Can you learn the Humanities over the Internet?

"You could maybe soften your stance a little on the humanities (perhaps instead of learning about them on the Internet, repeating your thought that you can learn them independently?)" - My college counselor regarding an essay.

I think you can. Actually, I know you can. If you want to read a book, you can find and download it as a free pdf in under 10 minutes. Quite fittingly, this is exactly what I did to get my copy of the Singularity is near.

If you want to discuss it or read analyses, you can easily travel from wikipedia, to sparknotes, to online forums, etc. I often go to amazon.com and read the reviews. Online comments are an ENORMOUS resource of compelling ideas. This is why I think the online WSJ is far greater than the print edition. The comments alone can be better than the original article. Furthermore, you will almost definitely here an articulation of all sides of an argument. I know my knowledge of history has some terrible deficiencies courtesy of our liberal Exeter history department. Reading a wikipedia page tends to give a less biased rundown of what actually happened, and lets you focus on what you personally find interesting.

I have a private blog and on this blog I just copy and paste every phrase or link that I think I may want to recall later. (To do this, just create a blog on blogspot and go to permissions and set it up so you are the only one who can view it). [Evan and Philip, I think we were talking awhile ago about how frustrating it is to forget where you read something because we read so many sources nowadays. Well, here's your solution.]

Anyway, nuff said,

- Jimmy

LBJ Great Society

- Dr. Tisdall, you said at the start of the LBJ reforms, out of wedlock births of African Americans shot from 10% to 60% almost instantly. Do you have any on hand links for this data? I haven't found much.

- Can you type up a quick rundown of the effects of slavery on black culture? I'm a little fuzzy on the details of industrial slavery, the worst part of the whole ordeal.

- Evan, you mentioned a book that covered a lot of the woes of Great Society programs, what was the name of this?

The government bail out of GM

As you head home for Thanksgiving, you liberal friends will no doubt be lauding the government rescue of GM. GM started selling its government shares as the start of the company's return to private ownnership. The IPO was a rousing success, with the "re-born" GM valued at $51 Billion dollars at its IPO price of $30-35 per share. So the jobs of 300,000 GM employees have been saved and perhaps another 600,000 secondary jobs saved in an economy that has lost around 8 million jobs in this recession. As the government sells the rest of its shares, it could conceivably end up getting all of its money back. So there, thank God the Democrats were in power to use the beneficent hand of government to prevent all of that human suffering. All at no ultimate cost to the taxpayor.
The problem with this story can be illustrated with this thought experiment. If government wanted to save GM, why didn't it just lend it the money, like it did with the banks or use an equity infusion like it did with AIG? Bankruptcy, Chapter 11 in this case, is a well defined legal procedure which has always placed lenders, specifically bond holders, ahead of all other creditors. The normal legal procedure is to sell the company and give the money to the creditors, with the bondholders first in line. What the Democrats did, however, was force debtors into a debt-for-stock swab. The government, owed $16B, got 50% of shares, bondholders, owed $27B, got 10% of shares, and the union(UAW) got 40% of the shares for its unfunded "legacy" costs. These were the costs that were such an important cause of GM's bankruptcy in the first place.
What we see then is a good example of crony capitalism. The government stripped legal creditors for the benefit of of its supporters, in this case, organized labor.
So in an industry with overcapacity, will it have been worth saving GM? That will really depend on the company's future success. That, in turn, will depend on how well it changes its culture. Are UAW workers going to shed their worst habits, including restrictive work rules and extravagant benefits? Can GM make cars that people will buy, or is it going to make a mostly electric car with a battery range of 30-40 miles costing $42,00 dollars? In addition, there is no real way to measure this misallocation of capital. We spent $80 Billion dollars up front, with another $45 Billion dollars in future tax breaks, to save a company that made a product that wasn't needed and consumers wouldn't buy. How do we measure the missed opportunity of the new company that wasn't formed or the research for the new product not now imagined? How do we measure the erosion of trust of lenders, who now have to wonder if government is going to strip them of their legal rights to favor a political supporter?

