If the executives running the ports at Maputo, Libreville and Bandar-Abbas have hours or days of warning they can get ships moved to deep water. A tsunami is harmless then, but in shallow water a tsunami striking a loaded Ultra-Large Crude Carrier or a massive container ship or a bulk carrier hauling ore or grain will not be pretty.
Large ships sinking in the Straits of Hormuz would make already difficult navigation impossible.
In the United States a law that attempted to rectify a number of serious problems in education was known as No Child Left Behind. It mandated annual testing on more or less standardized tests. Unfortunately, the results are aggregated, and the evaluation is done at the level of schools, which is without any statistical justification. We've nothing against evaluating teachers, but prefer to emphasize improvement of individual students with progress evaluated weekly. That means everyone needs an Individual Education Plan - one student in six already has one. In addition, we see no (zero) value in NCLB's goal of a high school diploma. We assert a job after college needs to be the objective. While the United States searches for an answer, quantitative types have always wanted to compare national educational infrastructures. Currently, there is no universal test. When we analyze American high schools we use geometry scores as a simple factor. There are problems with this as one must equate scores in Alaska with those in Alabama. Internationally, an interesting measure of tertiary education is the production of FIDE chess grandmasters in particular and chess players in general. There's a reasonable archaeological argument to be made that chess was invented or at least formalized in Iran. Weighing intrinsic worth against mobility; optimizing finite resources; calculating the future consequences of complex scenarios - what's not to use? To illustrate such strategic thinking, we give some lightweight analysis of a recent game from the Iranian national championships.