Cedar's Digest

I'm moving!

2011-07-15T14:38:00.002-04:00

Ok, actually, already moved. Over to wordpress.
So, redirect your linker-doodles to:
Http://cedarsdigest.wordpress.com

Public Education is a Community Garden

2011-07-05T11:34:00.000-04:00

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about where my academic training would help in the education reform debates--in cognitive psychology, in research design and in statistics. But on those rare times when I get to engage someone whose take is largely different from mine, it seems that the evidence is irrelevant. So many in the education debates seem to have entirely different notions of what the American system of public education is. I don't think that people who don't agree with me are evil, greedy, or stupid. But I do think they might be operating under a different metaphorical framing of education than I operate under. So here is a metaphor I have been toying with lately:

Photo: Jennifer Cowley (The Constituency for a Sustainable Coast)

Public education is a community garden.

There are many elements that go into the success of a garden. There are different degrees of sun, soil, water, seeds, weeding, and different kinds of gardeners to maintain it.

From far away, our American garden looks both unkempt and unproductive. Wholesalers who weigh our produce at the market look down and shake their heads. Chefs at restaurants say that if we keep at this rate, they won't be able to serve their customers. Then a new crop of architects, after conferring with these chefs and grocery stores, survey our garden woefully, roll up their sleeves and get ready to apply new science and technology and their experience planning buildings to quickly solve the problems of this poorly managed community garden.

The gardeners on the inside have a different view. They see that one side of the garden is thriving. That side has perfect soil and plenty of sun. The seedlings from that side come from an expertly maintained greenhouse. The architects can't see what the gardeners know; this side has a hidden irrigation system that cares for the plants when the gardeners aren't there. The soil is refreshed with compost, lovingly collected and gently spread by the neighbors of that side of the community garden.

The other side of the garden is not so lucky. The soil is hard and barren of nutrition. The trees above give too much shade and pine needles acidify the soil. The seeds must be planted directly, and do not get time in the greenhouse. The hoses are leaky and always breaking.

Gardeners on the inside see and cope with these conditions. The ones on the sunny side come in the morning, and gently trim their plants, shaping them with trellises or tomato cages. They appreciate the superior tools they are given, and how they don't have to hoe every day, or do the grueling tedious work of removing pine needles. The irrigation system lets them wield their spray bottles, polish their fruit, and cultivate a rich and diverse garden of flowers, fruits and vegetables. Yet they appreciate their position, and don't fault the gardeners on the other side for the differences in effects.

The gardeners on the other side have it differently. Some bring a rake from home, and use the handle like a pick ax to loosen up the earth. Others wander around aimlessly picking up pine needles, grumbling that this doesn't feel like the gardening they signed up for. A few dedicated, and often experienced gardeners manage to get flowers to grow out of this awful environment. They have often cleared out the weeds and needles from their area, are doubly proud of their hardy little seeds and their own accomplishments. But most gardeners on this side don't feel that, or only for a season or two. Many realize that they would much rather wield the spray bottle than use the handle of their rake like a hoe and jump into an open spot on the sunny side as soon as they can. Others think they aren't cut out for gardening, and leave the garden altogether, some even become architects. And some give up, lean on their rakes, or sit down and stare off into the distance; ignoring a stray seedling or two, often knowing it won't be enough to take to market.

What do I like about this metaphor?

First, learning as cultivation strikes me as capturing the nature of learning a lot better than the "filling up the head" featured Waiting for Superman, or the "Race" to the Top. It is a more organic process, more obviously complicated.

Second, I think it emphasizes the distortion of the economists such as Eric Hanushek, and policymakers evaluating the entire system as a whole through test scores, comparing to other "community gardens" in other towns (like Singapore, Hong Kong or Finland) just by a crude single metric (perhaps simply weighing the produce?). We have at least two school systems in this country, and the gaps between rich schools and poor schools are stark.

Third, I think it captures the complexity of the situation for the teachers/gardeners. Let me acknowledge a point of the reformers: there are bad teachers. There are teachers who have given up and don't put enough effort into the job. But the next two questions are critical. How many of these are there? In my experience, and that of my friends, siblings and wife, this was small at some of our DC Public Schools. Further, can you be so sure that you can identify the ones who have given up and the ones who are taking a break. I am reminded of John Steinbeck's story about his uncle in his book "A Primer on the 30's" (nice blog post).

Relief workers in San FranciscoPhoto: Greg Gaar Collection, San Francisco

It was the fixation of businessmen that the WPA did nothing but lean on shovels. I had an uncle who was particularly irritated at shovel-leaning. When he pooh-poohed my contention that shovel-leaning was necessary, I bet him five dollars, which I didn’t have, that he couldn’t shovel sand for fifteen timed minutes without stopping. He said a man should give a good day’s work and grabbed a shovel. At the end of three minutes his face was red, at six he was staggering and before eight minutes were up his wife stopped him to save him from apoplexy. And he never mentioned shovel-leaning again.”

Many critics of the shovel leaners have no idea what it is like. Others, like Michelle Rhee, leave after three years, after proclaiming success, despite employing questionable methods. And they are right in principle that an amazing dedicated gardener can have a real impact anywhere. A teacher who is willing to work 70-80 hour weeks and shed blood to feed her little seedlings can, with luck and support, coax a flower from the dust bowl. But this is not a way a way to approach a system or grow a profession. Many things matter to student learning. The student's ability, desire and discipline. The school environment, the class size, the resources available, the course content. External factors wreak havoc on any gardener's well planned regimen: Lead paint, family illness, constant relocation.

This metaphor illustrates to me the approach of Diane Ravitch, the SOS March and the skeptics of top-down, market-based reforms They are on the side of the gardeners, defending their hard-worked, but still weedy patch of earth in front of bulldozers. They agree that the current state of the garden is unacceptable, but they don't think bulldozers and a new set of gardeners will help: the soil is still the same, as is the sun, and the water. But before we have a deeper, more sophisticated discussion about different seeds, soil types, what kind of plants we value, we have to stop the bulldozers and stop attacking the gardeners. What would reform look like, you ask? More compost (resources, aides), more water (interesting content), better tools (higher teacher salaries across the board), and maybe a smaller row to hoe (class size). But this is not the same as saying the garden is perfect as it is.

Corn in a Community Garden, Photo by Ned Raggett

This metaphor also fits with how I view standardized testing. The kind of testing we see seems to be a simple ruler. How high is your plant? Plant height is not a totally irrelevant metric for plant health, but when you push too hard on it (Campbell's Law) it ceases being as informative. What would intense pressure and incentives for taller plants in a community garden cause? The nice sunny side would ignore it at first: My tomatoes are tall and lovely, thanks. On the other side you would see contraptions to stretch every inch. But eventually, people would move away from planting things like pumpkins and squash, or strawberries, and all plant corn. And the narrowing of curricula has started to happen across the country, just as our crop biodiversity has narrowed with the efficient and standardized approach to growing corn and soybeans.

I am sure this metaphorical approach doesn't solve anyone's problems, but for me it is a reminder that it is very hard to agree on how to improve education, if we can't agree on what our education system is.

David Brooks: C'mon Feel That Invigorating Moral Culture, baby!

2011-07-01T13:39:00.003-04:00

David Brooks recent column on education reform is not as immediately awful as many of his other columns. It does not make me want to throw it down in disgust (but in the bestest, smirking-est, Taibbi-est way possible). It does not make me want to mumble die yuppie scum (ok, maybe just a little bit). It has that wonderful brooksian reasonableness, you can just see him with Mark Shields, nodding in resignation in response to something about Sarah Palin while subtly plugging Newt Gingrich’s epic intelligence.

Nevertheless there are some major errors in logic, and a repetition of a troublesome theme of his, which I think merit a line by line criticism.

Diane Ravitch with a book
she recently poured out

First, he begins with the standard criticism of Diane Ravitch. She is so prolific (“she pours our books”). She gives speeches (sometimes two at the same place! What a blabbermouth!). She is too quick to assign evil motives. Okay, I will acknowledge that I too don’t like her tendency to assail the intentions of some reformers (although “greed-heads?” Really? Is this 2nd grade?).

But you know who else is prolific? Appearing on TV and in the NYT? Writing books? Giving readings? David Brooks. I don’t see anyone debunking Brooks based on the quantity of his output. What hypocrisy for people as prolific as Brooks to resent the attention that Ravitch gets. They should acknowledge two things. First, she cultivates attention by listening to the educators. She is also is an amazingly effective social networker, publicizing teachers' own words along with her own frequent pithy, twitterific turn of phrase. Brooks, being a good writer himself should realize some of Ravitch’s popularity is due to rhetorical skill as well as to audience cultivation. Second, Ravitch touches a nerve. Her power comes not from her awesome institutional power as a Professor at NYU, or from her bully pulpit as a columnist at the New York Times (oops, sorry, that's Brooks), but from the fact that she expresses what so many people are already thinking and feeling, and she is rare in the national media for doing so.

The next paragraph is a straw man (see Paul Thomas' response), but a critical one in the education debate as it highlights what many reformers misunderstand about Ravitch, and misunderstand about resistance to current top-down reform efforts. Brooks identifies these as “the party-line view of the most change-averse elements of the teachers’ unions:”

There is no education crisis:
This is an oversimplification. The argument that Ravitch and many others (if Brooks bothered to read one of her books, he might realize this) isn’t that there is no education crisis, but that this claim rests on two false assumptions. First, there is no single American educational system. Well-off suburban schools have been turning out well-educated future professionals for quite some time now. Second, the current crisis rhetoric ignores the historical data. Ravitch is a historian, and has seen the permanent educational crisis described in every decade of the 20th century. She claims that our present moment is not unique.

Poverty is the real issue, not bad schools.
Again, an oversimplification, but one that Ravitch comes a lot closer to making. But saying “real issue” here obscures Ravitch’s point. While Ravitch may say that addressing poverty with a holistic program (like, hmm, Harlem Children’s Zone, maybe?) is better educational policy than test-based accountability, she is not a nihilist who thinks “bad” schools don’t matter. She is simply saying that poverty is a greater predictor of academic achievement (yes, even test scores) than reformers want to acknowledge, and that trying to identify and punish bad schools is not an effective way to improve them.

We don’t need fundamental reform; we mainly need to give teachers more money and job security.
What does “fundamental” mean here? Ravitch knows that reformers of every age have pledged that the school system needs to be “fundamentally” reformed. Many teachers know this firsthand, suffering from “reform fatigue” as every new turnaround expert boasts of fundamental change. When ed reformers of all stripes use the word “fundamental reform” it means “the way I want to redesign the educational system.” Everyone involved in this debate wants reform. There are many dimensions of reform possible. From class size, to school size, to curriculum, to who is teaching, to how we train them. Take Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson, Deborah Meier, E.D. Hirsch or any number of other people involved in education reform for a long time, and you will find many different ideas for reform. Please stop calling your own approach “fundamental” and everyone else’s ideas “change averse” without bothering to understand them. Most of these people have been trying to change the system for most of their careers.

At this point, Brooks steps back from the straw man (Look how reasonable I am! I am not going to attack this straw man I have shoddily erected, I’ll just be passive aggressive and undermine my opponent before I show how reasonable I am and admit that despite her overall craziness, she has some good points). Brooks acknowledges that teaching is a “humane art built upon loving relationships between teachers and students.” A system designed to improve multiple choices test scores distorts that.

At this point, I must acknowledge that that I continue to read Brooks for a reason. His willingness to acknowledge points of the other side does bolster his credibility. “If you make the tests all important, you give schools an incentive to drop the subjects that don’t show up on the exams but that help students become fully rounded individuals. You may end up with schools that emphasize test-taking, not genuine learning” Acknowledging the tension between testing and the humane nature of education buys him back into my good graces.

Oh, wait. I missed that word. “may” As it turns out, this incentive doesn’t have to work the way Brooks says it “may.” Why not? The dehumanizing testing incentive can be overwhelmed by the magic of ~~the free market~~ a visionary school leader with a mission. Brooks cites “education blogger” Whitney Tilson (Don’t you mean hedge fund director? Or TFA co-founder? Or finance columnist? or co-author of More Mortgage Meltdown: 6 Ways to Profit in These Bad Times) as delivering the linchpin in his argument here. The schools that are the best indicators of reform, like KIPP and Harlem Success Academy put tremendous emphasis on testing. But they are also the schools most likely to have all those nice things that Ravitch wants: chess, dance, physics, philosophy and Shakespeare. Tests are not the end in these places, but merely a “lever” that their visionary leaders use to get their students interested in school. Here is the message: Accountability schools have tests, but the tests are subverted to a broader mission (and bizarrely, it doesn’t seem to matter whether that mission is character education, Core Knowledge, or performing arts). The charisma of the school leaders and their “invigorating moral culture” (like some sort of super charged educational shower gel) ensure that these schools are not testing centers, but where education comes alive.

Some evidence? No cherry picking here! Oh wait, just kidding. Carolyn Hoxby’s results of studying charters in New York and Chicago. New Orleans (yes, where Arne Duncan said that Katrina was the best thing that happened to the education system there) has doubled the percentage of students performing at basic competency levels and above (yes doubled! Right here in River City! That’s double with a capital “D” that rhymes with “C” that stands for charter school!). What, you are skeptical of doubling academic achievement in a couple of years. Are you a status-quo defender?

Taste our invigorating moral culture, vile illiteracy!

First, I can believe that many charter schools in New York and Chicago have good results. But Hoxby’s study does not say why they are better. Imagine the following situation: You are pitting two youth basketball teams head to head. They played several times before, and it has always been very close, but one team recently got new uniforms. The new uniform team crushes the other team. The clothing company crows about the new uniforms being the thing that made the difference. Silly, no? Is this a fair metaphor? Follow me for just a few seconds. To say that the new uniforms made the difference, you would obviously have several good questions. The first one is of course the criticism that Ravitch begins with: selection bias. Did the new uniform team get any new players? Did they cut their lower ability players? This does not have to be a charter skimming only the best students, and need not be nefarious counseling out (although that does happen). It can be the result of a policy that demands a high level of involvement from parents (KIPP and parental involvement link here) ensuring that even across other measures of poverty, motivated parents more able to be involved in their child’s education are able to enroll. This absolutely happens in some charters. This is not a reason to damn the charter school itself, but just to acknowledge that accepting that high attrition cannot be a national model (or even a system- wide model, the students have to go somewhere). New Orleans is a tragic special case of this demographic fact, in that natural decimation does have a way of changing the demographics of a city, including its school system. The second, often neglected point, is that you might ask what other basic differences between the teams. Did one team get more practice? This is an often passed over difference between many charter schools and traditional public schools, that Hoxby acknowledges, charters often have longer school days, and longer school years. Maybe more practice at school helps you be better at school? Just sayin. If you moved beyond the practice question, you might ask about resources. Did the new uniform team get other things besides new uniforms? How do these charter school pay for chess, philosophy, Shakespeare? Oh, maybe it is because of massive fundraising efforts?

The kind of presentation of evidence Brooks engages in here is reminiscent of Matt Yglesias with the magic of bourgeois modes of behavior. They dispense with the first criticism of selection bias (using a lottery study, or a single case study but ignoring other sources of selection bias) and trumpet the new uniforms. This reminds me of many shoddy popular interpretations of psychology experiments. Just because you have dealt with one third variable problem (selection bias) does not mean you get to say that now correlation really does mean causation.

But I don’t hate charter schools. And neither does Ravitch. I would love to see some of the elements of KIPP and Harlem Children’s Zone see more wide acceptance. For one: addressing poverty takes time and money. Rather than trumpet miracle schools that have amazing results with the power of mission, or leaders, or spiritual fervor, acknowledge that money helps when spent wisely, on things that Ravitch wants it spent on, like chess, Shakespeare, philosophy, or the arts, or foreign languages.

Brooks saves his most dishonest, victim-blaming paragraph for near the end, and almost makes me re-read Myers’ epic rant to fortify myself:

The places where the corrosive testing incentives have had their worst effect are not in the schools associated with the reformers. They are in the schools the reformers haven’t touched. These are the mediocre schools without strong leaders and without vibrant missions. In those places, of course, the teaching-to-the-test ethos prevails. There is no other.