The Chinese Century and Biologic Laws

Economics is History masquerading as Physics.
I have introduced to you my belief that the 20th Century was best conceptualized by the Laws of Physics, driven by Energy (think of WW2 as the "war of oil") and communicated in the math of Calculus. I think that the 21st Century will be best understood through the Laws of Biology, driven by Information, and communicated throught the math of the Algorithm (computers). Two of the laws that I have become aware of, but barely understand, are evolutionary algorithms and cellular automata. The former teaches that information can be created without a directing intelligence, by setting up a system with choice and competition. To see this in action, view this brilliant example of the Blind Watchmaker on YouTube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0). Cellular automata teaches us that very complex systems can arise from simple rules. To see an example of this, see Wikipedia's entry on Conway's Game of Life: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life).
These ideas are much better constructs for understanding people's behaviour than anything in physics. The reason for this is that the laws of physics teach constancy. For example, Charles' Gas Law teaches that if you keep heating a balloon, the gases will keep expanding until the balloon pops. This is as true now as when Charles first described it in the 1780's. The laws of biology, by comparison, teach change, due to increasing information. The balloon that Charles popped in 1780 didn't reproduce and so to survive and reproduce, balloons would have to find a means to relieve the pressure. There would be many possible adaptations and the best would be sorted out through selection. This means that if you tried to reproduce Charles' experiment in a biologic balloon world, you might get a different result than he did.
It is instructive to apply these ideas to economics, a biologic system based on information. Niall Ferguson has written an article on the rise of China (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704104104575622531909154228.html?KEYWORDS=niall+ferguson). In this article, he states that the 500 years of Western domination were based on six "killer applications":
" Competition: Europe was politically fragmented, and within each monarchy or republic there were multiple competing corporate entities.

• The Scientific Revolution: All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology happened in Western Europe.

• The rule of law and representative government: This optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.

• Modern medicine: All the major 19th- and 20th-century advances in health care, including the control of tropical diseases, were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.

• The consumer society: The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

• The work ethic: Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation."

This list could serve quite nicely as the "set up" rules of a cellular automata program. The first Ferguson parameter, competition, and parameter 5, consumer society (choice), sets up an evolutionary self-teaching information-adding program. By adopting 4 of the 6 rules, China is getting the predicable result of good economic growth. This has been rapidly accelerated by the fact that they can just copy our science and technology. It is interesting to speculate on the effects of not using two of the rules; representative government and a consumer society. Only a physics-minded economist would try to predict with any confidence.

A Moment in the Singularity: Analog to Digital

My weekly copy of the US News & World Report came today with this cover: "We are writing to inform you that this will be your last issue of (our) magazine...We will continue to publish the usnews.com website". The editor noted that this 77 year old publication started as a broadsheet newspaper and will continue its "information business" as pixels on the screen. I doubt it will last for long. As a long term subscriber, I had stopped reading it seriously years ago, not because of its format but because it didn't provide me with any unique information. Its "Best...Lists(best colleges, best hospitals etc) were entertaining, but nothing you could act on. Just like many city newspapers discovered when Craig's List took away their Classifieds income, not enough people were willing to pay for their low information content to be economically viable.
In today's WSJ, L. Gordon Crovitz comments on the Beatle's tunes coming to iTunes (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704496104575627282994471928.html?KEYWORDS=crovitz). He gives a short history of technology disruptions of the music industry: sheet music, phonographs, 8 track, cassettes, CD's, MP3. He notes that iTunes provided a model for payment after the analog to digital revolution made theft of music ubiquitous. He offers these key insights:
"For music and many content-based industries, the shift to the Information Age from the Industrial Age is a shift to digital versions from older analog versions. The older forms don't disappear altogether. Instead, traditional products find a more limited role alongside newer versions that take advantage of new technology to deliver different experiences to consumers. Sellers may lose scarcity value for their goods as digital tools make copying easy, but as iTunes has shown, convenience is also a service worth buying".
In the same issue of the WSJ, Vacellarp and Schechner write about the coming disruption by Online TV: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704264804575626902698357466.html?KEYWORDS=vascellaro
I don't know how this fight will turn out, but I'm betting on the disrupters. The only objection of the TV stations, afterall, is that they aren't getting paid for their content. Will the cable companies survive? The analog-to-digital disruption has only just begun. I don't expect my specialty, pathology, to survive in its present form. Why would you pay me $150K /yr to read slides on a microscope, when the slide images can be digitalized and read on a TV screen in India for $40 K/yr? Radiology will suffer the same fate. Every industry will feel its effects in some way.
James once asked me what I subscribed to, and I told him the WSJ, Discover Magazine (science) and The Atlantic (thinkers). Only the WSJ is very good. Discover is OK, but it's more of a "geewhiz" content provider than a "this may be important" information provider. The Atlantic was excellent under Michael Kelly, but now has liberal editors and is sinking under their politicized view of everything. In the end, "information" providers will be paid for aggregated data to specialist groups and information to general readers. The conversion of data to information will only be as good as the editors and writers strengths in critical thinking and communication skills. Right now, the WSJ is the most highly subscribed newspaper in the US, and is very expensive at $365/yr in the print edition. It is worth every penny.
People will always pay for information. The analog-to-digital disruption is an essential theme to follow. One of the Internet's famous quotes, by Stewart Brand, is:
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

