and early uptick in the next week.
Harold – that’s my experience too, tho’ I’ve not really stopped to wonder why. Interesting question!
@Ray
Yes, but the Goracle promised them!
Slightly off topic but in the UK there is a game show called “pointless”, where contestants have to get answers which the lowest possible number of 100 members of the public got right (it’s a bit complicated to explain here). Maybe there is a US version.
Anyway, one of the questions was about oscar nominated documentaries and images were shown from 5 documentaries, of which one was from “An Inconvenient Truth”.
None of the contestants recognised it and only 5/100 of the public identified it correctly.
Re: Anteros (Sep 4 09:54),
Not everybody can do that. It’s probably the human brain’s ability to recognize patterns. See also Dyslexia.
The person who sent this to me claimed that it meant that phonics was unnecessary. It may be for some people, the 55 out of 100 that can read the above. But what about the other 45? TheLook-and-Say or Whole Language method of teaching reading has resulted in poor reading skills for a lot of people.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #119277)
TheLook-and-Say or Whole Language method of teaching reading has resulted in poor reading skills for a lot of people.
Yep…most school districts only teach one or the other…if ‘child’ is having trouble learning to read at school and mom and dad have a little cash then buying the at home version of the method the local school district isn’t using is good advice. It’s how the ‘hooked on phonics’ company can guarantee success or your money back.
I actually questioned a 1st grade teacher on this…her answer was that some portion of the class was going to grow up and work in a convenience store no matter what…so why bother trying to reach ‘all the students’.
DeWitt Payne
I don’t think that proves phonics is unnecessary at all. Yes. Once people have been reading a long time, many can recognize those words. But that doesn’t necessarily tell us what happens when they can’t yet read nor does it mean that phonics doesn’t help people figure out words as they build vocabulary from k-12 and so on. Even now, I run across words I don’t know. But I can figure out how the are likely pronounced without dashing to the dictionary because I know the rules for pronouncing things.
I first learned to read in Spanish. We sounded out everything. It was not called “phonics”… because… well.. the rules in Spanish are so easy.
This is a stupid excuse. It’s true that some are going to grow up and work in convenience stores. But why should that decision be based on the failure of a 1st grade teacher to adequately teach reading?
Lucia
I’ve been doing a cursory study of Japanese. Now they use 3 different writing systems (five counting the Latin alphabet and romanji): two are syllabic (katakana and hiragana) and the fourth is kanji which is based on Chinese ideograms. Katakana and hiragana are very easy because they never change their pronunciation. The thing about kanji (almost 2k in the official list) is that the characters can have multiple pronunciations depending on the other characters they are in combination with and other characters can be pronounced the same way in other combinations. Somehow Japan is a very literate nation despite the lack of phonics.
Far East languages? An enless thorn in my side, what with representatives in several countries with whom it is almost impossible to communicate. Still, it is perhaps a bit off topic. 😉
Re: lucia (Sep 4 18:18),
Indeed.
I was listening today to someone (on NPR of course) spouting off about how bad tests for state or national educational standards were. It amounted to defending poor teachers and poor teaching practices. Standards are useless without measures. This is like day one in Quality Management.
Lucia writes “But why should that decision be based on the failure of a 1st grade teacher to adequately teach reading?”
For a class of 30 students, they can expect to get individual tuition time of perhaps 30 mins each per week. And not all of it for reading.
If the student needs “another kind” of teaching then I think the argument is strong its simply a resourcing issue. Do you spend more time with those individuals at the expense of the others?
BarryW. Slight correction, the Latin (Roman) alphabet is Romanji, so its 4 systems. Japanese are highly literate because they put a great deal of effort into teaching literacy, as well as education in general. They need to, because to graduate from high school they need both kanas (2×48) plus to be able to write a minimum of 2000 kanji. They will be able to read a lot more than that.
I live in Japan, and teach English (I’m a geologist, not a teacher). My more advanced students (pre-high school) get 10-15 minutes of phonics from me, every lesson. It’s a wonderful feeling when they get to around 10-11yo and they start to read the words off the page.
While I’m completely OT, but on Japanese education. I read a piece in the loss-making Grauniad a few months ago where Williams GP team were complaining about the woeful level of maths in potential apprentices. They gave an example maths paper. I got 100%. I ran it past two of my 14yos, and they both scored 97%.
TimTheToolMan,
Asset allocation is a different argument from “why bother trying to reach ‘all the students’.”