The reformers have touched every single public school in our country. NCLB and RTTT have ensured that is the case. By elevating testing in reading and math as THE incentive that matters, accountability-based reformers have demanded change from every single principal, and every single superintendent in the country. But where does this testing have the most impact? In the “failing” urban schools (although don’t worry, we’ll all be failing soon). The highest demands, the most intense pressure is felt by those places that had the most children in special ed, the most children in poverty, the most crumbling school buildings, the least amount of cultural capital, the least potential for PTA fundraising, the least number of functioning bathrooms, the least experienced teachers. But no, that doesn’t matter to Brooks. All they need are strong leaders with vibrant missions. No matter how many times Brooks goes to his thesaurus for “alive” (“alive” “vibrant” what’s one more… oh, how about “invigorating” “passion”) it doesn't hide his privilege, callousness and ignorance.

I went to DC Public Schools, I worked with a few principals after college in a brief volunteer stint for Hands On DC. My dad has taught at my high school for 15 years, my wife taught at another one for 8 years. The problem is not mediocre people. Please stop handing a charter principal a multi-million dollar budget and a development office and turn around and tell the public school principals to stop being mediocre and work harder on being outstanding with a sense of mission. When charters have as little resources as public schools, they struggle.

At the end of the column, we finally get the Brooks final solution, so much more reasonable than Ravitch: “The real answer is to keep the tests and the accountability but make sure every school has a clear sense of mission, an outstanding principal and an invigorating moral culture that hits you when you walk in the door” You know what, I love my kids' public school. I can volunteer there (to teach chess!) because I am a professional with flexibility in my hours. There is a great principal and a wonderful staff of hard-working teachers. But what makes this school work so well? Dedicated professionals. Active PTA and parent community. A state and district that funds reading aides and math aides (scroll to the bottom), and lower class sizes. An office staff and a full time nurse.

I’ll fight to protect my school with dedicated professionals with resources, a caring community with time and money to give, and a curriculum as full of "interesting science facts" as my son says. And I'll advocate to give the same to as many kids across the country as we can.You can keep your invigorating moral culture, David Brooks.

The web is best when it's arguing

2011-06-26T21:26:00.001-04:00

Since I just got back into Twitter I've been thinking more about the strengths and weaknesses of the web. I am going to focus on what I think the internet does right, instead of belaboring what the net is doing to kids brains when they spend all day on Facebook (back in my day, we spent our useless teen time on the phone!). Yes, this is continuing to riff on my Oral Culture vs. Literate Culture post from last week.

I know that looking at Facebook comment wars doesn't back this up, but I think when the internet really shines is arguments. The recent theory by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber about how human reasoning evolved for the purpose of argument uses as evidence findings that people get more reasonable when they argue. In other words, we reason better when we are trying to persuade. I am sure that is not a general rule, but when I read a good point-counterpoint I am struck by how much I can learn -- not just by a journalist saying "he says-she says" but a real back and forth, with supporting evidence from each side, not limited to what will fit in a 1000 word newspaper piece, as interpreted by a generalist.

Yves Smith

Ok, exhibit A: Yves Smith shreds Ezra Klein's review of Inside Job. Here's a bio of Yves Smith if you didn't know who she was. Basically what this amounts to is an expert with 25 years of experience taking down a hasty journalistic essay, piece by piece. Yes, it has some scholarly ass-kicking, reminiscent of the letters section of the NYRB, but it backs it up with links and evidence. Smith is relentlessly critical of Klein, but retains an appreciation for the storytelling ability of Michael Lewis, Klein's apparent "expert" in explaining the financial crisis. The piece is very long, but I found it very illuminating, and synthesized a lot of my conclusions about the financial crisis: We should not blame a few evil greedy bankers at the top, nor should we shake our heads and say that our international banking system is so complicated no one could have predicted it. This was a systemic diffusion of responsibility, much like the bystander effect, a well-documented phenomena in social psychology in which people are less likely to aid someone in need when there are many bystanders. Further, it was a complete capture of the levers of regulation by the industry meant to be regulated. By the way, some comments are typical bickering, but there was one that included a long review of Inside Job, by Dave Stratman, who seemed to be basing it on his earlier review.

Zeynep Tefukci

Why did I like this? Because it was not just someone explaining the financial crisis, but arguing with other people, explaining why they were wrong (or incomplete). Why does it show what's great about the web? Because I think the role of the generalist journalist is (and should be) declining. Previously, popular modes of mass communication were limited by space (newspaper columns) and time (deadlines, no journalist can be expert in everything they cover) in a way that they are not now. I don't need the New York Times to employ a sociologist of technology, but when an issue comes up, I would rather read Zeynep Tefukci than Bill Keller when considering the effects of twitter. She is a professional in that field, knows a lot of the evidence, thinks about this stuff when she goes to bed at night, and has several days to follow many of the different subthreads of Keller's argument. Keller, a really really smart guy, can read the articles that Tefukci sends, criticize them and then cites as evidence in response the following:

My sense of Facebook, not based on research but based on some experience and observation, is that for some people Facebook creates a kind of friendship that is more superficial than the kind that grows out of hours spent together in one another’s company. Of course, social media is a way to keep in touch with real friends and expand your network of more casual, less intimate relationships. But it also makes it possible to feel like you have a meaningful social life when, in reality, you are missing something. I did not offer this as a scientific fact but as an observation and a concern.

He ends the letter with a smarmy, "and now I have to go earn a paycheck." This is exactly it. If I am interested in this issue, I want somebody like Tefukci, who looks for evidence, interprets it within a context of other evidence, who is dogged and persistent. If some evidence is lacking, then look for more. (Here is more, by the way). I want to read someone who wants to stick around and argue, I don't want someone to make a few "observations," share a few "concerns," and then leave. I don't want a smarter generalist, who's got great "general critical thinking skills" and is an expert at making anything readable, a nice narrative, and interesting. I want someone who has found this issue interesting for 25 years, and is going to find this issue interesting for another 25. I'll skim a little, forgive typos, ignore a little jargon here and there, follow and appreciate the links. And I'll tune in more and more, to my trusted sources on specific issues, not a single trusted source on general issues.

Practical Wisdom and College Teaching

2011-06-23T23:08:00.002-04:00

Twas love at first sight! (At the 6th grade science fair)

My last post was a review of Practical Wisdom, a book by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe, about how wisdom relies on dedicated practice, and how that practice is being stifled by our educational, legal and medical institutions. I limited the post to a straightforward review of the book, but it neatly fits into a narrative of why I love my job so much. I have the freedom to practice what I love. The particular kind of intellectual and professional freedom I enjoy as a college professor is what drew me to the profession, and it continues to sustain me.


At the beginning of every semester ...	and at the end.

For me, the first element of practice is the freedom to fail without immediate consequences (besides the sinking realization that one has failed). In my teaching, I have tried different pedagogical approaches. I gave many straight lectures in general psychology, interactive demonstrations in my sensation and perception laboratory class, project based learning in research methods, and almost pure discussion in a cognitive science seminar. All of them have failed one way or another. I take solace in the recent study by MIT economists, led by Pierre Azoulay, who suggest that scientists given more latitude to fail produce more "hits" and more "duds." In other words, the freedom to produce duds is critical to producing hits. Failure is not the opposite of success, but the raw material of practical wisdom. And I am amassing some serious raw material here.

Don't mistake this for an overall judgment of my failure as a teacher. The students felt like they learned something, and they did actually learn something from my past classes. But I have always been painfully aware of the huge missed potential for learning and inspiration. The gap between those two quantities have always gnawed away at my soul as I read over the final exams, or question the students in future classes. Any teacher who thinks the students learn their content perfectly should have the (always humbling) experience of having that student in a class a year later. But I learn from these failures, and I love being in a field where I can learn from failures without fear (i.e. practice).

It is impossible not to be wowed by the Lilac Chaser

But what have I learned from these failures? I have gotten pretty good at describing phenomena in Sensation and Perception to beginning undergraduates. I have a good sense of which topics will blow their minds, which will bore them but are necessary for deeper conceptual understanding, and which exam questions provoke the deep studying. I have learned that class discussions can be critically important on the class chemistry, and that I can trust some students to do the reading, but most will try to see if they can get by without, before reading. I have learned some cultural differences between the places I have taught. There is justified grumbling about a group project with out of class planning when some students are commuters. I have learned that senior science majors don't always like grappling with historical primary documents the way I do.

But most of what I have learned cannot be translated into words. This is embedded in the very nature of the practice of any craft, and in the nature of the practical wisdom that Aristotle described : it is context-specific and escapes general, rule-based summary. There is no one right pedagogy, there is no one right way to teach General Psych, or one right way to teach kindergarten. There are a few principles, that are right, most of the time, in most situations, which are good at guiding better practice. What I have learned is likely a lot more specific than even I realize. It may be specific to my teaching persona, or to that particular class, or to my subject, or to the age of my students. I am always surprised at how different 18-year-olds are from 22-year-olds, and this means that teaching each cannot simply conform to a few general principles.

Next post:
A history of Psychology in beards

The second element of developing practical wisdom is balancing tradeoffs. Schwartz and Sharpe emphasize this, and I couldn't agree more. While I would love to "solve" teaching general psychology, the reason I find it so engaging is that it is not merely a puzzle. What works one semester doesn't work as well the next. There are trade-offs between depth (I could spend a whole class period on a debate about policy implications of Claude Steele's stereotype threat research! or have them memorize nonsense syllables like Ebbinghaus!) and breadth (Do I have to skip evolutionary psych, or health psych, or stress?). There are trade-offs between what is fun (let's talk about personality!) and the science behind the fun (why is the Big Five better than Myers-Briggs? Well, there's some math, and some research methods, and the nature of likert scales...Hey why are your eyes rolling that way, this stuff is great!). It is sometime hard to tell the difference when to a total psych science geek like myself it is ALL fun (I know I can totally make them love the difference between predictive validity and construct validity). There are trade-offs between extrinsic motivation (do this for a grade) and intrinsic motivation (do this because you are curious, or you want to get better at it). Part of practicing is continuing to balance trade-offs, and learning which tradeoffs are necessary in a given situation. In general, I feel that freshmen often need more extrinsic motivation (for example, regular quizzes to get them to read) whereas you can trust seniors a little bit more to work on their own. This is, of course, relative.

It's not turtles, it's practice,
all the way down

Finally, I think a critical piece of this freedom to develop practical wisdom, is an acceptance of the complexity and uncertainty of assessment and evaluation. On one hand, to get better at teaching, to learn from my failures, I need to know how I failed. On the other, assessing learning is a vastly complex and noisy undertaking. Most assessments of learning require wise interpretation. This interpretation improves with practice too. My rubrics continue to evolve, just as my evaluation of them. If the environment that I am teaching in fails to acknowledge that, and tries to precisely measure my effectiveness, I will adjust my teaching to fit that precise measure. Tie my salary to number of students and to student evaluations (as some powerful interests in Texas are encouraging), I will do my best to make my courses draw more students (hello sloganeering course titles), make students happy (goodbye rigorous writing assignments) and not worry as much about how much they learn. I exaggerate to make a point, here, not all students are drawn like flies to the Chemistry of Wine, or tricked into enrolling in the Psychology of Illusion, and some do appreciate long writing assignments. The free marketers who say I should be more customer-focused may be right, but my customer is my student ... ten to twenty years later, not the first-time-away-from-home-man-child in front of me. Show me someone who is successful at selling a product whose benefits are enjoyed ten to twenty years later to 18-22 year olds, and we can talk. Until then, please spare me your increased accountability.

More pressure to precisely measure the learning narrows teaching, and narrows learning. The successful assessments that I have seen are formative, not evaluative. No matter the evaluation, the instant that pay, or hiring and firing gets tied to them, they become hammers instead of scalpels. We may be able to boost that particular metric if we push really hard, but that often comes at a cost of other outcomes that may be harder to measure but are not necessarily less valued. Sometimes, that outcome is acceptable. In Atul Gawande's The Checklist, he describes how pilot checklists have ensured the remarkable safety record of the commercial airliner. But I suspect this emphasis on safety has come at a cost to innovation, energy efficiency, and price (whatever happened to Valujet?). We may be ok with an overwhelming priority on safety for airplanes, but in higher education, narrow accountability will crowd out many other worthy goals, not to mention people who value academic freedom and the ability to cultivate their practical wisdom.

Ultimately, part of the reason I love what I do because I can feel myself getting better at it (the teaching and the scholarship, if not the pithy blog posts) and I can enjoy the fruits of my labor. These fruits are not merit based pay, but the tiny lights of inspiration, of comprehension, of curiosity, going off in the deep recesses of my students' minds. The sparkly warm glow of reading about a new finding in embodied perception. A profession is defined by practical wisdom, and practical wisdom is not dispensed like manna from the talented, but generated by accident by people just trying to get better at something they find interesting.

Book Review: Practical Wisdom

2011-06-21T22:04:00.001-04:00

Practical Wisdom

By Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe

The premise of this book, written by a psychologist (Barry Schwartz, also author of Paradox of Choice) and a political scientist (Kenneth Sharpe), is that we have a society with too many rules and perverse incentives that discourage the cultivation and use of practical wisdom. This may sound at first glance like a modern rehashing of a libertarian perspective, that we should let individual freedom and market forces lead us all to greater happiness and stop meddling government rules and bureaucrats.

But this book deftly shows how de-humanizing incentives can corrupt and undermine practical wisdom in many large institutions, whether they be a public school or a private hospital. The book is split into four sections. First, what is practical wisdom and why do we need it? Second, the machinery of wisdom. Third, the war on wisdom, and finally, sources of hope.

What is practical wisdom? It begins, say the authors, with Aristotle, who described what he called phronesis. Aristotle’s wisdom in Nichomean Ethics was not a theoretical system of moral rules, but a specific, practical ethics, impossible to describe in general terms. Doing the right thing was not a matter of just knowing the right rules, but knowing the right thing to do, in the right circumstances, with the right person at the right time. And this takes practice. This moral dimension of practice is a compelling one for me, and resonates with how I approach becoming a better teacher.

In the machinery of wisdom, they cover several bits of familiar (for me) territory in modern research in psychological science. First, that decision-making is critically dependent on our emotions. Without emotions, there are no decisions, and without empathy, there is no wisdom. Second, science has a desire to find hidden patterns, the unseen rules that drive our clockwork universe. Science has been wuite successful in this effort, but our human worlds, of education, of law, of medicine, are not at all clockwork, and so complex and uncertain, that rule-based approaches are doomed to fail. Examples of this abound in artificial intelligence research, where we have thought that giving robots cameras, microphones, and an amazing analytical processor would quickly give us computers that could do simple human tasks, like navigate our environment, understand language and recognize objects and faces. But even these simple tasks have proven to be monstrously difficult, because we are doing what our brain does best in these cases, which is to cope with uncertainty and make good educated guesses. Most computers, while amazing when given a good set of rules in a rigid, predictable environment, are terrible in situations that are context-dependent or uncertain.

So what is the war on wisdom? The authors begin with judges and mandatory minimums. Mandatory sentencing guidelines erode judges’ ability to make individual decisions based on the circumstances. In other words, it takes away their power to judge. Doctors, through financial incentives are nudged into doing more procedures and seeing more patients per day. Teachers are given strict guidelines on what to teach on what days. Or if they are not, are nudged towards teaching to a specific high stakes test.

Why do we have this war on wisdom? Of course no one is anti-wisdom, but well-intentioned efforts designed to encourage other characteristics have had horrible side-effects on practical wisdom. In medicine, a value of higher patient autonomy has led doctors to present options, but refuse to give their own (expert) opinions. In law, the system where lawyers are strictly advocates for their clients, rather than also representatives of the court has led to a disregard for the truth and wise solutions. Further, the desire to fully account for their time, and the competitive nature of making partner, has shaped the legal profession for the worse. The “science” of accountability in the legal profession has eroded the wisdom of the profession. In teaching, seeking to consistently train new teachers and set minimum standards has led to undermining teachers’ ability to learn through practicing their craft.