A witty commentary on our current politics

This witty article cleverly captures the contradictions in our current political scene.
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/111364/a-war-of-the-worlds-for-the-modern-day

Thinking about College

We've talked a great deal about college. You don't, after all, pay $44 K/yr (retail) for high school because you have little faith in expensive schooling. The elephant in the room is how to cope with predicting the future in The Information Age in which knowledge in science and technology has a half-life of 4 years, the humanities can be learned from the Internet, universities are deeply politicized against us, and the tuitions are so large they are life altering. Steve Cobb and I had a very long discussion about this last night after the club meeting. He has the excellent idea that he wants to be at a research university where he feels he has the best opportunity to be at the cutting edge of the Singularity and have the highest caliber of student body to challenge him. He was having none of my observations that enough smart students can be found at any major college nor that enjoying yourself along the way should be a consideration (I hope I don't get re-born as his kid). He freely admitted that he had been infected by the "East Coast is best" prejudice but swallowed hard when I observed that their tuitions listed around $50 K/yr. The conversation ended when I learned that he had California residency and I observed that most of the UC schools were world class, and for him, very inexpensive. Steve was respectful but skeptical. He hadn't heard of the Shanghai Rankings. Well, here they are and it sure upsets the applecart of perceived truth. The top 50 research universities in the world include surprises like Wisconsin (17) Illinois (25) and Colorado (32). As for Steve, 6 of the 10 State schools in the UC system have ranked in the top 50 universities in the world for all 7 years the rankings have been published. You can read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Universities

As universities struggle to keep their programs relevant, I came across this article in the WSJ about designing your own college major. Interdisciplinary studies deserve serious discussion. When you read the Comments about the article, remember to ask yourself the question, what is the best fit for ME?
http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2010/11/17/can-do-it-yourself-majors-help-you-land-a-job/

Taleb on QE2

Bestselling financial author Nicholas Nassim Taleb — who is familiar with the Hayekian critique of central planning and has written scathing attacks on mathematical economics — as usual offers an interesting perspective on this second burst of inflation. In a sense, Taleb is the anti-Cowen: whereas Cowen effectively said, "Hey, it probably won't work, but we might as well give QE2 a try," Taleb effectively argues, "Hey, it just might blow up the world financial system, so let's not give QE2 a try."


http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2010/11/taleb-nails-it.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=7wMuF4A4XF8C
http://mises.org/daily/4851

Notes on tonights meeting

I got to the club meeting late tonight (had to get art hw done) but here are a few things i picked up on/ were requested to be posted:

- LBJ's Great Society [Connor]
- The Millionaire Next Door
- The New Elite [Charles Murray Washington Post article] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/22/AR2010102202873.html]
- How do you help people?
- Poverty is not not having money. It is socioeconomic. [Rohan: See socio part]
- Competence vs. Intelligence
- Necessity saying [someone comment with the right one, I think it is: nothing works like necessity, necessity is the mother of invention, etc.] This was used in context of how easy it is to get money in America. It is an indication that life is easy if no one is knocking on your door asking to mow your lawn etc.
- Land of the Billionaires argument. [Philip please expand this one. It's yours and I don't want to skew any points].
- 4 yrs of college vs. 4 yrs of WSJ [See my last post on higher education bubble]
- Chales Murray [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8GN8g0Si7Q] [Philip - please correct me if this isn't the right video]
- On eduction: See WSJ articles: The Origins of Good Ideas; Why Some Islanders Build Better Crab Traps; and No You Can't - Is genius a simple matter of hard work? Not a chance]. Soltas and Tisdall - if you have read any more in this vein, let me know.

As I said, I got to the meeting near its end so please supplement this post in the comments.
- James

[Evan: Add that video, Cobbe: Economist article you were talking about, Tisdall: Article Jack gave you about designing your own undergraduate degree].

PEA Republican Club alumnus

Michael Hamel was a PG at the school 2 years ago. He was a Texan who initially struggled with a certain, how shall I describe it, cultural gap at the school. He found a real home in the club and was valuable contributor. He was the first to check every fact, real time, using his phone. Here is his picture at the inauguration of the Bush Library at SMU, where Michael is a ROTC student. Unfortunately the sign covers his guns, knives and clubs.

False Common Knowledge

Everyone seems to agree these days (especially around Exeter) that liberal politicians are more intellectual and worldly. Bush is recognized as somewhat of a dumbo while Gore, Kerry, and Obama are viewed as intelligent and educated. To believe that government officials are that much smarter can lead one to trust government expansion, a dangerous thing. What perhaps this article does best then, is show how academically mediocre nearly all politicians are, and not merely the republicans. In revealing this notion, one can't help but doubt their current level of trust in our elected leaders.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=553753

Thinking about Wal-Mart and recent Club discussions

Wal-Mart has been the topic of two recent articles in the WSJ that serve to reinforce subjects we've discussed in the Club recently. Miguel Bustillo writes on 11/17/10 that Wal-Mart U.S. sales fell 1.3% last quarter for the sixth consecutive time. This is attributed to "stiff" competition from Target and Dollar stores. Nearly all of Wal-Mart's growth is coming from international operations which account for one fourth of its $400 Billion in revenues.
Mariko Sanchanta writes on 11/15/10 that Wal-Mart appears to have established itself in Japan where it now owns 400 stores and plans to grow by acquisitions. While Japan has one of the largest retail markets in the world, the market is highly fragmented with numerous small, inefficient and highly politically defended family-type stores. Wal-Mart has been trying to establish itself in Japan since 2002 but has only been profitable for the past 2 years. Wal-Mart has attributed its success to Japan's 10 years of deflation making its citizens sensitive to lower prices. Wal-Mart is now focused on entering China, Brazil and India. Success is not assured. Wal-Mart sold its German operations after 8 years of failure and has exited South Korea.
- should Wal-Mart follow the great American business tradition of using gov't to defeat its rivals? Monopoly status looks to be fading if it doesn't.
- If Wal-Mart is unpatriotic because it supplies from China, should we praise it for generating $100 billion dollars in overseas revenue? That outsourcing/buy American argument can get tricky
- national culture: failure in Germany and South Korea, success in Japan. Same company.
- free markets unlock value. Think how happy all of those small Japanese retailers were to sell their stores to Wal-Mart. They can now re-invest or spend the money and Wal-Mart can bring efficiencies of scale for Japanese consumers. Of course those little stores that don't sell in time will be wiped out (Schumpeter)
- why has Japan had 10 years without growth despite massive gov't spending? Compare their "zombie" banks to our banks "toxic" assets.

The Effects of Long-Standing Liberal Government in California

One of the country's most struggling states is California. Despite its proximity to growing powers China and India, its economically supportive weather, and its plethora of great colleges: Stanford, CalTech, etc., California is being strangled by its liberal legislature and courts. While the heavily conservative and libertarian "Great Plains" have best weathered the recession, California is becoming the first US "debt state".