Besides which, no one was suggesting ‘individual tuition time’. Neither the choice of method (i.e. phonics vs. whole language), using a mix of methodologies (i.e. incorporating both vs. using only one or the other) is not “individual tuition time”. It is also not the same things as spending more time with one kid rather than the others.
I was lucky to first read in Spanish. Most letters (and all vowels) have exactly 1 pronunciation. “A” is “ah”, “E” is “eh”, “I” is “ee” and so on. The exceptions to only 1 pronunciation are hard and soft c and … I think hard and soft ‘g’. This makes ‘phonics’ a trivial subject so I don’t think anyone gave it a name in school. And the first hurdle for reading is easy. I can’t help but imagine once the first hurdle is accomplished, everything else is easier (That include learning ‘ough’ has any of one bajillion pronunciations).
After we’d moved to the US and I started 2nd grade, another student in the class asked something like “have you taken phonics”? And my answer was “huh”? She explained about “the shwa”. But I would say that the way I learned to read Spanish was “phonics” not “whole word”. And if Japanese has phonetic spelling I imagine they all use “phonics” too. It’s just that when a language is very phonetic, no one discusses “phonics” as as a subject.
Well… we’re off track. 🙂
Lucia writes “Besides which, no one was suggesting ‘individual tuition time’.”
May as well stay off track for a bit longer…my point was that if a student isn’t responding so well to the methodology being used then there may be little scope to try another one.
I don’t envy teachers (apart from the holidays perhaps) I know our youngest has been somewhat ignored because according to her reports her teachers don’t seem to have a good idea of what she can do. I assume its because they spend too much time with other students.
I do agree that “why bother trying to reach ‘all the students’.” sucks as an attitude. In an ideal world everyone would get all the time and teaching energy needed to reach their full potential. We don’t live in an ideal world and different people compromise differently.
TTTM,
Believe it or not, in 5th grade one 3rd grader was having trouble with math, so a teacher asked me to help him at lunchtime! I did it for a little while–I don’t quite remember how long. It wasn’t every day either. Eddie never became a stellar student, but he caught up a little. There are things that can be done. And in my school system it was not unusual for teachers to divide the class in 3 for reading circles. The teacher was with one, and while the other two groups were not reading, they could help each other out with various challenges. And it’s a bit social, which is not a bad thing.
So, people can think of things to do. Admittedly, there are limited resources, but oddly enough, the kids themselves can be a resource. And it doesn’t actually hurt the kids who are quicker to help out the ones who are slower. It happens in college, why not 2nd grade. (Mind you, the class discipline needs to already be good. So, this can be difficult for some teachers too.)
Lucia writes “Eddie never became a stellar student, but he caught up a little. There are things that can be done.”
For sure. Parents taking some responsibility and putting in effort for their child’s education for one!
“(That include learning ‘ough’ has any of one bajillion pronunciations).”
though as in toe;
tough as in cuff;
cough as in off;
hiccough (a variant of hiccup): as in up;
plough as in cow;
through as in boo;
thought as in or.
Ghoti is a constructed example used to illustrate irregularities in English spelling. It is a respelling of the word fish. It has,
gh, pronounced /f/ as in tough /tuff/;
o, pronounced /i/ as in women /wimin/; and
ti, pronounced /sh/ as in nation /nayshun/.
🙂
TTTM,
I wasn’t Eddie’s parent. Not even a sibling. The soooper-beautiful Tammy who was also in 5th grade was Eddie’s sister. That whole family was super-mega gorgeous and also quite nice.
But if your point is the family cared if he learned– I suspect his parents asked the teachers to be creative. And I suspect the teachers asked my parents if I could help out. (BTW: I think it was Eddie. There were something like 7 kids in that family– though maybe only 5, and it was a while ago. I know some stories about the family– all reflect quite well on them.)
@Hector Pascal
I’m familiar with Romanji. The reason I mentioned the Latin alphabet separately is that you see words written out in English (business names for example) using it as opposed to the Romanji which is just another way of writing the syllabaries (kana). Of course, you live there and I only have seen this in pictures and videos so I might be overstating the case. While there may be some rules of thumb that I’m ignorant of, there is no way a priori to know how many of the kanji should be pronounced in compounds. For example, the symbol for one can be pronounced ichi, itsu, or hito. I counted 25 kanji that all can be pronounced KO in A Guide to Remembering the Kanji also, and that is not uncommon from what I can see. Do they have the equivalent of spelling bees in Japan?
