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CONTENTS Editorial: A Time to Be Wrong Of the Zormler, By the Zormler... by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. The Power of Visions by Charles E. Gannon By the Rules by Edward M. Lerner Sam and the Flying Dutchman by Ben Bova Working Alone by Henry Melton 3rd Corinthians by Michael F. Flynn Punctuated Equilibrium by Pete. D. Manison Aloha by Ken Wharton Biolog: Kyle Kirkland Personalized Drugs by Kyle Kirland The Word Mill by Don D'Ammassa The Alternate View: LENR, Part 2 The Reference Library Upcoming Events Upcoming Chats Brass Tacks In Times to Come Analog® Science Fiction and Fact June 2003 Vol. CXXIII No. 6 First issue of Astounding® January 1930 Dell Magazines New York Edition Copyright © 2003 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications Analog® is a registered trademark. All rights reserved worldwide. All stories in Analog are fiction. Any similarities are coincidental. Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding) ISSN 1059-2113 is published monthly except for a combined July/August double issue. Stanley Schmidt: Editor Sheila Williams: Managing Editor Trevor Quachri: Assistant Editor Brian Bieniowski: Assistant Editor Victoria Green: Senior Art Director June Levine: Assistant Art Director Abigail Browning: Sub-Rights & Mktg Scott Lais: Contracts & Permissions Peter Kanter: Publisher & President Bruce Sherbow: VP of Sales & Mktg Julia McEvoy: Advertising Sales
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Editorial: A Time to Be Wrong On several occasions I've complained about a recent fad viewing the cultivation of “self-esteem” as a primary goal of education. The most important thing, we've been encouraged to believe, is that students should be made to feel good about themselves—whether they deserve to or not. Correcting their errors, or insisting that they correct them, does not make them feel good; therefore they should be spared such treatment by their teachers. The tangible results include such things as an epidemic of people who use and omit punctuation more or less at random, thereby destroying its function as a tool for precise communication. With that said, I would like to turn now to another educational problem I've observed, which may at first appear to contradict that one. It may be that in at least some cases problem “A,” just described, arose as a well-intentioned but misguided reaction to problem “B": a constant emphasis on evaluation that makes students afraid to take chances for fear they will be “marked wrong.” Now, at some point in the educational process—typically at the end of a block of material—there does need to be some form of evaluation. You can't claim to have taught something until the students demonstrate that they've learned it. If they haven't, you need to try again until they do. But that's at the end, when you would like to believe you've finished a unit. The problem I'm referring to is that so much of our education, at least when it's not obsessed with Self-Esteem at All Costs, has long tended to make students feel that they're always on trial. Teachers’ deeds, if