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/552810/201011041910/The-Golden-State-Still-Doesnt-Get-It.htm

Bureaucrats

"The bureaucracy must be expanded to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy"

funny that this came from the same guy who wrote soul of man under socialism...

The Wisdom of Crowds and the Federal Reserve

At 11:38 am on January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Seventy-four seconds later, it was ten miles high and rising. Then it blew up. The launch was televised, so news of the accident spread quickly. Eight minutes after the explosion, the first story hit the Dow Jones News Wire.

The stock market did not pause to mourn. Within minutes, investors started dumping the stocks of the four major contractors who had participated in the Challenger launch: Rockwell International, which built the shuttle and its main engines; Lockheed, which managed ground support; Martin Marietta, which manufactured the ship's external fuel tank; and Morton Thiokol, which built the solid-fuel booster rocket. Twenty-one minutes after the explosion, Lockheed's stock was down 5 percent, Martin Marietta's was down 3 percent, and Rockwell was down 6 percent.

Morton Thiokol's stock was hit hardest of all. As the finance professors Michael T. Maloney and J. Harold Mulherin report in their fascinating study of the market's reaction to the Challenger disaster, so many investors were trying to sell Thiokol stock and so few people were interested in buying it that a trading halt was called almost immediately. When the stock started trading again, almost an hour after the explosion, it was down 6 percent. By the end of the day, its decline had almost doubled, so that at market close, Thiokol's stock was down nearly 12 percent. By contrast, the stocks of the three other firms started to creep back up, and by the end of the day their value had fallen only around 3 percent.

What this means is that the stock market had, almost immediately, labeled Morton Thiokol as the company that was responsible for the Challenger disaster. Six months after the explosion, the Presidential Commission on the Challenger revealed that the O-ring seals on the booster rockets made by Thiokol--seals that were supposed to prevent hot exhaust gases from escaping--became less resilient in cold weather, creating gaps that allowed the gases to leak out. Thiokol was held liable for the accident. The other companies were exonerated.

In other words, within a half hour of the shuttle blowing up, the stock market knew what company was responsible. How did they get it right? Said Cornell economist Maureen O'Hara, "While markets appear to work in practice, we are not sure how they work in theory." From The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

The theory of the "wisdom of crowds" is based on the idea that a large enough group of people acting as separate individuals will come up with a conclusion, once their differing opinions are aggregated, that is better than the opinion of those same people meeting as an expert committee (You can read more here: http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/12/critical-analysis-wisdom-of-crowds-by.html or in the book). Researchers at the University of Iowa have actually developed a futures marketplace that allows individuals to place "bets" of up to $500 on future events. It is most heavily used for political elections, and its "crowd-based" predictions outperform the "experts" (www.intrade.com)

This brings us to Fed Chairman Bernanke and his belief that "printing" $600 billion will help our economy. Where can we find signals to evaluate his bet against the wisdom of crowds? Remember, the individuals in the crowd must act independently and must have real money at stake. Here are some described by Alan Reynolds in the WSJ today (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303467004575574610003111250.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories#articleTabs%3Dcomments):
1. Gap between regular Treasury bonds and inflation-protected bonds (TIPS): widened by 60 basis points since August (bet is against bernanke)
2. US dollar: dropping against non-Western currencies (bet is against)
3. ETF ProShares: This fund bets against long term interest rates falling. If Bernanke's gambit was to work (ie by decreasing interest rates), the Proshares should drop. So far, it has not (bet is against).

The point here is not so much that Bernanke is "clueless", because he is not. The point is how one best makes a difficult judgement: by trusting experts and committees or by trusting Hayek's marketplace. Free markets out perform top-down marketplaces over time, because they rely on the latter. If you think you can identify an undiscovered predictor from the crowd, you could also make a lot of money.

How many reported on this?

In a report to Congress on Oct. 26, 2010, Neil Barovsky, the special inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which funds HAMP (The Dem's program to help homeowners avoid mortgage bankruptcy), had this to say. The high profile mortgage-restructuring program "has undoubtedly put people into foreclosure". "It's a parade of documentation horrors." Many borrowers might end up "worse off than before they participated." More than half of the 1.4 million borrowers who have been approved for temporary decrease in their mortgage payments under the plan will fall out and have to repay the modified difference to the bank.
As Reagan said, "the scariest words in the English language are, "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help...""