What are the sources of hope? In law, the authors praise special veterans courts, where judges design sentences and programs to balance the goals of rehabilitation and safety. In legal training they cite a clinical approach to teaching law, preparing law students using a mentoring apprenticeship. Like many in education, they propose a portfolio system for evaluating students and teachers, with flexible criteria, allowing teachers to work within their curriculum, with their own judgment.

While the prose and argument was sometimes a bit lengthy (he says in his typically long-winded blog post), I really recommend this book. It integrated disparate thoughts I have had on large political questions that don’t seem to be engaged by any politicians, or any political party. I can see how simply leaving people entirely alone to practice (whether it be teaching, judging or healing) could be corrupting, but the dehumanizing system we currently have is corrupting in a different way, and we seem to be heading further down that road.

In the next post, I am going to pivot on this, and try to integrate some of the insights from this book with another of my intellectual touchstones, Atul Gawande’s The Checklist, and apply them to my own teaching practices.

Other resources:

The authors have a Psychology Today blog, whose theme is practical wisdom
Wired interview with Schwartz about the book
Barry Schwartz gives a TED talk on Practical Wisdom (23 minutes)

One more supporting link (maybe more to come)

From Vaughan Bell at MindHacks: Medical school reduces empathy

Reasonable Doubts about "The Brain on Trial"

2011-06-16T21:40:00.003-04:00

I agree with a lot of what David Eagleman has to say in "The Brain on Trial" in this month's Atlantic, and I find him an interesting and provocative thinker. But I had a few reservations.
First, let me say that I have been reading a lot about him lately, and I read his book about how the internet can save civilization (on the iPad), and it was interesting.
Some of these ideas have been stewing since he gave a talk on the topic of neuro-law here at Randolph-Macon College a few months ago. I had the unique pleasure of getting to talk to him for about 45 minutes in my office. I was a bit star struck at the time, but would have been even more so had I known he was about to be profiled in the New Yorker (by Burkhard Bilger, no less!).

Ok, a quick overview for those of you who don't want to follow any of the links above:
He argues that we should redesign our legal system to reflect how much we know about the brain.
What relevant findings does modern neuroscience tell us? First, the amount of free will we have is on a spectrum. No argument there, we don't hold children as blameworthy as adults, and we make allowances for accidental deaths, or the insanity defense. But second (and this is important) we don't have as much free will as we think we do. A lot of modern psychology and neuroscience show how our unified sense of our conscious thoughts controlling our actions is an illusion. Not only that, but in certain situations we we can look at the brain, and tell how much free will someone has (tumor in the frontal lobe, you lose control of yourself). And we can look at a loss of free will, and predict what we are going to see in the brain (you are losing control of yourself, maybe something is wrong with your frontal lobe).

How should this be applied to the legal system? Eagleman urges to drop assessment of blameworthiness, or intent altogether, and instead look to the future, at reducing recidivism. If we can tell whether someone is likely to commit another crime, that should influence how our legal system deals with them. He argues that we have a lot of good actuarial data on predicting recidivism, and that as neuroscience matures further, we will get even better predictions about who will commit another crime. If we care about the safety of our populace, and the reform of our criminals, why don't we position the legal system to prevent crimes, instead of simply reacting to them?

What's not to like? I agree that our legal system could be better, and more fair, if we took into account recidivism rates, and incorporated crime prevention programs like drug treatment instead of simply punishing and imprisoning. And I agree that we should recognize that dealing with lead paint is a great crime prevention program. But here's where I am skeptical of Eagleman's neuro-optimism:

We don't need neuroscience for any of this.

We can (and should) make our legal system forward-looking because we should recognize that a legal system should not just punish wrong-doing but reduce the circumstances that lead to crime. Exposure to lead paint, drug addiction, and PTSD are all things to be treated, not to be punished.

Social programs and policies should be designed with the knowledge that we have less free will than we think we do. Watson and Skinner said this 75 years ago. Yes, they overreached, and Chomsky and the computer revolution led us away from rats, pigeons and the brain as a black box and towards the mind as an information processor. Another way of putting this is: the environment is powerful. Eagleman believes his knowledge of brain areas and circuits puts him in a different league than Skinner and the behaviorists, but his argument is not that different. And he is not really any closer to scanning someone's brain and predicting a complex behavior.

As Michael Gazzaniga, an esteemed neuroscientist, mentioned off-hand at his talk at the Association for Psychological Science this year: There are frontal lobe patients who lose control and kill people, but many more who don't. And plenty of serial killers don't have frontal lobe abnormalities. Basically, while we can make a probabilistic judgment that damage to the frontal lobe is more likely to impair your judgment than damage anywhere else, we can't make an individual judgment that one person's actions are due to a particular element of their brain anatomy or chemistry.

Finally, there is one piece of the article that for me represents a lot of what bugs me about his approach (and it is not uncommon in modern neuroscience). He describes a prefrontal workout, "in which the frontal lobes practice squelching the short-term brain circuits." In what amounts to a super charged, fMRI -sophisticated biofeedback system, you see the pattern of brain activity that corresponds with craving, and then you try to reduce that pattern of brain activity. This just seems odd and incredibly indirect to me. We don't want to reduce brain patterns. We want to reduce cravings. There are some decent ways of reducing cravings, at least for cigarettes. Eagleman ignores effective psychological treatments and therapies, while trumpeting the dubious triumphs of Prozac, thinking that at some point we will understand the brain enough to directly hack its circuitry. We certainly know a lot more about how the biology of the brain relates to behavior than we did 20 or 30 years ago.

But sometimes the best way to change behavior, is to change behavior, and measure behavior.

In the end, I am a big fan of David Eagleman. His energetic mind, his boundless joy and love of science and his optimism are a wonder to behold. For someone with such confidence in his ideas of applying science to solve the problems of society, he was disarmingly modest and patient with all the questions I saw him answer during his short stay in Ashland. I hope he succeeds in his aim of making our legal system more forward thinking, environmental, and less black and white when it comes to free will. But I wish the wide-eyed optimism about what neuroscience can do was tempered with some acknowledgement that neuroscience isn't the last word on the human condition.

How the internet make us smart, but makes us feel like idiots

2011-06-15T21:51:00.000-04:00

My last post was about a science blog-world kerfuffle. Since I had spent hours looking over these comments, on a few different blogs, trying to pull together the story, and another hour or two writing my post, applying my expert knowledge on how important content knowledge is, I thought I might offer to write a guest blog at the Sci Am blogs about it, and what is to be learned from it all.

The gracious editor responded promptly and gently let me down. Of course, I was two weeks late, and had only grazed the surface of this debate, which played out over more blogs than I realized, as well as on twitter. So I was struck by the irony. Here was a conversation that I felt made me smarter, as I could see the thought processes on display as scientists, journalists and and a collection of otherwise very smart people publicly turned over these ideas in their heads. But in retrospect I realize now that I was only seeing half the conversation, and not even fully comprehending the context and background of that half that I did see. In other words, even as I felt like I was probing deeply, I was made painfully aware that I was scratching the surface.

Which is an odd paradox of the internet. On the one hand, you can learn just about anything you want with a few felicitous keystrokes. On the other, as you do, you realize how ignorant you really are. Kind of similar to grad school that way. Just as you think you know a lot about a topic, you find someone who has spent years exploring a small slice of that topic.

The thing for me is that this is the _best_ way to use the internet. Otherwise, we run the risk of creating our own information bubble, nodding our heads at people who agree with us but don't challenge us, and failing to confront the boundlessness of our ignorance. The price we pay for valuing education is that we must also seek out ignorance and misunderstanding.

But confronting our own ignorance is uncomfortable and feels shameful. Well. At least for me it did. But I tell myself that the sting is necessary to prod us to learn more... and eventually, confront more ignorance and start the whole damn cycle again.

Getting smart about Wise Crowds, or Some stuff even really smart people don't know about science

2011-06-14T20:19:00.002-04:00

I found a discussion between scientists, science writers, and journalists online that I found really fascinating, I thought I would share thoughts here. It relates to a few common themes of mine: that scientific thinking is unnatural, and that statistical thinking is unnatural, the role of content knowledge in critical thinking, and that we should have some role for expertise in interpreting scientific results.

The discussion began with a column by neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer, about a phenomenon called "the wisdom of crowds." Basically, the idea is that when estimating something very uncertain, sometimes the average crowd response can be "wiser" or more accurate, than even most expert responses. The classic example is from Francis Galton, who observed that the average crowd response for estimating the weight of a steer was better than most of the butchers who guessed. Lehrer's column was about a paper which showed that this wisdom of crowds phenomenon can be reduced (i.e. crowds get less wise) by making the crowd interact with each other.

Ok, so we're fine so far. The brouhaha begins when Peter Freed, M.D., an actual neuroscientist, writes a ranty blog post entitled "Jonah Lehrer is Not a Neuroscientist." He calls Lehrer to task for using "for example" when cherry picking a certain description of data from the paper. In other words, Lehrer acted as if the number he was citing was representative, when it was not. Freed uses this as a way of highlighting the difference between scientists, who look at data all day, and science writers, who do not. But Freed himself makes an error (and he confesses, and makes it part of his blog post) in confusing the median and the mean as measures of central tendency in this case.

Ok, now, maybe I have lost some of you, and I am going to back up just a second, because this is where I think it gets interesting. It depends on a (relatively) nuanced understanding of the three words I used above: median, mean and central tendency.

The vast majority of science that I am aware of takes a set of observations, and looks to describe those observations using some sort of quantitative measure. We don't want to compare apples and oranges, but once we are measuring all apples, we have a set of numbers, and we summarize those numbers to describe the group as a whole. Most of us are familiar with the word "average," and we don't give it any thought. It seems as if an average (adding up all of the numbers and dividing by the number of observations) is a natural, real, description of the set of apples we have in front of us.

But there are different kinds of ways to describe a group of numbers. We can say the most frequent response (called the mode, as in, "9 out of 10 dentists ranked it first"), or the middle response (called the median, when you take the SAT three times, and get a 2000, 2100, and a 1000, you want to count the median response, 2000, not the mean, which would be 1700). The most common is the mean, which most of us consider synonymous with average., as in, "When Bill Gates is in the room, everyone in that room is, on average, a millionaire." This is not even getting into the difference between the geometric mean and the arithmetic mean.

So first, a key point here is that none of these descriptions are more "true" or accurate descriptions of a set of data, they are simply one of many descriptions. This is a mistake made by Nicholas Carr in his blog post discussing Lehrer's column, as he argues that

As soon as you start massaging the answers of a crowd in a way that gives more weight to some answers and less weight to other answers, you're no longer dealing with a true crowd, a real writhing mass of humanity. You're dealing with a statistical fiction. You're dealing, in other words, not with the wisdom of crowds, but with the wisdom of statisticians. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that - from a purely statistical perspective, it's the right thing to do - but you shouldn't then pretend that you're documenting a real-world phenomenon.

Carr draws the line between the real-world itself (which he identifies with the arithmetic mean) and a statistical fiction. None other than Kevin Kelly (among others) takes issue with Carr on this point in the comments, which I think are really worth a read.

Given that we accept that all descriptions of a set of data are to some degree interpretation, not simply observation, where do we go from here? In a follow up post, Freed describes the lambasting he received from some of his critics, and relates a funny (fictional) story about his third grade class as it relates to the choice between median and mean. The critical moment is when the principal writes to the statistical research firm: "You may know a lot about statistics, but you don’t know anything about third graders. You get an F, for Fired"

Which leads me to my main point. Statistics is not a purely "scientific" position or a purely aesthetic decision, as Freed claims in a comment on another blog post, by the physicist Chad Orzell. The statistics that scientists use reflects both a basic understanding of distributions of data (what it means when there are a lot of extreme responses, leading to skew, or other non-normal conditions). But the statistics used also depend critically on some knowledge of the phenomena itself. When cognitive psychologists analyze reaction time data, they not only look at the distribution of responses (which will just about always be right skewed) but also consider the task that they are reacting to. What does it mean when most people take 1 second to respond, but a few take 2 minutes? Is that "real" data, or did they fall asleep, or answer their cell phone?

As Orzel points out, there are valid criticisms that one can make about use of statistics in pop science, but at some point, you have to engage with the actual science of the article. In this case, there is a rich literature of making a decision under uncertainty, and the phenomenon of the wisdom of crowds. To criticize the pop science writing, you need to know something about that science, which Freed seems not to. Not only that, Freed celebrates it:

Here’s my deep point. I don’t care about straight psychology – straight psychology is, not to pull punches, over. I care about neuroscience. And Lehrer was not trying to be a neuroscientist in this article. This was a straight-up psychology article. But modern neuroscience, his chosen wheelhouse – particularly the subfields of behavioral and affective and cognitive and social neuroscience – is radically more complex than straight psychology.

Where are the lessons in all of this?
Lesson #1: Even really smart people make mistakes about science. Even scientists make mistakes about science, especially when not directly in their area of expertise. We should be wary of treading into another field of science, proclaiming it "over" and declaring that our domain is "radically more complex." The scientists working in that field are smart people who have found it to be plenty complex.
Lesson #2: When smart authors and their critics engage in a well-moderated comment section, it can be an amazing way to learn. The commenters on the posts above are generally articulate and educated about the topics. Lehrer responds to Freed in his comment section. Nicholas Carr's post in particular features an honest and thoughtful exploration and arguing with people. To me, this supports the recent theory that people are more reasonable when they argue because human reason exists not to discover truth, but to persuade other people.
Lesson #3: You can learn a lot by reading a few good posts and comment sections, but there is still great value in subject matter expertise. In this case, as Orzel entreats us, actually read the article by the scientists who did the study in the first place. But we should also recognize that many of the sentences in that article are the result of thousands of thousands of hours of work by many experts in this field.

Oh, and also, Jonah Lehrer pretty much had it right in the first place. Which he does most of the time, in the limited amount of space he has for a newspaper column. I remain a fan.

A little postscript: Someone pointed out that I was too hard on Freed, who was gracious in engaging his commenters, and offered a good model for how a scientist reads a paper. He also pointed out that Lehrer brought up the wisdom of crowds paper as a way to join the whole "internet is making us stupid" crowd, which I agree is not true. I am not an Eagleman/Kelly/Shirky, "the internet is going to save civilization" optimist either. But I find many of the traditional journalists decrying the internet (twitter, blogs etc) mostly unconvincing. He also pointed out that this was old news (like two weeks ago!) and that there was a lot to it that I missed. So, now I am on twitter. We'll see how that goes.

Oral Culture vs. Literate Culture

2011-06-06T14:07:00.001-04:00

I've been reading The Information by James Gleick, (NYT review, exerpt) which, like most Gleick books that I have read (Chaos, Genius) is an absolute nerdgasm of science, technology, and history. But it gave me a context of thinking about Rachel's latest foray into the big time, a little kerfluffle with mostly-progressive Matt Yglesias.
In an early chapter, Gleick describes the transition from an oral culture to a literate culture, and all of the changes in human thought that came along with that transition. It was no accident that Aristotle and Plato were basically inventing logic; Gleick argues that logic wasn't supported by a culture based on oral traditions. In some anthropological studies today, he cites evidence that some recently discovered non-writing cultures do not recognize syllogisms:
All bears from the north are white.
My bear Fozzie is from the north.
What color is Fozzie?

People from pre-literate cultures will answer: I don't know, I have never seen Fonzy. Gleick lays out the case that a number of the modes of abstract thought that we now take for granted were developed only because of the advent of written words, which were two times removed from the world (they signified spoken words, which signified the world). It is a really fascinating book, and incredibly well written. I know it is thick, but I am loving it so far.

Ok, so back to Yglesias. I see modern day blogging as bringing some of the elements of oral culture back. Gleick cites Marshall McLuhan as the first to bring this up, and there is no shortage of screeds against blogging, twitter, or how google is making us stupid. To me, Yglesias' blog embodies the dual capability of this streaming mentality. On one hand, looking at his economic and political pieces, you can see a commentator reflecting on incoming news, but also accumulating specific knowledge, and applying this growing knowledge. Despite his youth, his political pieces reflect a wide reading and knowledge in politics. His financial pieces likewise reflect (and document) his growing expertise in interpreting the US economy. This is where I see one amazing benefit of the internet - it enables amazingly fast learning of specific knowledge. This goes as well for applications like twitter, which can organize communities of like-minded people, and enable sharing of information.