Lucia,
Your story of tutoring another student reminds me of introductory calculus, where the professor used the “theorm-prrof, theorm-proof, theorm-proof” teaching method. After a few weeks, there were enough students with spinning heads that the school assing a cople second year students to tutor lost freshmen. It took about one ohur for the basics to become clear.
.
The “watch, do, show” teaching method is remarkably effective. I never understood chemistry as clearly as aftee I was asked to tutor other students.
lucia (Comment #119279)
September 4th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
This is a stupid excuse. It’s true that some are going to grow up and work in convenience stores. But why should that decision be based on the failure of a 1st grade teacher to adequately teach reading?
Of course it was a stupid excuse…and the local ‘private’ Montessori elementary school managed to teach all methods of reading to all the students for $6,000 per year…which was a fraction of what the public school was getting from taxpayers.
That particular teacher managed to lose 10 students per academic year to private schools. I felt sorry for the 15 who were left because their parents couldn’t afford private school. But at least they didn’t have to sit in a class of 25.
Don’t get me started about her notes home to parents who were reading books to their children that were more then 1 full grade level above what was being taught in class.
harrywr2 (Comment #119299)
That is why we homeschooled our kids.
@BarryW. I checked with the memsahib, and Latin script is universally refered to as Romanji. When I’ve mentioned “Latin”, it has been almost universally met with incomprehension. I think yours is a distinction without a difference.
Normally, in Kanji, the different readings are clear from the context. When there are issues, the reading is spelled out in kana, either following the Kanji, or as a superscript. This commonly happens when dealing with people’s or place names, which can be very particular.
I was wrong with the numbers. Kana is 2×73 as there are some archaic characters. For Kanji there are 2136 that have to be mastered (written) by graduation from Junior High School (age 14).
They do have spelling bees, with local and national Kanji competitions.
For anyone interested in the question; “how does the phone book work?”, Kanji/Hanji characters are classified by the number of strokes. The most the memsahib found was 84. You wouldn’t want to be stuck behind him when he is signing a few documents at the bank or post office. 🙂
Interesting, related metric:
Arctic Sea ice volume.
I was a bit surprised to see it hasn’t changed much in three years. Nobody tell David Rose. 😀
Carrick writes “I was a bit surprised to see it hasn’t changed much in three years.”
It didn’t change much in the first 15 years either. All those downward sloping lines certainly emphasise the decrease!
TTTM, to be fair the dip around 1981 is associated with a major volcanic eruption. Since their series doesn’t go before 1980 so, we can’t say whether the volume was constant or not prior to that.
CArrick writes “Since their series doesn’t go before 1980 so, we can’t say whether the volume was constant or not prior to that.”
Thats the thing about not having data.
I’m sceptical about blaming Mt St Helens for the huge 1980 dip in the PIOMAS ice mass “data” (assuming thats the eruption you’re talking about?) when Pinatubo in 1991 doesn’t so much cause a visible blip.
Its an easy post hoc rationalisation.
And by “dip”, surely I mean increase.
TTTM:
I should have said “potentially could have been”. I didn’t mean to sound definitive there when I was just speculating.
Beyond that, I’d say to start don’t confuse effect on global mean temperature with impact on arctic sea ice extent or volume. While there is a relationship between temperature and extent or volume, it’s mostly a low-frequency relationship.
Secondly, St. Helens is substantially farther north than Pinatubo, so the possibility of a link isn’t completely crazy, especially if there was deposition of ash on the arctic sea ice. I dunna if any data was taken on that at the time.
Thirdly, you don’t have data prior to that point on volume, and it is dangerous to try and “make the call” on what would have happened prior to 1980. So would volume continue to increase prior to 1980? It would be nice to know the answer to that, but I don’t think reliable information is available.
We do have data on extent that goes back further. Oddly it doesn’t have this dip, so maybe the dip was noise.
link
Carrick:
Interesting speculation on Mt St Helens. I couldn’t find any actual field data regarding volcanic ash. I did find this modeling paper.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/12/5341/2012/acpd-12-5341-2012.pdf
Then googled some of their data sources. Apparently biomass burning dominates light absorbing particulates in the arctic.
http://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/black-carbon/bond-et-al-2004.pdf
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/11647/2010/acp-10-11647-2010.pdf
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/10923/2010/acp-10-10923-2010.pdf
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/sootinsnow/PDF_Documents/Soot%20in%20the%20Arctic%20Snowpack%20A%20Cause%20for%20Pertubations%20in%20Radi.pdf
Check out the Hockey Sticks on Figure 4 (below):
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/10/4963/2010/acpd-10-4963-2010.pdf