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704805204575594453938527666.html?KEYWORDS=foreclosure+crisis

the New Deal and today's recession

Jason Zwieg is an economics reporter I've long respected. In the WSJ today (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704405704575596382345085258.html?KEYWORDS=zweig), he discusses an economist from the FDR era, Melchior Palyi who had insights into the New Deal that are as true today as then:
1. Banking Act of 1933, which said that banks could not hold securities that weren't rated "investment grade" by two ratings firms. Noting that in the 1920's these bonds often went under, even in the same year they were rated, he predicted that a bank following the new rules could have 1/3 of its bond portfoloio go bankrupt. Rating agencies are so unreliable, he wrote, that it would be "more responsible to stop the publications of ratings altogether". He felt that the banks had replaced liquidity as a way to handle this risk, with "shiftability" to others that would some day "be magnified into catastrophic dimensions".
2. government push for universal home ownership (1938) would "make the population fixed to the ground" by 'overburdening them with housing costs". Limited mobility of workers in this housing collapse is thought to be a major factor in our current persistently high unemployment rate.
3. "quantitative easing" by the Federal Reserve is "a sort of Santa Claus to the economic system" that can lead to "runaway inflation" and too muchpower in too few hands.
La plus ca change...

Where do your tax dollars go?

I have written about understanding income taxes before, using the "tax receipt" idea from Third Wave. Here is another good example from the WSJ 11/6/10 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704506404575592900454547226.html?KEYWORDS=laura+saunders). As we discussed last Thursday, all of the expenditures below SS, Medicare/Medicaid, interest on debt, and the military (called "non-military discretionary spending) only account for 17% of spending. If you cancellled them all, you would barely cover 1/2 of this year's deficit.
This is a good place to note that there are 7 different ways that income is taxed at the federal level: income from work (to which 3 different tax schemes are applied: federal income tax, Social Security, and Medicare), income from interest, income from dividends, income from investments and then all of these combined under another tax scheme, the Alternate Minimum Tax.

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed with a few more examples of Gov. complicity in reducing competition

Mr. Reich, It's Not the Tea Partiers Who Are Out of Touch 

In "Why Business Should Fear the Tea Party" (op-ed, Oct. 29), Robert Reich fails to state that the largest U.S. companies have played both sides of the political fence for years. The result is ethanol, windmills, the elimination of the incandescent light bulb, ridiculous car safety and gas mileage standards, the elimination of top-loading washing machines and other laws that have reduced competitiveness and established a government-business alliance that is part of our spending problem. This has resulted in a tax code that carves out special tax breaks for certain businesses. We in the tea party would like business to be competitive and not part of the ever-increasing crowd suckling on the government teat. So yes, some businesses should be nervous.

Davies Wakefield

Green Bay, Wis.

Energy: natural gas, the Marcellus shale and fracking

We were discussing the importance of natural gas as a transition energy source to carbon-free energy production. The US has vast natural reserves, most noteworthy in the Marcellus shale of the Appalachians. This has become commercial in the past twenty years due to technical advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic extraction, called "fracking". There is real controversy as to the environmental hazards of fracking. It is quite an emotional topic, so make up your own mind, but beware of using secondary sources. Here is a starting reading list:

1. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=shale-gas-and-hydraulic-fracturing#comments
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
3. http://gaslandthemovie.com/
4. http://climateprogress.org/2010/03/03/natural-gas-fracking/
5. http://blogs.forbes.com/christopherhelman/2010/08/08/can-gas-fracking-pollute-groundwater-unlikely/
6. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703399204574507440795971268.html
7. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/environmental-defense-fund-admits-propaganda-effort-against-natural-gas-exploration-is-bunk-105903083.html

Cost of public school in New Hampshire

We discussed the cost of schooling in tonight's meeting. In New Hampshire public schools, it is $12,144 / pupil /year. Here is the reference:
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20101010-NEWS-10100341