But Yglesias' education reporting shows the "dark side" of blogging. He is not a teacher or a parent, has not even attended any public schools, and yet he leverages his blogger credibility to write about the deficiencies of public education and benefits of a particular approach (the No Excuses model). He reads a report on KIPP and interprets it in a way that doesn't reflect any knowledge of how parenting works, how KIPP works, or even how educational research works. His recent posts on education reflect a facility and fluency with language ("labor force success," "bourgeois modes of behavior") but a lack of sophistication or knowledge when it comes to the common characteristics of public education for the poorest or lowest scoring students, the dimensions of choice for a curriculum, or even the difference between things that parents can teach through explicit instruction and the things children must learn through modeling or simply maturing. There is science for each of these, as well as some common sense through experience, Yglesias knows neither.

It is this side of blogging which I see as reflecting an oral culture. Within an oral culture, it is difficult to evaluate individual claims of a speaker, rather, we must judge the overall credibility of the speaker. Within an oral culture, it is difficult to bridge different kinds of evidence, trying to differentiate exactly what makes KIPP's approach different from that of traditional public schools. Within an oral culture, there is less emphasis on a historical approach, where people might ask, "Have people tried elements of No Excuses before? What were their results?"

The interesting thing is that blogging is not a unitary, oral culture activity. Some blogging involves deep explorations of a topic, developing a theme or a content area over time. But the kind of blogging that Yglesias does, at least in education, does not seem to match this. It is memory-less, in that he is repeating the same things that David Brooks wrote about Harlem Promise Academy two years ago, without reading any of the responses.

The role of theory in science

2011-06-02T11:45:00.002-04:00

One final thought about evolutionary psych, in the wake of the Kanazawa debacle.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to get generally smart and educated people to understand the nature of science. Despite many people's eagerness to dismiss young earth creationists as either deluded or cranks, I think their beliefs are built upon a misconception of science that is remarkably prevalent. When strongly held beliefs meet scientific evidence, the beliefs generally win.

At the end of my history of psychology course, we read Keith Stanovich's excellent "How to Think Straight About Psychology". It is an incredibly readable philosophy of science book, applied to psychology. But even at the end, I have students who I know still doubt evolution, or hold strikingly pseudoscientific or unscientific beliefs. This is not because they are stupid, or haven't studied enough, but because science is quite often counterintuitive, and in most of our school science curriculum, we don't really teach how science works as much as a large set of science facts. Not to diminish the power of facts, because you can't organize anything if there are no facts, but science is not just a series of facts.

Darwin's first writing of theory of evolution,
in 1837, 21 years before Origin was published

One main misconception of science is the relationship between theories and facts. Evolution is a theory. So is evolution as applied to psychology. What "work" do these theories do? I think a good way of looking at a theory is as a framework for past facts and a way of finding future facts. In science, we might replace facts with observations, or experiments, since observations and experiments are the root of all facts in science. So, how can we evaluate theories as good or bad? First, a theory has to explain some portion of the current set of facts. Darwin's theory explained his finches, and other animals, but it also fit in with a larger set of observations of animals of other explorers. But we can't ignore that Darwin's theory also fit with the growing set of observations in geology about the age of the earth, about dating different fossils, or even explaining coral reefs, a mystery of the time (described beautifully in Steven Johnson's "Where Good Ideas Come From". Darwin's theory was a pretty good theory for explaining the morphology and current behavior of animals from around the world. But Darwin was dubious of his own theory, and delayed publishing it for nearly 20 years. Why? Partly because he knew the conflict it would stir with religion, but also because he wanted to collect more evidence. In other words, Darwin's theory predicted future facts and observations. If species change, and in a gradual way, and this way corresponds with environmental changes, then there should be more fossils of transitional forms. This is a key part of evolutionary theory, and of any theory. You should be able to find more facts that fit into this theory. In other words, a theory should generate hypotheses.

So where does that leave us with evolutionary psychology? Well, evolution explains a great deal of human and animal biology. How does it do with psychology? I am not a big fan of many of the evolutionary and genetic accounts of intelligence, partly because they do not square with my egalitarian beliefs, but also because they may explain some facts, but they do a crappy job of predict any new ones. If the IQ gap between blacks and whites is genetic and fixed, why is there so much evidence that IQ can be changed? Why is there the Flynn effect?

While popular imagination of science hears evolutionary psych and thinks of Kanazawa, or the Bell Curve, the theories of evolutionary psychology are many and diverse. Instead of disparaging the whole field, we should try to be more like scientists ourselves, and tease apart which individual claims of a theory have merit, and which don't. Unfortunately, this often means learning more about the set of facts that the science is trying to organize, or trusting the scientists who know those facts. Too often, instead of learning more, we look down the hole and see darkness, and assume that it is shallow, instead of asking those who have dug, who had reached, who have probed and prodded, to tell us how deep it goes.

Runtime thoughts: Psychology: The Unnatural-est Science of All

2011-06-02T11:15:00.001-04:00

Two of my goals this summer are to write more and to run more. Since I don't run with headphones, it gives me a good chance to turn over some ideas in my head. Even if no one reads them, I figured regular writing here after my runs would help me get the writing juices going.

One of the main ways that I think of science is that it is an unnatural way of thinking. What does this mean? The pieces of this I have previously thought of as the collection of shortcuts and biases that human thought entails. To take just one, once we get an idea, it is very hard to dislodge, because we only search for evidence that confirms our idea. Further, when we see evidence against our beliefs, we tend to minimize or ignore this evidence. This phenomena, called the confirmation bias shows how in our mind, we fudge the difference between facts, ideas and beliefs. It also makes science really hard to do, because science is supposed to be built on both positive and negative evidence. Science, while it is a search for truth, it is done by human brains, which aren't necessarily built to search for truth, but just to search for "close enough." This makes science very hard. The history of science is littered with examples where we thought we had the truth ("we are the center of the universe!" "the earth is only 4000 years old" "The ghost of falling made that apple fall" "look at the pretty phlogiston in the fireplace") only to be revealed as quite silly in retrospect.
Recently, there was a provocative paper in a great journal called Behavioral and Brain Sciences, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber arguing that human reasoning evolved not to discover truth, but to persuade other people. The great thing about BBS is that they publish a long target article, followed by invited commentary from the community of experts. Basically the best, curated, edited comment feed in science. Of course, the bad thing about BBS is that they publish a long target article, followed by invited commentary from the community of experts, an issue is often over a hundred pages long. And, it is subscription only.
Here is an excellent summary by Chris Mooney over at Discover, and a great comment feed, with Mercier chiming in to argue with some philosophers (the puns, they make themselves!). They make sense of a number of the heuristics and biases, as well as some new experimental evidence in making this argument (too meta... I'm melting...). For me, this has interesting implications for the history and philosophy of science. Science progresses when it makes better predictions about the world (Galileo, Copernicus, Keppler, Newton ultimately won because they made more accurate predictions about the behavior of physical bodies). But human reasoning works by trying to convince other minds.
So why is psychology the most unnatural science? Because its predictions are not the behavior of falling bodies, or planets, but rather other people. If human reasoning evolved to convince the human mind, sometimes this can get in the way of understanding how the human mind works.

Introduction to the History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Part 3)

2011-05-31T21:48:00.001-04:00

For part 3, we evaluate the history of the third kind of evidence in cognitive neuroscience:
A normal subject is asked to do a task. While they are doing the task, a scientist observes their brain in action.

For many readers, this will sound like fMRI, where a person lies down in a huge machine, is instructed to think about something, or view something, and then, VOILA certain parts of their brain light up. But in fact, this kind of logic has been used for much longer than fMRI. Before I launch into a description of fMRI, let's follow the chain of evidence that gets us there. The neuron is the basic unit of the brain, across animals. Some animals have brain systems that are quite similar to human brain systems.

The neuron is the basic unit of the brain. This had to be discovered, and was once the subject of debate. While Schwann and Schleiden proposed that the cell was the basic functional unit of life in 1838, it strangely took some time for this to be applied to the brain. Advances in microscopy, and lenses allowed Purkinje to find the first neurons in 1837... Wait, what's that? Well, even though in retrospect we see that Purkinje discovered the first of many nerve cells, at the time, this was not enough evidence to counter the camp of scientists who thought the brain was fibrous tissue and not cells. Later physiologists, like Otto Dieters, whose work published after his death in 1865 documented other neurons, and Camilo Golgi, who discovered a new method of staining in 1873 and showed the world incredibly clear pictures of the brain.

But Santiago Ramon y Cajal was responsible for breaking through the doubters, by using Golgi's staining methods to show clearly the neurons in the cerebral cortex, in 1888. He shared the Nobel Prize with Golgi in 1906. Except that Golgi still though that the brain was a bunch of undifferentiated tissue, and said so in his half of the lecture, while Ramon y Cajal used his half to try to refute Golgi and show that the brain was made of individual neurons. By the way, the link above is from the blog Neurophilosophy, and is a great synthesis of this story of the discovery of the neuron.

The brains that Golgi and Ramon y Cajal were studying were animal brains, but as they discovered the fundamental unit of the neuron, others began to discover how these neurons worked. In 1921 Otto Loewi discovered that neurons transmit their messages chemically (Nobel Prize, 1936) as well as electrically.

Animals have brain systems, just like us
Why does any of this matter? Well, these discoveries (along with others, and technological development in making really small, narrow glass pipettes) allow for the possibility of recording electrical activity from a single neuron while the animal is awake or active. This allows Eric Kandel (Nobel Prize, 2000) to investigate how memory works at the cellular level, mostly by working with sea slugs (aplysia). It allows Hubel and Weisel (Nobel Prize, 1981) to investigate (using cats) how a certain pattern of light on the retina results in a certain pattern of activity in the brain. These studies are what are called single cell recordings. Basically a very small hollow-tipped needle is placed inside the brain of an animal (inside a single neuron, to record its activity) , then we ask the animal to think something, and observe what makes that particular neuron activate.

With humans, this was not possible. So human live brain scanning began with the EEG, which measured the brain's electrical activity. When a bunch of neurons fire, you can detect electricity by placing detectors on the scalp. This technology had a great advantage of being able to detect neuron's firing at the exact moment that they fired. The disadvantage was that it was not very good at telling where the neurons were firing, because it could only detect broad patterns of electricity, in general brain locations. In technical terms, we say EEG had high temporal resolution (very sensitive to time) but low spatial resolution (could not tell exactly where in the brain the activity was). But despite its lack of localization, EEG is still used today, and has given us much insight into how the brain is connected to the mind.

After EEG, PET scans were an advance, because they could tell with much more accuracy which areas of the brain were active. For PET to work, you need to be injected with radioactivity, which your blood then takes to your brain and makes it glow. When a neuron fires, it needs energy to keep firing (it is actually an electrical signal, which takes energy). It sends a message for more blood, then the blood (ooh, it glows!) gets sent to that area.

PET scans gave way to fMRI, which similarly used the blood flow as a marker, but this time, no radioactive marker. The MRI machine uses an enormous magnet to detect the magnetic fields of oxygen atoms in your blood. In fact, when your brain sends blood to a set of firing neurons, it sends too much. Most of this blood gets used. Some does not. The fMRI detects that extra blood that got sent, using the BOLD (or Blood Oxygen Level Dependent) response.

Despite the fact that fMRI has been in use for twenty years, and the basic principles remain the same, the methods of its use have changed drastically. For one example, consider the computational constraints of taking a scan of the brain. Instead of a 1.5-dimensional graph (on or off) over time for single cell recording, fMRI has full 3-dimensional data, thousands of thousands of voxels (volumetric pixels). As computing power has increased, as the power of the magnets has increased, this has yielded improvements to the techniques in fMRI, which are still imperfect, albeit convincing well beyond their actual scientific utility.

This logic, of observing a brain while the animal is in action, has been around for a long time, depending on whether you start with Galvani's frogs in 1771, or Helmholtz measuring the (non-zero speed) of neural transmission in 1852, or with Kandel's studies of the cellular basis of memory in the 1960's.

Ok, so now I am at the conclusion of my introduction, and it is probably not much better than going to Wikipedia (although after doing this, I started to edit the cognitive neuroscience Wikipedia entry). What was the point?

To return to the main point: cognitive neuroscience is not young. The connection between mind and brain has been a topic of experimental study and debate for at least 200 years. But this 200 years is not simply progress, one scientist taking another's discoveries and adding to them. Golgi and Cajal, despite making amazing contributions, disagreed on whether the brain was made of neurons, in their Nobel Prize acceptance speeches. I have not described developments in whether brain cells can change (neuroplasticity) but that was a lively topic of debate for some time too. If we look closely at the history of most sciences, we see that science progresses in fits and starts. In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, we can see how advances were tied to advances in technology (lenses, magnets, electricity) or advances in other fields (PET depends on safe radioactivity) or even tragedies (head injuries in WWI resulted in many observations). When we look at the history, we see that the history of cognitive neuroscience includes physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. In other words, despite the apparent immaturity of knowledge at every level, there is still communication and influence. Returning to the exercise that brought all this about (evaluating evolutionary psychology), I am left agreeing with another commenter on TNC's blog, it is relatively pointless to assign maturity or youth to an entire subfield. We should instead consider individual claims, and evaluate the evidence for these claims, in the context of a broad background in related scientific knowledge.

Introduction to the History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Part 2)

2011-05-30T19:57:00.001-04:00

Ok, so last post I described the first part of the history of methods in the cognitive neurosciences, when behavior goes wrong, then finding out what's wrong with the brain. For this section, I'll be discussing when we intentionally damage, or directly zap the brain. Before you get too creeped out, this has mostly (the mostly is important) been done on non-human animals. There are ethical issues with animal research, which have been noted and struggled with since the beginning of animal research. Marshall Hall, a pioneering researcher, laid out several principles in doing animal research (in 1831). These principles are pretty much in place now. How are they applied? For example, principle 4 ("Justifiable experiments should be carried out with the least possible infliction of suffering (often through the use of lower, less sentient animals") applied means that if we are studying individual neurons, we should study the simplest creature possible, whereas if we are studying, say, the visual system, we should study the "lowest" animal that is comparable to humans (in this case, the cat). All the while, we should make sure the animals are as comfortable as possible.

So, where should we begin? The first psychologist was not a psychologist at all, but a German physiologist named Gustav Fechner. Whereas Descartes thought that the brain communicated with the body through a series of tubes (that's right, Ted Stevens), Fechner demonstrated that it was electricity. Not only that, but he showed that it took time for the brain (of a frog) to communicate with its leg. It was previously thought that brain-body communication was immediate. But now, it was a very very very short amount of time. But that instant could now be measured. And Fechner, and his fellow German physiologists went about measuring the relationship between the physics in the world (like light, or sound, or electric shock) and our psychological experience of the physics. Now that each could be measured, we had a psychophysics. Fechner was born in 1801, and so most of this work was in the early and middle 1800's.

Of course, there were skeptics about the use of zapping a frog in explaining the human mind. William James himself wrote (in 1907, in On Pragmatism):

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs—especially if the frogs are decapitated—and that—on the other hand—any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings—with heads on their shoulders—must be benighted and superstitious.

But there were now neurons, and soon there would be neurons working together. Donald Hebb, and much later, Eric Kandel, began to discover the way, at the cellular level, that neurons communicate and remember. As the decades went by, different animals (from sea slugs, to cats, to, in very rare cases, monkeys) had different parts of their brains surgically changed, and their behavior was recorded. A map of the brain was beginning to emerge.

