The Daily Mail gives all kinds of accolades to a Polar Bear that destroyed expensive camera equipment

Wildlife documentary-makers are going to increasingly cunning means to sneak into the secret world of their subjects but don’t think for a second that the animals are fooled, as these images prove.

Award-winning director John Downer had disguised one of his remote-controlled spy cameras as a large snowball to capture the journey of a polar bear mother and her cub crossing the sea ice in Svalbard, Norway, in search of seals.

But – in a documentary Dowler says captures the bears’ ‘astonishing intelligence’ – this adult male wasn’t having the wool pulled over his eyes.

Next time I see a surveillance camera I will smash it apart. The owners will see that I am merely exhibiting my astonishing intelligence. Or maybe they will think that their surveillance camera design is sub-optimal because some dumb human was able to break it?

The photos in the Daily Mail are humorous, to say the least. This is what they call sneaky?

At least the incident will give bears some more publicity, but as far as I can tell that fat white duck-looking thing with propellers had it coming. Good thing penguins were not around. They really would have torn it up.

The Dusseldorf airport’s CEO and new President of the German Airport Association has sparked a debate about passenger profiling

…he wanted to introduce passenger profiling in German airports to fight terrorism. The system would be similar to that used in Israel, where passengers are categorized as high or low risk according to their age, sex, ethnic background and other criteria.

“In this way, the security systems can be more effectively used to benefit all those involved,” [Christophe] Blume, who will become president of the German Airport Association (ADV) in January, told the German Newspaper Rheinische Post on Tuesday.

Although one might take this only at face value and wonder about the philosophical issues at stake with profiling, Blume’s profile brings up another point.

He signed a 10-year 200 million dollar outsourcing contract in 2005 that gave 70% ownership of IT operations to SITA.

I suspect, again from his executive profile, that he was sold by SITA on their “iBorders Advance Passenger Processing” system:

South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs was particularly interested in a proactive solution, which would enable them to analyze and pre-screen travellers before they arrived. If necessary, this would allow them to stop any unauthorized or ‘undesirable’ visitors at the point of departure – thereby avoiding any expenses associated with processing and repatriating these visitors.

His announcement is thus a way for him to say he will work to expand his financial relationship with them by bringing in another SITA project.

Maybe if he or SITA said something about the system increasing security or making flights safer I would be more encouraged. Instead I wonder if their focus on terms like expenses, efficiency and effectiveness is really a way of saying they want to get their hands on the money that has been going to other technology vendors and firms.

I won’t even bother to try and understand why he finds South Africa and Israel the appropriate models for German national security.

The Atlantic Magazine explains that simple regulations in one state significantly improved education performance results, in contrast to the rest of the country. The article is called Your Child Left Behind

Overall, it says America is far behind other rich nations, even when you look only at top performers nation-wide:

“The United States does not do a good job of educating kids at the top,” he says. “There’s a long-standing attitude that, ‘Well, smart kids can make it on their own. And after all, they’re doing well. So why worry about them?'”

The exception to this lazy approach is the state of Massachusetts, which has followed a path that found success in other countries. It has directly intervened and introduced compliance:

What did Massachusetts do? Well, nothing that many countries (and industries) didn’t do a long time ago. For example, Massachusetts made it harder to become a teacher, requiring newcomers to pass a basic literacy test before entering the classroom. (In the first year, more than a third of the new teachers failed the test.) The state also required students to pass a test before graduating from high school–a notion so heretical that it led to protests in which students burned state superintendent David Driscoll in effigy. To help tutor the kids who failed, the state moved money around to the places where it was needed most. “We had a system of standards and held people to it–adults and students,” Driscoll says.

Massachusetts, in other words, began demanding meaningful outcomes from everyone in the school building. Obvious though it may seem, it’s an idea that remains sacrilegious in many U.S. schools, despite the clumsy advances of No Child Left Behind. Instead, we still fixate on inputs–such as how much money we are pouring into the system or how small our class sizes are–and wind up with little to show for it. Since the early 1970s, we’ve doubled the amount of money we spend per pupil nationwide, but our high-schoolers’ reading and math scores have barely budged.

There are a million examples of how compliance and regulation can improve results; this is a particularly good one. Simple and inexpensive regulations on education in the US can reduce spending yet generate better output according to standardized tests.