I'll mention a few more cases of changing the brain, then observing behavior. The first was an experimental surgery to relieve extreme epilepsy. It was 1953, and 27-year-old Henry Moliason was referred to a reckless doctor named William Beecher Scoville. Henry's epilepsy was localized to a structure in his brain located in the middle of his temporal lobes, on the side, tucked underneath. Scoville removed an entire section of his brain around this area, and thereby improved Henry's epilepsy. After recovery, Henry could see, hear, walk, talk, breathe, eat and drink just fine. But he needed to be institutionalized for the rest of his life. Why? Because Scoville unwittingly removed Henry's ability to make new memories. Someone could go into Henry's room, meet him, leave, wait a minute, then reenter and meet Henry again. For Henry, it would be "for the first time". Later studies showed that Henry could learn new skills, but would never remember having practiced them, so the memory damaged seemed to be only his conscious, or explicit memory.

In the past decade a new technology has allowed us to selectively "damage" human brains, but only temporarily. Imagine applying a little shot of anesthesia and paralysis to a certain small group of neurons and seeing what happens. This is exactly (ok, not exactly, but close enough) what transcranial magnetic stimulation is able to do. Zap Broca's area with a targeted magnetic field, whammo, you can't talk. For a few minutes. Then you are fine.

While Henry Moliason (or Patient HM, as he was known for most of his life in the memory literature) was a uniquely tragic, yet informative patient, for over a hundred years, cognitive neuroscientists have been changing the brains of animals and observing and recording the ensuring behavior. This has given us tremendous insight into how the mind and brain are linked, from organization of the visual system, to different memory systems, to systems of how our brains control our muscles. With the progression of technology to TMS, we are now able to very selectively "damage" human brains, and observe the associated behavior. But this is built on an increasingly detailed map of the brain, which in turn was surveyed using thousands of human and animal studies.

Introduction to the History of Cognitive Neuroscience

2011-05-30T13:08:00.001-04:00

Recently, spurred on by the Kanazawa business, Ta-Nehisi Coates asked about Evo psych in general in one of his special "Talk to Me Like I'm Stupid" sessions. This spurred on a lively discussion (mostly piling on about how terrible it is) but led down an interesting road, when a commenter named neocortex noted that evo psych makes its claims on the connection between evolution and the brain, based on our limited understanding of the link between brain and behavior. She urged everyone to consider that cognitive neuroscience is still very young as a field, and therefore evo psych is necessarily built on a shaky foundation. Several (besides me) other people disagreed with the metaphor of "foundations" for different levels of explanation (you can explain atoms, molecules, neurons, brains, behavior). But I have continued to think about this, because some of the misconceptions shared by neocortex and others (her comment was later elevated by Coates, and commended as excellent) get at a fundamental misconception of a lot of science, but psychology is often a victim of this "we don't know anything" attitude. I think what most disturbed me was a seemingly small error in words, which is a linchpin in my argument against her point of view.

Here is the quote:

Disciplines like functional neuroimaging (which shows us how different thoughts and actions activate different brain regions) have only been around for a couple of decades or less

Look at my beautiful brain!

What's wrong? Functional neuroimaging is not a discipline, but a tool. The discipline she is speaking of is cognitive neuroscience, but she acts as if the tool is the discipline. We don't say that biology is only as old as the electron microscope or that physics is only as old as the supercollider, but yet this statement passes for truth, even from someone who has extensive undergraduate experience in neuroscience. Interestingly, increasing knowledge in a certain field can sometimes lead new learners to conclude that there are so many questions left as to render the current state of knowledge tiny in comparison.
I think we can understand a lot about the nature of science by studying the history of science, and distinguishing questions from tools, so here is my contribution to correcting that misconception.

The field of cognitive neuroscience is actually quite old. What is the connection between our biology and our thoughts? How does our brain create our mind? This question has been around longer than any consensus that our brain does create our mind, to the very beginning of biology itself. And scientific reasoning (however basic) has been used from the start.

We start with Aristotle, who thought that the brain was responsible for cooling the blood, while the heart was the seat of reason. Why? One can survive a blow to the head, but not to the heart. The heart must be more important for conscious thought.
Of course, he was wrong, but his logic was impeccable, and forms one third of the logic of modern cognitive neuroscience.
There are three basic ways that cognitive neuroscience gains knowledge about the brain. This is not the only way of classifying the logic of cognitive neuroscience, but it nicely draws attention to the history of evidence in cognitive neuroscience.

1) We observe a change in behavior, due to known injury or biological disease . We classify this behavior. Then, we figure out where, and how, their brain injury (or disease) correlates to their behavior. In this case, the behavior is known first (think, memory problems in Alzheimers, or amnesia after an accident) then later the biological basis is described. I will discuss this part today, and continue with the others tomorrow.

2) A known part of the brain is either injured or stimulated (on purpose). In this case, we know the part of the brain injured (technical term: lesioned) and then we observe the corresponding behavior change.

3) A normal subject is asked to do a task. While they are doing the task, a scientist observes their brain.

We combine these techniques, inherently "connnective" with basic psychology (a pure psychological task, with psychological measure) and basic neuroscience (dissection and staining of brain cells, for example), which each can be quite insightful in cognitive neuroscience.

So, what is the history of these techniques? People have been getting whacks to the head forever, and doctors have been investigating them forever, but a few important patients form the beginning of modern cognitive neuroscience for a few reasons. First, for most of human history, weapons have been high on large blunt force, and low on damage to a specific area. Our ability to gather evidence on what brain area does what (and all of neuroscience is not only what brain _area_ does what, but more on that later) using people who have brain damage is dependent on how big that damage is. Further, the issues of drainage and infection made most head injuries fatal in the short term, if not immediately. I think you could make the case that the first important case in the history of neuroscience was as much to do with gunpowder and the germ theory of disease as anything else.

The comb-over covers his brain!

Phineas Gage (the wikipedia page on him is actually excellent) was a foreman building the railroad in Vermont. When the railroads needed to blow up a mountain, they:
1) Dug a deep hole, down to the hard rock
2) Poured some gunpowder in it and set a fuse
3) Filled the hole back up with sand
4) Tamped down the dirt with a long iron rod
5) Light the fuse
6) Run away

This is a dangerous activity. And don't skip step 3. Be very careful that you don't skip step 3, because banging an iron rod directly on gunpowder, with hard rock below, tends to make sparks. Which gunpowder likes. A LOT.
So, poor Phineas skipped step 3, was looking to the side and thought the dirt was in. And the iron pod he was tamping flew up the hole, hit him right under the chin, and flew out the top of his head, taking a big chunk of his brain with it.
But Phineas walked to the hospital, and was "ok" the next day. His personality seemed to change, and he wasn't very good at making decisions, but that was about it.

Let's stop. Do we know what the frontal lobe does? No. And this is just one brain. Just one Phineas. And we don't really know exactly what the damage was, or exactly how much his behavior changed. But it starts to give us pretty good evidence that this part of the brain (or at least that part that got blew out) isn't important for walking or talking or breathing. It establishes some boundaries.

Ok, next stop, Tan. Tan was a patient who could only say Tan. But his doctor noticed that he could also walk, and breathe. Just not talk. Tan did not have a brain injury, but a brain disease. His doctor, Paul Broca, hypothesized that his ability to produce language was disrupted, but his ability to comprehend language was spared. Tan could follow simple directions. When Tan died, Broca did an autopsy and found damage to the brain on a certain part of the left side of his cerebral cortex. Unlike Phineas, Tan was not unique. Broca was a specialist in aphasias, people who had difficulties with language. He had a large set of patients with language problems, and a lot of them who had problems producing language had damage to that area, whether by syphilis (which was Tan's disease) or by gunshot wound.

Another doctor, named Karl Wernicke, had many other patients, who seemed to have no trouble producing speech, but could not understand it. At autopsy, these patients also had damage to the left side of their cerebral cortex, but in a different place than Broca's patients.

Phineas Gage had his accident in 1848, and died 12 years later.
Tan died in 1861.
Wernicke described his group of patients in the 1870's

So, by the time the 1870's are up, we have one famous patient, and several groups of patients, all attesting to a pattern of behavior that correlates to certain kinds of brain damage. This work continues, with people having strokes, getting gunshot wounds in war, and advanced stages of certain diseases. They start to give us a picture of certain brain areas being responsible for certain tasks and behaviors. This has been going on for at least 150 years. What has happened in this time? Similar logic, but we have improved our ability to detect the damage, and describe the behavior. Detecting the damage (in chronological order), with x-rays (1895), PET scans (1961), CT scans (1972), and MRI scans (1977). The scanning technology above only describes anatomical structure (and damage), not brain activity. We'll have to wait for a little until I describe techniques to scan brain activity. Our ability to describe the behavior has also improved, with millisecond timers, or with behavioral technique such as Gazzaniga and Sperry's split brain studies, or the different kinds of standardized neurological exams.

So, what I have described above is one main class of evidence for the connection between brain and behavior. Of course, we are not "there yet" (because there is no "there" there). But at each stage, there is mounting support for a general hypothesis ("Certain areas of the brain serve highly specialized functions") as well as mounting support for individual hypotheses ("The left posterior inferior frontal gyrus is important for processing and producing grammar").

Tomorrow, the second kind of evidence: intentional brain damage or stimulation.

Spatial Navigation for MightBeLying

2011-05-25T20:36:00.001-04:00

Over at TNC's blog, there was a big discussion about evolutionary psych, which bled into me defending cognitive psych as a real science not dependent on neuroscience. I volunteered to try to explain the links between cognition and neuroscience for any given topic. Here is my response to the first brave soul to shout: spatial navigation:

Ok, first, with a little bit of an intro.

Insight into how the mind and brain work, and how our conscious experience and behavior map onto the biology can be found in several main ways:

1) Extirpation: Damaging the brain of an animal and seeing what happens. This has been happening for a very long time. Rats do spatial navigation. Rats have brains. Understanding an animal model can help. Of course, you have to map the rat brain to the human brain, which is tricky. But not impossible.

2) Clinical method: Someone gets brain damage, then we figure out how it affects their behavior, and relate it to the brain damage. In general, relating behavior, or experience, to some sort of activity (or lack of activity) in the brain. Some fMRI falls into this category.

3) Electrical stimulation: Again, mostly with animals, but not entirely. Direct stimulation of the brain, then seeing what happens to behavior.

Let's start back with the demise of Skinnerian behaviorism. Skinner and his adherents did rely on rats to do many experiments, but they believed that rats learn responses to stimuli, nothing else. In other words, there is no need to talk about spatial navigation in the rat (or in the human), there is only a set of responses to a set of environmental situations.

Edward Tolman, who investigated rats in mazes, started coming up with evidence that rats have mental maps. This was kind of a big deal (in 1948). It means that we have to investigate what the shapes of those maps are, and we have to open the black box of the brain. … and a lot of stuff happens, and we now have models where a certain kind of damage to the rat hippocampus, in a certain place, lead to a certain pattern of them being lost, or forgetting, or being unable to learn new mazes.

So, given that rats have maps in the brain, of course we do too. So what kinds of maps do we have in our brain? How does the software relate to the hardware?

Well, one snarky way of summarizing 50 years of cognitive psychology research is that rats are smart and people are dumb. So, we suck at spatial navigation, especially compared to a lot of our animal cousins. We navigate with vision, not with smell, like salmon, or super-vision, like desert ants (not to be confused with dessert ants). And the way that we navigate with vision (and memory) utilizes shortcuts and biases. We regularize, impose a pattern when there isn’t one, make things line up north south, or east west. Many people think that Reno is east of San Diego (it isn’t) because we don’t really have an accurate map in our heads, we have a map biased by some easy to remember rules (California is west of Nevada).

Ok, the neuroscience side: hippocampus seems important. You mess with rat hippocampus, you mess with their navigation. With brain scanning, we can look at people’s hippocampi. One famous study imaged the brains of London cab drivers at different stages of their careers. The amount of experience was related to the amount of knowledge, was related to the size of a particular part of their hippocampus.

Of course, spatial navigation can't be understood in a vacuum, because it involves perception and memory (at least), both in behavior, as well as networks of brain areas. It is not quite right to say that memory (or spatial navigation) happens in the hippocampus, and that perception happens in the back of your brain (occipital cortex), but it isn’t as wrong as the phrenology of the past. We are not, for example, going to realize that we’ve been totally wrong, and that vision happens in the front of the brain, not the back, and that language areas are actually buried under everything in the midbrain. But we may discover that the way we have been thinking about the hippocampus is slightly wrong, in that it is a critical part of the memory circuit, not the place where memory happens.

Or you could read people who know much more than me, put it in a much better, clearer, and more organized fashion:

http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~bt/space/index.html">Barbara Tversky at Stanford. This is a http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~bt/space/papers/levelsstructure.pdf">
more comprehensible paper for the layperson, at least the first few pages.

http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/mcnamaralab/mcnamaralab/currentprojects">Tim McNamara at Vanderbilt:

Or do some of the reading for this course : http://cogs200.pbworks.com/w/page/10991738/FrontPage

Just taking a look at this course should tell you that, within one course, you can see the work being done from the level of neurochemistry within neurons, to single neurons, to brain structures, to behavior. All complementing each other, filling in gaps, mutually dependent.

Ok, that was not very well organized, but it gives a taste of what the research on spatial navigation looks like. It involves cells, brain areas, brains, bees, salmon, rats, London cabbies and regular people. Not all of it converges on a great explanation for how exactly spatial navigation works in all brains, or even in our brain. But we know more than we did twenty years ago.

Some thoughts about educational games for the iPad

2011-05-17T17:39:00.001-04:00

One of the reasons I treated myself to an iPad last year was that I saw great potential for educational (and fun) games for kids. I was hoping we could further delay getting a Wii or DS or other console, and nudge the kids into some educational games to boot.
I have been pleased so far, but of course the games are mixed. I thought I would share some thoughts about different kinds (and qualities) of educational games, using a few examples as case studies.

My favorite pair of educational games for the iPad is the Stack the States (and Countries) games.
The game works like this: You answer trivia questions about the states, when you get an answer right, you get to stack the states. Once you reach a certain line, you are awarded a state on your map. The gameplay is a simple physics/puzzle game, where you have to figure out how the shapes fit together, and balance them to reach the line.
Why am I a fan? First, it is pretty fun. The physics-based puzzle gameplay is challenging in a simple video game way.
The second reason that I like it is that it does a good job mapping the relevant dimensions of gameplay map onto good educational dimensions. What the heck does that mean? Instead of just being a glorified trivia game, where you get points for answering questions right, the stacking task integrates relevant state facts into the game itself. In this specific case, you naturally learn the shapes and sizes of the states as you do the stacking. I bet a few hours of playing this game, and kids could do a pretty good job sorting states from smallest to biggest, without even trying to memorize this.
For improvement, I would love a difficulty setting for the trivia questions, which are fairly limited right now. But for a 3.00 purchase, I have gotten more than my money's worth. I highly recommend it.

Another game, which don't like as much, but still ok, (and is typical educational software fare) is called Math Ninja.
This is a very simple arcade shoot-em up, where you answer math questions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) in between rounds of shooting evil robot cats and dogs. This game follows the model of bribing kids to do math drills by interpersing them with a video game. I am not totally against this approach (and this game is a pretty good execution, you don't just get points, but you unlock weapons by answering more questions quickly). Sometimes you just need to practice, and drill, and math facts are a likely candidate. I am ok with bribing my kids to memorize the times tables just so long as that doesn't become how they think of all math.

Anyways, those are a few quick thoughts. Any other iPad educational game recommendations out there? The boys have discovered the periodic table of elements, thanks to They Might Be Giants. I wonder if there is a game to be made from that?

A "Remarkable" history of science book

2011-01-28T20:48:00.000-05:00

A month ago, I finished "Remarkable Creatures" by Sean Carroll (biologist Sean Carroll, not physicist Sean Carroll). It was a wonderful review of all of the scientists who have contributed to our evolving understanding of ... animal evolution. Beginning with Darwin and Wallace, this book relates the tales of these explorers and adventurers, some leaving behind promising medical careers to go fossil hunting in the dangerous jungles, deserts and remote places on our planet. But there was something relatively unique to this book, among the many many other excellent books on history of science that I have read. This book managed to be an incredibly effective history of the ideas of science, by not letting itself be drawn in by the powerful personalities who were doing the science.
To this end, this book showed a side of science that many books written for a popular audience fail to do. Despite the fact that it doesn't make nearly as compelling a story, Darwin didn't "prove" evolution to be "true." Neither did Wallace, nor did Eugene Dubois (who found Java Man) nor did Roy Chapman Andrews, who found some of the first skulls of the earliest mammals. In this book, Carroll is able to show how tentative and gradual scientific "revolutions" really are, without seeming wishy washy and "we don't know anything for certain". No one scientist acts alone to prove a theory to be true, but all of their findings, taken together, begin to bring a picture into focus, or begin to assemble the pieces to a puzzle. Some pieces are more important than others, but no single one stands alone.
How does he do this? By making the structure of the book follow the puzzle of science, rather than merely the personalities, or even the chronology. He doesn't begin with Darwin, but rather we are reminded that the question of the origin of species didn't start with Darwin by a prologue about the prolific naturalist Alexander Humboldt, whose books were the only ones that Darwin took with him on the Beagle, and indeed, those which inspired Darwin to be a scientist. These books, even with the knowledge contained in them, also suggested the gaps that existed. These led Darwin to his adventures and to his theory of natural selection, which had been germinating for quite some time. He knew how controversial this would be, so he kept his book under wraps for ten years, until he got word from Alfred Russell Wallace asking him for advice on a nearly identical theory. But another reason that he kept this under wraps, is that he didn't exactly have all the evidence that he wanted. The fossil evidence just wasn't there.
Which leads us to the next step in the journey, as scientists and explorers take up this challenge, each finding suggesting a new avenue of research, another gap. There is no missing link, because each time you find one it shows you that the chain is bigger than you thought, and that there are more gaps than you thought. Each found "missing" link comes with evidence of another.
Carroll manages to infuse his book with this logic, without hitting you over the head with it. We are amazed to learn the human stories of the incredible cast of characters. But the main character of the book, the driver of the narrative, is the scientific problem of where species come from, and how they change. This is as it should be in a history of science, but it happens all too rarely.

The Web as a Consulting Company

2011-01-11T21:49:00.002-05:00

I read a really interesting and provocative essay about the web a few days ago that has really stuck with me. I thought I'd share it with my five loyal readers, and ask what they thought.

Here is the essay: The Web is a Customer Service Medium, by Paul Ford

I think it is worth reading the whole thing, but here is a snippet:

I like to think about media in terms of questions answered.

Here's one question: “I'm bored, and I want to get out of the house and have an experience, possibly involving elves or bombs. Where do I go?”

The answer: You could go to a movie.

Here's another: “How do I distract myself without leaving the house?”

You might turn on the TV.

“I'm driving, or making dinner. How do I make a mundane thing like that more interesting?”

Radio! Especially NPR or talk radio.

“What's going on locally and in the world, at length?”

Try this newspaper!

A medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.

For Ford, the fundamental question of the web is "Why Wasn't I Consulted?"

(I should also mention, it is worth reading the comments at the metafilter post on this, where the founders/moderators talk a bit more about their philosophies. There is also a great story about Craig Newmark, of craigslist)

This struck a chord in me, and I couldn't help but look at pretty much all of my Internet activity, from my recent (too extensive) comments on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog or elsewhere at the Atlantic, or at Inside Higher Ed, or even this blog, seems to answer this question. And it bugs me, that even when I feel I have added value to this world, it was often coming from a place of "Hey I have knowledge of this issue, why hasn't anyone asked for my important opinion?"

I have lately been putting a lot of time and energy into the TNC blog, because, I tell myself, it is such an amazing community of commenters, and because Coates himself is eloquent and sophisticated about so many of the things I care about. Really, how many blogs have great posts on hip hop, history of race and the civil war, Michelle Rhee, data on high school drug use, and a guest post by Michael Chabon... about hip hop?). But what I had previously neglected was how much I enjoy feeling "consulted" by this group of people, and even Coates himself. It is such a thrill for me to be engaged by a writer whose work I respect, and a community of people whose opinions I respect.

But it has a dark side. In search of responses, and, to a lesser degree, of "likes," I find my comments drifting towards a certain side of my personality, nitpicking and finding disagreement wherever possible. I find my tone nudged, as if by some unseen force, into patronizing and pretentious lecturing. I no doubt have this in me, but it bothers me to see it come out in public forum. But I can't stop, given that even this pretentious lecturer gets responded to, engaged, paid attention to, in this web community. My intellectual diatribes (78 likes!) give me enough intoxicating approval that it keeps me coming back. But as I step back, it disturbs me. I am not on the whole "google is making us stupid" train, but I do believe that different media encourage different kinds of relating, and even when I find a great match for my interests (hip-hop AND Dungeon Dragons AND education AND history?) it encourages certain kinds of expression at the cost of others.

Maybe it is the contrast that this provides with my daily life of college students, many of whom regard their classes, especially science class, as times to receive knowledge, rather than question it, engage the thinkers, or challenge me. I am still trying to work out a way to talk about the evolution of the eye so that a few of them feel safe enough to challenge me. Or talk about the science of their emotion, or memory to convince them to think about changing just a small bit of their lives. But in person, I am so consciously aware of not offending, of carefully building a trusting and safe place for intellectual inquiry. Ok, there is still some pretentious lecturing (I am a professor, after all) but my oppositional web self is replaced with a conciliatory discussion leader, trying not to say, "Umm, no, that is wrong, as it says here? On the first page of the reading?" and instead "That is a really interesting observation, and a common misconception, you are not alone in making that judgment."

So here is a resolution of sorts. To create my own work, then to consult others, risking the wrath of criticism, or worse, apathy, instead of taking those ample opportunities to offer my consultation to those who didn't really ask for it. And maybe, try harder to convince a few 18-year-olds to speak up and let their own long-buried curiosity express itself, instead of writing comments as if I am speaking to a nation of 18-year-olds, whose desire to be consulted never has any problem being expressed.

Why I care about the difference, and dependence, between facts and skill

2011-01-06T22:24:00.000-05:00

Lately I have found myself drawn into commenting on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog over at the Atlantic. For a regular columnist, I find him a sophisticated commentator on issues of race, class and American history, as well as a writer whose prose is a joy to read. But what really drew me in was the other commenters on the blog, who can range from an interesting conservative construction worker from Baltimore, to a former teacher/ current boat builder to hyperliterate out-of-work librarians and former teachers. In other words, kindred spirits. During a few recent posts (one on the Huck Finn controversy), I found myself ranting about something that most there seemed to feel was tangential to the issues at play; the fact that skills are based on a rich knowledge of facts. But it got me thinking about why I care so much about cognitive psychological distinctions that few people seem to care about. My answer is that the fallacies I rail against are the foundation of much of modern day education reform, and have an impact on even poor old Mark Twain.

What is the relationship between facts and skills? Many people believe that we need basic cognitive skills to learn things. In other words, the skills come before the facts. For example, you need basic reading skills to appreciate literature, learn more history. You need basic math skills like adding, subtracting, etc to move up to algebra and geometry. You need critical thinking skills to evaluate scientific findings. While this view makes sense to many of us, who know how to read, and know basic math, as we imagine that the rest of the things that we know are dependent on our basic reading and math skills.

This view is wrong.

What we think of as academic skills are based on a rich foundation of background knowledge. We think of all of these facts as furniture, decorating a structure held up by strong skills, but it is exactly the opposite. Rich content knowledge makes skills possible, not the other way around. People certainly had rich amounts of knowledge before the widespread use of the printing press, much of it was not gained through reading. Kids manage to learn incredible amounts of information before they can read. But we take all of this knowledge for granted, because we have forgotten that we even needed to learn it. At one point in your life, the meaning of the word “banana” was a fact that you had just learned. At another point, the word “forget” or “moment” or “count” or “knowledge.” We have forgotten those moments, so we don’t realize these things are memory; we don’t count them as knowledge. Obviously the previous sentence would be gibberish without the vocabulary that I just mentioned. In addition, without “forget, moment, count or knowledge” you wouldn’t start to learn the new words of “realize” and “memory.” Facts let you learn more facts.

I was reminded of the importance of background knowledge as my boys were learning to read. Caleb was having trouble decoding (going from the groups of letters to the sounds they make) and testing behind in reading. But at the same time, we were reading to him, he was surrounded by picture books, and he enjoyed narratives and learning new things, whether they be the difference between types of camels (“the dwomadawy has one hump, but the Bactwian has two, and is from Mongolia, dad”) or the difference between a town, a city, a state, a county, a country, and a continent. While he took a little bit longer than others to be able to decode, Caleb’s reading “skills” have now miraculously vaulted forward. The point (other than to brag about my kid) is that he was never really behind. He had a rich background of facts, of building materials, and was held up just briefly waiting (well, actually working hard with the help of dedicated teachers) for decoding to happen. I don’t mean to minimize the fantastic job they did at his school with helping kids who have trouble reading, or the hard work that Caleb put in, but decoding happens. It takes longer for some kids than others, and it is no small thing to teach, but it does happen. And when it does, because most of us who know how to read as adults can decode just fine, the foundation for learning more is not our decoding skills, but our background knowledge. My colleague Dan Willingham has a great post about this, interpreting some test scores showing how our performance relative to other countries is lower in high school. The point is that it is lower in high school precisely because we are hammering on decoding and forgetting about the rich content knowledge. While the emphasis on skills is prevalent in elementary school, its effects are felt in high school, and in college too. One of my colleagues told a heartbreaking story recently, in which a student came up to her during a final and asked what the word “cumulative” meant. This student did not need more basic reading skills. He needed more facts. And he needed them in middle school, when he was busy being drilled for the SOL's.

This is an example for reading, but it is equally true for “critical thinking,” even in college. We would love to have the general ability to dissect a problem, analyze its parts, and evaluate its solutions. But such a skill does not exist. I can do that fairly well with a psychology experiment (ok, maybe a cognitive psychology experiment, ok, maybe a visual perception experiment), but if I am evaluating the politics in Iran, or a medical diagnosis, or a book on the history of physics, I am kidding myself if I don’t realize that I am an amateur (and to the extent that I am an advanced amateur, it is because of extensive amateur reading I have done on medical diagnoses, or the history of physics). Skills are generally a lot more domain restricted than we would like to think.

I have written here about how this leads people to propose silly redesigns of the college curriculum, with classes on “7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College,” one of which was applied cognition (“the neuroscience you need”). All of those skills are dependent on background knowledge. Other people propose that we just teach kids “how to search” and “how to evaluate online sources” and then they don’t need to know any facts because they know how to find whatever they need. Unfortunately, this is not a skill. Knowing how to parse google search listings for the right links, or peruse Wikipedia and actually learn something while avoiding the controversial or unsupported errors is a skill that is dependent on content-specific knowledge.

What is the best way to acquire facts? Reading lots of books. That’s it. Being interested in stuff, and reading about it. Somehow our educational system has forgotten this. If a student gets interested in Star Wars, or furniture design, or spiderman, or environmental law, or drug policy, give them a few books, and let them go to town. Of course, we should have an idea of what we think they will find interesting, and give them some of that too (race in America? Social psychology? Autism?). But their patience with our books will wane if we keep telling them to put theirs down.

Which brings me to the basis of education reform, and the furor over Huck Finn. Many education reform arguments go like this:

1)American education is failing our students, and we are falling behind our international competitors.

This statement is often made based on international tests, such as the PISA, or the lack of improvement on our own standardized tests such as the NAEP. These tests are most often of basic reading and math. It often goes unchallenged that these are reflective of the rest of our education system.

2) To catch up, we need to catch up on these tests (or, if our reforms cause us to catch up, we would notice it on these tests).

This has two meanings. First, we need to narrow the “achievement gap.” What the achievement gap most often means is that performance of poor, urban (mostly black and Hispanic) students is below performance of white and wealthy students on these tests of basic skills. This often leads to the well intentioned effort to work these poor children harder (more test prep drilling, school on Saturdays, no recess) so that they can catch up on these tests. This approach has not been a resounding success.

The second is that we need to narrow the gap between the US and other countries on these basic skills. For this, the logic is somehow that to remain economically competitive, we must be educationally competitive. Yet if we look at the innovations that have kept the American economy strong over the past 50 years, they are not the amazing basic skills of the workforce, but the amazing creativity of a relatively small group of Americans. This creativity has occurred with the aid of different sorts of programs. Malcolm Gladwell outlines how Bill Gates was able to access a computer very early on in his education.

3) The best way to catch up is to increase accountability and teacher quality

Accountability measures have taken the accountability out of the local hands (principals) and urged greater standardization. To have standardized accountability, you must rely on a measure everyone agrees matters. Enter tests of basic skills. Principals and teachers, railroaded by the particular kind of standardized accountability instituted by reformers, drop everything and do more test prep.

Which leads them to drop books from the curriculum, because who has time to read a book when you need to boost your test scores ten points or lose your job, or get your school closed? And so, yes, Huck Finn has always been censored, and always been controversial. But teachers have been teaching it. But teachers are just exhausted from dealing with the pressure to raise test scores, who has the time and energy to deal with trying to explain to teenagers the complex motives of Huck Finn, and the satirical wit of Mark Twain?

In the end, we have the paradox that our students spend a lot more time practicing these basic skills and less time learning facts, when the time comes to actually show that they have these skills, they don't perform well because they have no background knowledge, not to mention not much interest, because in our mad dash for skills, and accountability and performance, we stopped asking them what they were interested in.

Ripley's Believe It or Believe It

2010-11-12T14:31:00.000-05:00

Amanda Ripley has an article in the Atlantic about comparing individual states to international test scores
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/your-child-left-behind/8310/

Given that the Atlantic seems to be publishing a few sophisticated pieces on education, I read it with higher expectations. In cases like these, that makes me even more angry when the reporters use all the trappings of scientific writing (the language, the graphs) but none of the logic that separates science from pseudoscience and ideology. I know there is not that much sense to this, but I am personally less disturbed by Jenny McCarthy, or Oprah, or Jerry Falwell, than by Ripley in this garbage masquerading as social science research. The first group openly attacks the authority of science (and even logic) from outside in the favor or mysticism or religion, whereas the second steals my language, borrows what little legitimacy social science research has, writes "better sampling techniques" and "correlates," and utterly fails to make a logical argument.

Basically, the premise is that even if we separate our high achieving kids, (like, white kids from Massachusetts) they are still middling in the international rankings on (math) tests. The (barely) unstated conclusion: Our education system is failing everyone, not just the poor kids. But yeah, there is diversity in the states, and some states do a lot better than others. For example, Massachusetts seems to be doing better. Ripley answers why in one short paragraph, and then goes on to speculate what to do next.

Here's my comment in response:

It is worth emphasizing here that Massachusetts' reforms are not what NCLB and RTT are instituting nationwide (did they need to kill their teacher's union, which seems to the Manifesto-writers as the necessary first step?). Their success depends exactly on resisting the "clumsiness" of NCLB and RTT, as well as the clumsy logic in this article.
The short paragraph devoted to what works in Massachusetts (literacy test for teachers, test of students to get out of high school, "moving money around") is in itself a clumsy and simplistic view of reform. The paragraph describes two very specific outcome measures (a literacy test, rather than a credential, a single comprehensive test for students) and one vague input measure ("move money around where it is needed"). Then concludes that "meaningful outcome measures are necessary." What makes a meaningful outcome measure? What makes the "moving money around" successful? What makes Massachusetts' test a model of student accountability, but the NY Regents exam such an apparent failure?

Part of the problem with the debate over education policy is that even the most sophisticated journalists (and Ripley is among them) take these complicated findings and butcher them in the search of a coherent narrative. There are lots of tests, they might not be comparable? Wave your hands a little, "other countries are now more inclusive, better sampling techniques" voila: apples to apples. What, it is hard to compare across languages and cultures for content areas and science? Well, math is convenient, and math is a better predictor of future earnings anyways... voila: let's just use math scores and say it is the best indicator.
The problem with this approach (and it is Hanushek's too) is that when we make choices of factors and indicators that matter relatively _more_, this approach urges us to throw away the other choice. Teachers matter most? So let's forget about poverty. Teacher credentials don't matter? Then neither does experience. Reduced class size doesn't immediately solve our problems? Stop throwing money at that problem then.

Reporters need to stop taking Hanushek's (quiet, gentle) word for it and actually question his logic. They will find it to be quite ideological, and not bound by his data. There is a lot of sophisticated hand waving, but it masks an ideological agenda not based on the data. A simple understanding of what an effect size is, what portion of variance explained means, and basic economic (and psychological) research methods would help journalists be more skeptical of listening to "that guy you go to for What's the other side of the story?" This sort of false equivalency is what makes many scientists hate the majority of science reporting, and social science reporting (which is what this is) is no exception.

Liberal Arts 2.0! New! Improved! Unbiased and free of any knowledge of Liberal Arts 1.0!

2010-10-18T22:52:00.000-04:00

Permit me a little grumpiness and snark. Pieces like this recent one in Wired, 7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn In College (look, now with list-power, and SEO-bait!) drive me a little crazy. They are part of a recent trend in some corners of the smart set to suppose that college needs a complete reinvention. Look, the New Liberal Arts. These starry-eyed future watchers operate under the very old assumption that higher education is outdated, outmoded and not preparing our students for their lives in the future. I am a big fan of Kottke.org, one of the seed beds of this idea, and I am generally sympathetic to the idea that higher education needs to take the modern world into account, but journalistic forays into telling higher education how to do its job don't sit well with me.
Rather than provocative prognosticating about jobs or skills of the future, this strikes me as a few journalists and social media mavens looking at the world of education (actually, introspecting at their memory of life as a student) and supposing that they have a better idea of how to organize it. Many academics give a lot of thought to what a liberal arts education means in the modern world, and most try to design their classes to be interesting and applicable to their students lives. There are arguments within the academic community (for example, around Mark Taylor's provocative proposal to "End the University as We Know It" and Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus' book review) that are worth having, and many informed voices weigh in. Simply ignoring those and saying "It's the 21st Century, knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, or calculate the slope of a tangent isn't enough anymore," doesn't serve anybody. I'll outline what in particular bothers me about this article below, but these concerns also apply to some of the other recent criticisms of higher education curricula.

First, the "skills" offered by these "out-of-the-box" thinkers achieve their apparent novelty by simply being overly broad or overly narrow conceptions of current skills and knowledge. It would no doubt be totally awesome to be skilled at "Finding" (an actual chapter in this book) just as it would be awesome to be the hitchhiking fingersmith from Roald Dahl's Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six more. Unfortunately, in the real world, magicians have to learn every trick that they do independently, musicians have to learn each instrument, and I can beat the best squash player in the world in ping pong (or at least I could in college). Because even the skill of "hitting a small ball with a racquet" is too general.

However, just because magicians have to learn each trick separately, does not mean that there aren't some general rules and principles (Like Penn and Teller's Principles of Sleight of Hand). For example, in any given introductory composition class, or in most writing classes across the curriculum, one learns rules of expressing oneself clearly and directly... or ... Writing classes teach you how to write. You don't need a separate class on "Brevity" or "Writing for New Forms" (Wired Skill #6). Take a non-fiction writing class, take a creative writing class, take a poetry class, they will put you on your way to making your tweets and your blog posts clear, direct, and interesting.

Second, all of the wonder at the networked world can make us lose sight of the fact that most knowledge has a structure. Knowledge is not a stream to be poured into a waiting mind, but rather, a building to be constructed. To teach my students about how the eye works, I need to first teach them a little bit about the nature of light. And how neural transmission works, and how the two lenses of the eye bend light. To understand how the brain works, it helps to know what the amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate gyrus, basal ganglia, etc are. We have prerequisites in the college curriculum not just to limit class size, but because it is the nature of certain knowledge to be dependent on other knowledge. We might desire to jump right into "Applied Cognition," or an interdisciplinary program about "Water" (one suggestion from Taylor's op-ed), but it makes little sense to talk about water systems engineering without some knowledge of basic principles of physics and engineering. It makes little sense to talk about Applied Cognition without any knowledge of how and why psychology is a science, and some background facts of cognitive psychology.

Here are a few point-by-point take-downs

Wired Skill #1: Statistical Literacy
(Quotes from the original Wired article are indented)

Why take this course? We are misled by numbers and our misunderstanding of probability.

What will you learn? How to parse polls, play the odds, and embrace uncertainty.

Hey, guess what, we've got that. You may have missed it, because it is called Statistics. Statistics literacy is also offered in the Psychology Department and called Research Methods and Statistics. It is also offered in the Sociology, Political Science, and Economics departments, where it can be called Research Methods. Make no mistake, it is offering statistical literacy, albeit for that discipline. Many of these courses use Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics, or one of the other books mentioned. But actually, one of the best ways to get statistics knowledge and skills is to have a teacher skilled in statistics, design assignments and activities for students with your background knowledge, and goals. Sometimes an experienced teacher will combine their expertise in the subject matter and their experience with how students learn the topics, and write a textbook (how terribly 20th century of them! Why don't they just do a wiki?). Some of these textbooks are fantastic ways to learn about the subject (yes, some of them suck, but that is mostly because it is really hard to write a textbook, not because it is made of paper, and ruled by evil publishing companies)

We use only 10 percent of our brain! That familiar statement is false—there’s no evidence to support it. Still, something about it just sounds right, so we internalize it and repeat it. Such is the power—and danger—of statistics.

Agreed. This statistic is false. However, the reason it is false is not based on statistics, but on knowledge of the brain, the relationship between the white matter and the gray matter, etc. There is an excellent discussion of this in 50 Myths of Popular Psychology, a book my students read in General Psychology.

Our world is shaped by widespread statistical illiteracy. We fear things that probably won’t kill us (terrorist attacks) and ignore things that probably will (texting while driving)

No. The reason that we fear terrorist attacks and not texting drivers is a well-known cognitive bias called the availability heuristic. It has little to do with statistical illiteracy, and more to do with our natural mental tendencies and how we make decisions with emotions. The natural resistance of our brains to making decisions based on statistics rather than emotions could be taught in a statistics course along with the difference between a mean, a median, and a mode, but cognitive biases are not the same as statistical illiteracy.

Also in this department: Personal Data: The self may be unknowable, but it is not untrackable. It is now easier than ever to tap into a wealth of data - heart rate, caloric input and output, foot speed, sleep patterns, even your own genetic code - to glean new insights and make better decisions about your health and behavior.

This is on the surface, a wonderful idea, but silly. Unfortunately, we no longer live in the age of the citizen scientist. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could go into their backyards, observe the animals in the creek, and actually contribute to science. But now, to "glean insight" into any single variable above, you need graduate education in that topic. This is obviously true for the genetic code, but as someone who collected heart rate data for my dissertation, I can attest to the fact that it is not interpretable without significant training and guidance.

Wired Skill # 4: Applied Cognition : How the Mind Works and How to Make it Work for You
In just about any college catalog I can find, there is a course (and I have taught it) called "Cognitive Psychology." This course teachers how the mind works, and how to apply this knowledge to your own life, like using the science of memory to make your studying more effective. This course often assigns books such as Barry Schwartz's Paradox of Choice (look, he teaches Introduction to Psychology) and Jonah Leher's How We Decide. But often, to delve into the experiments themselves, and look at the data (this is science, after all) you need an experienced guide, and yes, sometimes a textbook, with questions, assignments, terms to know, etc.

So, what would I suggest to the authors of this article (hailing from planet Snarkmarket)? Rather than arguing that the liberal arts are outdated, why not take a look at current liberal arts classes and curricula, and realize that you are actually arguing for their continued vitality in the modern world? Read some of the academics who are struggling with keeping the liberal arts, rigorous and relevant, without turning them into vocational training programs. Finally, consider that if we keep hyping the inadequacy of liberal arts 1.0 (are we really only at 1.0, after at least 100 years?) we may not end up with 2.0, but rather, just a lot less of 1.0.

The Scientific Case for a Liberal Arts Education

2010-10-14T23:01:00.000-04:00

Those in academe have no doubt heard that in the face of a tight budget, SUNY-Albany has cut several departments and the tenured professors in them. French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater will no longer be programs at the flagship state college in New York. Stanley Fish has an interesting column describing this development, noting that "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives." I agree that there is a crisis, but I think it will soon be broader than just the humanities, this action reflects an attitude of thinly-veiled contempt for the liberal arts and for the life of the mind. While first they have come for the humanities, the arguments used against these particular departments could apply to much of the traditional college curriculum. For me, it is a good moment to argue for the vitality and utility of the liberal arts, using some arguments for the science of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as some of the humility demanded in studying these fields.

In considering how to respond, Fish points out several old argument that won't work.

Well, it won’t do to invoke the pieties [that] ... the humanities enhance our culture; the humanities make our society better — because those pieties have a 19th century air about them and are not even believed in by some who rehearse them.

And it won’t do to argue that the humanities contribute to economic health of the state — by producing more well-rounded workers or attracting corporations or delivering some other attenuated benefit — because nobody really buys that argument, not even the university administrators who make it.

I think Fish is correct in saying that these arguments won't work, and he resigns himself to the possibility of politics, or of a limited few powerful people pushing some important buttons since they have a personal value of French, or theater. But I think the rest of us should not breathe a sigh of relief, but attack the assumption that these programs are less necessary than ours. This logic will quickly lead to our own doorstep, because most of us do not have a firmer foothold than theater, or french, or russian when it comes to direct economic utility, or contribution to society or culture. When you consider where these arguments take us, you quickly come to the conclusion that people should be in professional training programs as soon as humanly possible. Why waste time studying y if you know that you are going to do x?

But, as the title to this post declares, I think there is a strong case for studying many things, including theater, French, and classics. I believe this case is first made by several studies which I will outline below. But further, these studies (and many others) should urge us to be humble in the face of our increasing drive towards narrow training at the cost of education, and towards applied pursuits in the search of a specific goal at the cost of basic intellectual inquiry in pursuit of the pleasure of knowing. This trend of more training and less education is pervasive in our current educational system, and can be seen in K-12 reforms like NCLB and RTT (which evade politically controversial curriculum changes, but end up coercing teachers to become reading "trainers" rather than seeking to instill a love of reading and knowledge) to other accountability measures, coming soon to a college near you (paywalled Chronicle of Higher Ed piece, but you get the idea).

So, what is the scientific case for French or Italian or Russian? First, there are diverse cognitive benefits for bilingualism. Ellen Bialystock's work has documented that bilinguals have beginning troubles with the competing languages, but that this leads to very long term and general benefits for what is called executive functioning (brief Washington Post summary) which generally concerns distributing one's mental resources. Bilinguals are therefore more able to ignore distracting information, even in some basic, non-language tasks. Her recent research suggests that bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia, by an average of 5 years (any economist want to calculate the cost to society on 5 years of dementia?). Further, it seems that learning two (or more) languages can enhance our concept formation and cognitive flexibility (when we understand how words can have subtly different meanings in different languages, it illuminates the flexible nature of language itself) (short blurb here).

Second, there are social, cultural and ethical advantages to studying a foreign language (especially study abroad). Yes, the students love it (but they also seem to drink and party more, so that is no surprise. But study abroad programs also enhance creativity (this link to the original article in a psych journal probably won't work). Study abroad also enhances cross-cultural tolerance and a global awareness. This tends to be a goal of a college education, but it can't be done by tolerance seminars, or even hundreds of generic exhortations. You can't just learn to be generically tolerant, you have to learn a particular culture.

Finally, I think a take-home message we should all get from the science of why there is value in the humanities (and the liberal arts in general) is that we should be humble in our drive to tie education to specific and direct goals. This approach is short-sighted, not just because bilingualism improves creativity and prevents cognitive aging, but because most of the effects of any sort of education are very very hard to measure. We psychologists can assail education research for not providing clear answers on anything, but at some point we have to conclude that the kind of clear answers we want just don't exist. Assessing the independent value of a good kindergarten experience (for example) is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. But in our striving for accountability (such a reasonable sounding goal), we are increasingly narrowing our educational goals to those that are easier to measure. This first drives out the humanities (theater! how do you measure outcomes of that?) but eventually it will drive the mind out of the academy and make trainers of us all. And ironically, I think we'll find that the job training and all those 21st century skills didn't turn out to be "trainable" skills at all, but depended on the broad body of knowledge that we have been working on for over 200 years.

Skills and Knowledge, and Evil Standardized Tests

2010-09-21T15:58:00.000-04:00

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Susan Engel, the director of the teaching program at Williams College decries the awful state of the reliance of our educational system on standardized tests. I am very sympathetic to this view, but for different reasons than Engel. She sees the rote memorization that current standardized tests assess as trivial, and suggests:

Instead, we should come up with assessments that truly measure the qualities of well-educated children: the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live.

And a response by Jonah Lehrer on his blog Frontal Cortex over at Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/what-are-we-measuring-in-school

Lehrer says that the tests are bad, because knowledge is fleeting, and what really matters are perseverance and diligence. These are the traits of successful students (highly correlated with grades) and employees, why don't we measure these directly?

I was moved to write a response, because I feel both of these pieces represent misconceptions of the nature of the difference between knowledge, skills, and traits, and the problems with assessment.

First, I really think that Engel has mostly the right idea, and I am very sympathetic to her criticism. She seems to accept that testing is inevitable, and that we need some metrics of success in schools. Further, her critique is not of all testing, but rather of the particular form of our current tests which values convenience and ease of interpretation over what we actually value in our children. However, I feel that she falls into the trap of separating knowledge from skills, and saying that what we really want from education is skills (true enough) and that we can do this without resorting to teaching boring factual knowledge (untrue).

Lehrer cites his own experience an organic chemistry class, in which the professor noted that students will forget all of the material, but that the class (and grades in the class) was a way to identify those students who had enough grit to stay up late and cram tons of facts into their heads for a limited amount of time. The class was therefore not just a class on organic chemistry, but rather, a class on "learning how to learn." Unfortunately for the hopes of many in higher education, cognitive psychologists have found that "learning how to learn" any general thing, is not really possible: skills of close reading, critical thinking, and abstract thought are quite specific to the particular background knowledge of the topic.

In Daniel Willingham’s book “Why Don’t Student’s Like School” he devotes a chapter to the evidence behind his claim that “factual knowledge precedes skill.” We think that knowledge is fleeting, or trivial, but we have that impression because once the knowledge begins to be used, it is thought of as skill. But most of the things we think of as skill are based on a foundation of factual knowledge. Lehrer may think that he simply flushed down everything that he learned in organic chemistry, but his skill as a science writer is informed by some of those facts, whether he knows it or not. Likewise with Engel’s suggestion of the elevation of noble skills rather than trivial memorized facts. The skills she imagines :

1) the ability to understand what they read;
Reading comprehension depends critically on background knowledge of the reader. Efforts to independently assess reading skill inevitably find that those who have more background knowledge in the topic area understand more. See Recht and Leslie (1988) for a study which compared “good” readers and “poor” readers on topics which they had background knowledge or not. Here is Daniel Willingham on why reading is not a skill.

2) the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification;
Again, this can be surprisingly specific to ones area of expertise and background knowledge.

3) the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again;
Again, many studies in cognitive psychology have shown that abstract thinking ability is strikingly specific. Professionals in one domain, which you might think helps them be better “abstract thinkers” or “critical thinkers” are shown to be just merely average when tested on a task outside of their domain which requires abstract thought.

4) the ability to think about a situation in several different ways;
This again is specific on the background knowledge. People are generally limited to relating situations to things they already know. This is limited by background knowledge.

5) and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live.
Here we have knowledge, but not rote memorization, rather, a dynamic working knowledge of society. But again, what makes this knowledge dynamic and working as opposed to static and trivial? For example, what if Engel wanted high school students to be able to reason about race inequity in our current society. Wouldn’t this depend on whether they knew the history of the civil rights movement? Or demographic facts about our country?

But I agree that the emphasis on standardized tests is ill-conceived. And I agree with Engel's suggestion that we get students interested in using books as a way to gain knowledge. For me, this is the real tragedy of our current crop of education reform: a totally backward and ham-handed approach to motivation and interest, both from the perspective of the teachers as well as the students.

The current regime of high stakes testing is not a problem because knowledge is trivial, but because constant narrow testing is actually a terrible way to motivate students to get this knowledge. What should we be doing? Getting kids excited about reading. Teaching them interesting content in science, social studies, literature, etc. And yes, improving their vocabulary, and their general background knowledge. If we did that, I think we would find their test scores magically rising.

Further, we need to recognize that basing their pay on students' test scores is also a terrible way to motivate teachers. For many teachers (myself included), a primary challenge is to instill as much knowledge, while maintaining motivation and interest. This is in the context of the fact that our brains were not meant to think (most of our brain power and sophistication is devoted to perception and moving). One problem with high stakes testing is that a too-strong incentive leads to limited learning, and paradoxically, lower motivation. Among the first to observe how too large an incentive limits learning was Edward Tolman, in his classic paper "Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men" (1948).

If rats are too strongly motivated in their original learning, they find it very difficult to relearn when the original path is no longer correct.

Tolman ends his paper with the following words:

We must, in short, subject our children and ourselves (as the kindly experimenter would his rats) to the optimal conditions of moderate motivation and of an absence of unnecessary frustrations, whenever we put them and ourselves before that great God-given maze which is our human world. I cannot predict whether or not we will be able, or be allowed, to do this; but I can say that, only insofar as we are able and are allowed, have we cause for hope.

Amen.

In my next post, I will discuss some more about which theory of learning and motivation we have chosen instead of Tolman (and the psychologists who have followed him).

Shop Class as Soulcraft vs. the Checklist

2010-06-02T22:20:00.000-04:00

I am now reading Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft (original essay with same points, NYT review) and am finding it very interesting, if a little simplistic and categorical, and the evidence too anecdotal (I guess that's what you get from a philosopher: "Here, take this situation, let me reason about it, and make generalizations about all of American corporate culture from that one story"). But I wanted to write this down (to get reactions, and to force myself to put words to paper) because as I was disagreeing with some of his generalizations, I found myself thinking of Atul Gawande's The Checklist (original New Yorker essay, NYT review).
Crawford's big point is that the "knowledge worker" has basically had the life sucked out of him by a corporate culture in which there are no objective criteria of evaluation. Nothing that he does has an easily observable and demonstrable effect, so it all comes down to rhetoric and feelings. If you feel good and a part of the team, and everyone has a warm fuzzy feeling about their company and their brand, then you have done your job well. Crawford compares this to his motorcycle shop (or most trades) where either the bike runs or it doesn't. Basically, whereas breathless futurists (or educational reformers) have said that we'll all be knowledge workers in the future, so we better go to college and prepare to think for a living, Crawford is saying that this supposed "knowledge work" that awaits us is not Google, but Dilbert and the Office, and it is soul-sapping and bad in all sorts of ways.

"There is a pride of accomplishment in the performance of whole tasks that can be held in the mind all at once, and contemplated as whole once finished. In most work that transpires in large organizations, one's work is meaningless taken by itself" p.156

One way that he attacks modern work is its reliance on algorithmic or recipe knowledge. Algorithms such as these, whether used to write abstracts for professional journal articles (a mind-numbing and stupid job he had for a while) or motorcycle repair manuals (a disaster when someone who does not know about motorcycles just copies and pastes from plans they don't understand, drive Crawford crazy, and illustrate how our modern society no longer values the tacit knowledge and expertise of the expert tradesman. This I can agree with ... to a point. It is certainly true for the extreme examples he cites. But he fails to acknowledge that there are still a fair number of jobs that are a mix of "knowledge work" and trade work.

This is where the Checklist seems superior and more sophisticated to me. There is a fair amount of tacit knowledge with surgeons (and the pilots, and construction workers profiled in Gawande's book) but a checklist is also an important supplement to their own expertise. This doesn't have to be soul-deadening or frustrating, as Crawford depicts it, but can free our minds to do the amazing pattern-recognizing that our expertise allows. Rather than dismissing the algorithm as comparing humans to computers and finding them not rule-following enough, Gawande shows that there are some situations which are so complicated that they need a checklist. Crawford has a disdain for "teamwork" in the corporate setting, he much prefers the solitary puzzle solving of him vs. the motorcycle, but he doesn't acknowledge that the very fact that the motorcycle exists is due to specialization, teamwork, and yes, some recipe following.

I do agree with Crawford that some knowledge work that by separating us from the effects of our labors, corrupts morals, inhibits learning, and degrades the purpose and value that our work holds. But I do think that some of this is necessary, and we should try to do the best we can with it (we are not going to back to small businesses making cars, TV's, furniture, appliances, etc). Also, there are a lot of interesting professions which are somewhere in the middle of the shop class vs. mathematical physics (a convenient straw man throughout the book is his dad, who offers pure equations and formulas, when the world of a 1983 VW carburetor has dirty nuts and bolts). Doctors need trade knowledge, but they also need to utilize the science of a knowledge worker. Teachers need to have trade knowledge of their students and what makes them seem happy, but also the science of memory and learning. If we could acknowledge that many professions are both trade and professional, instead of glorifying one at the expense of the other, I think we would be much better off.

Learning Styles: What's Being Debunked

2010-02-25T10:08:00.004-05:00

I have a response to an article on learning styles from Teacher Magazine
Here is the original article, and here is the link for my response, which you need a username and password to the site for, so the gracious editors have allowed me to post it here as well. By the way, you can sign up for a free account, which I would recommend if you are interested in this sort of stuff. So, here is my piece:

In her recent article “The Bunk of Debunking Learning Styles” Heather Wolpert-Gawron makes a plea for common sense in the face of research findings that contradict her direct observations of learning styles in the classroom. She cites a recent article (“Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence” by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork, in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest) which has claimed that there is no scientific evidence that learning styles exist, and argues that knowledge she’s gained during her 11-year career in the classroom prove that they do. As a psychological scientist and a son and husband to classroom teachers, I feel the need to respond.

First, it is necessary to clarify the definition of learning styles and the predictions of learning styles theory. Second, I want to pinpoint what the “debunkers” in question are claiming, which I think is more specific than Ms. Gawron-Wolpert describes. Finally, since she seems to believe that basic science is useless when it comes to the practice of teaching, I want to describe how basic cognitive science can apply to teaching. Although the scientific search for evidence of learning styles has yielded no evidence of their existence, basic psychological science can help teachers, even as it steers clear of dictating exactly what works in any individual classroom.

Learning Styles Defined

We must begin with how learning styles have been defined, both in the research literature as well as in educational practice. Learning styles theory does not propose generic differences between how students learn, but asserts a specific kind of difference. A learning style, by the prevailing account, is a preferred mode of learning, distinct from ability, and independent of content area. For example, a visual learner is not necessarily better at learning math or geography than other students, but a better learner when any material is presented visually, compared to other modes of presentation. This may not be Ms. Wolpert-Gawron’s definition of learning style, but it is the definition used by researchers for over 50 years, as well as the educational policy makers who are currently implementing learning styles theory. For example, although multiple intelligences may seem similar to learning styles, Howard Gardiner has made it quite clear that multiple intelligences is a theory of abilities, not of styles. The current learning styles theory defines “mode of learning” as a preferred sensory channel, either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, but there have been many ways of defining “mode” in the past.
Why is it critical that a learning style be distinct from content and ability? Because one important claim of learning styles theory is that no one learning style is superior to another. If visual learners learned math faster, and kinesthetic learners learned basketball faster, we wouldn’t need to label them with learning styles at all, we could say that one group has mathematical aptitude and the other athletic aptitude. Unlike decisions about what works in any given classroom, which are for individual teachers to make, learning styles is a theory of how the mind works, and it is framed in a way that makes it suited to controlled scientific testing. The key scientific claim for learning styles theory is that we could teach two classrooms of randomly assigned students the same content, but one would be taught “visually”, and one “auditorially.” The visual learners should do better than the auditory learners in the visual classroom and vice versa in the auditory classroom. If everyone does better in the visual classroom, then we would conclude that the content is more suitable for visual presentation. If the “visual learners” do better in both classrooms, then you have identified an ability, not a style. This “matching styles to instruction” pattern of relative differences in learning is the evidence that the authors of the paper above searched for in the scientific literature. Several studies claim to support learning styles, but did not perform this critical test. Those few that did satisfy this design failed to find evidence for learning styles.

What the Debunkers Do, and Why

These researchers have identified the central claim of learning styles theory, and failed to find any scientific evidence for this particular claim, despite many relevant studies. Ms. Wolpert-Gawron accuses them of invalidating the practice of differentiating learners at all. She suggests that they don’t mention the “alternative —that of teaching all students the same way.” This is not the alternative that the scientists have in mind. One representative quote from the article is, “it is undeniable that the instruction that is optimal for a given student will often need to be guided by the aptitude, prior knowledge, and cultural assumptions that student brings to a learning task.” In other words, obviously students differ, just not by learning style.
To refute her view of the debunkers, Ms. Wolpert offers many examples from her own experience which show that learners are different. While this is not the claim of the scientists, why should they bother debunking this theory at all, if many people define it as generally as Ms. Wolpert? Those scientists who debunk learning styles do so in order to remove the obstacles to teachers’ focusing their attention on dimensions of learners that both science and practice have identified as critical. In their words, “assuming that people are enormously heterogeneous in their instructional needs may draw attention away from the body of basic and applied research on learning that provides a foundation of principles and practices that can upgrade everybody’s learning.” Learning styles theory distracts teachers from principles and practices that we all agree are successful.
Ms. Wolpert-Gawron clearly agrees, stating that the engagement of all students is crucial to learning, but she maintains that a learning styles approach fosters attention to student engagement. Perhaps this is true for the way that she has defined learning styles, but it is not true for learning styles theory as a scientific theory of mind, as it is applied to many teacher evaluations, or state standards. Enforcing attention to learning styles directs teachers to a particular method of student engagement, and necessarily away from another. For example, to illustrate a certain concept, one could tell a very engaging story, related to the lives of the students themselves. But if one were a teacher with intense time pressure, meetings galore, and multiple classes to prepare (which is to say, any teacher), learning styles theory would encourage attention to the sensory modality of the story (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic), rather than to the meaning of its content, its intrinsic interest and its appropriateness for the particular lesson of the day. This doesn’t seem to trouble many teachers, who like Ms Wolpert-Gawron have been happily ignoring the central claims of learning styles theorists. However, this may not be the case with beginning teachers, or teachers who are stringently evaluated by arbitrary criteria based on the myth of learning styles.

The Role of Basic Cognitive Science in the Classroom

The misunderstanding of the scientific claims does undermine the subsequent article, but as a cognitive scientist who often reports research findings to my family of teachers, I feel it is important to address and confront the gaps that she mentions (and doesn’t mention) between research and practice, as well as her clear disdain for the scientists in question and their unwelcome incursion into her classroom. She is not unique in this attitude, nor is it limited to learning styles. This gap between basic research in cognitive psychology and the practice of teaching has negative consequences for each side. In their distrust of basic science, teachers miss an opportunity to improve their students’ learning by applying their expertise on relevant dimensions of learning. In allowing this distrust to exist, scientists undermine the public’s trust in the value of the basic science to understanding human behavior. Just as the science of medicine need not undermine the expertise of a doctor, the science of psychology need not invalidate practice-based knowledge, but rather supplement it with general information about theories of the mind and learning, without direct prescriptions for what to do in a certain classroom situation.
In order to repair this distrust, scientists must first summarize our findings for audiences outside of our community, with an eye toward informing educational practice. In doing so, we need to describe our basic science findings as theories of how the mind works, not straightforward recipes for educational reform. Daniel Willingham’s recent book “Why Don’t Students Like School,” may not do a great job answering the question in the title, but it serves as an excellent summary of consensus views in cognitive science as they apply to education (the learning styles and multiple intelligences chapter is particularly cogent and insightful). But we can’t stop there. We must also dispel myths, and we in psychology have a larger set of myths to dispel than others. When these myths exist, they are corrosive to science, because while seeming to represent science (“well, it says it’s a theory”) they do not provide the measurable, reliable results that science demands. These myths are perpetuating identity theft of science, calling themselves science and wrecking havoc on our credit scores, yet many scientists don’t connect the bankruptcy of public trust in science with the myths that we let roam freely. In the case of learning styles, minimal evidence has been exaggerated and marketed to educators and administrators, outside of the checks of the scientific process. As scientists we must take greater efforts to reign in this misapplication of science. The recent article on learning styles that Ms. Wolpert-Gawron refers to is an example of this, as is another excellent book “50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology,” by Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio and Barry Beyestein (learning styles is number 18). What’s more, the journal in which the learning styles article appeared, “Psychological Science in the Public Interest,” is a journal with the laudable goal of improving “giving psychology away,” with both topics and authors commissioned after a careful nomination process.
In addition to summarizing the scientific consensus, and dispelling myths, the basic science of learning should clearly state the questions that we do not know the answer to, and get out of the way of expert teachers. Experienced teachers certainly have knowledge that science does not. Given that practice-based knowledge is practical knowledge, gained by classroom experience, it can sometimes be specific to the population a teacher serves, rather than a general knowledge of how people learn (just like baseball players are not necessarily experts in the general rules of projectile motion). It is not basic scientists but political reformers who are turning scientific theories into coarse criteria for evaluating teachers based on test scores, or a simple checklist. Basic psychological scientists are in general cautious, as well as skeptical of attempts to directly apply general theories to particular classroom situations. What Ms. Wolpert-Gawron is interpreting as science telling her what she sees in her classroom is in fact a summary statement of scientists telling her what they don’t see, despite having looked in the best ways they know how. The authors of the study, in my mind, are attempting to empower teachers to use the principles of learning that they know work, while encouraging them to steer clear of myths, which may have had a scientific-seeming provenance (if it’s from Harvard…), but have not received rigorous scientific support for critical claims.
I argue that basic science can concern itself with general mechanisms, and teachers can practice applied science in their own classrooms, but what happens when there seems to be a direct confrontation? How do we decide between the scientist in his sterile lab vs. the expert teacher with 11 years experience and 2500 students? In other words, why should experienced teachers let scientists tell them what is and isn’t a myth when common sense dictates otherwise? Because despite the fact that personal experience is very compelling and convincing, human beings are notoriously bad at direct observation of complex relationships. Our stone-aged brains notice patterns that aren’t there, seek out evidence that confirms our preconceived notions (called the confirmation bias), and ignore evidence that might prove us wrong. This is just as true for surgeons and scientists as it is for teachers, and the controlled observation, whether in a scientific lab, or through a double-blind study, or using randomized assignment to experimental groups, is absolutely critical element to the success of science in explaining and predicting complex human phenomena. This holds equally true whether it be the spread of disease or the process of learning. The history of common sense has been remarkably wrong, even in those experts who have seen thousands of cases. Scientists are people too, and so we don’t trust our own observations any more than anyone else’s, but rather use them to inform what should be tested in a controlled study. If controlled study after controlled study fails to observe, or offers contrary evidence to our most cherished beliefs, we have no choice but to give them up.
The goal then, is a collaboration to arrive at the most relevant dimensions in learning, and the most effective way of teaching, respecting the expertise of the teacher, but accepting that in some cases, science can point out where myths exist. For example, the science of cognitive psychology can point to the necessity of practice (for example, through drilling) and background knowledge for deeper learning as well as the ways in which motivation and engagement are critical to learning, but cannot offer an ideal way to balance these two in a American History lesson for English Language Learners. The science can note that there is considerable evidence for the organization and meaning of a lesson having a large effect on learning, and little evidence that the color of the ink, or whether the words are on a page or on a blackboard have any effect. This does not mean that it doesn’t matter in any classroom, just that teachers should be cautious in choosing to spend time on choosing the color of the ink and err towards thinking about the structure and meaning of their lessons. However, only the teacher can apply these considerations to their subject and the particular students in front of them. As Ms. Wolpert-Gawron notes, teaching learning styles is far more difficult than not, but science here is trying to offer a way to make things easier. Just as science in medicine can call a doctor’s attention to a set of manageable indexes of health, science in education should aim to suggest to our teachers a set of relevant dimensions of learning, with the understanding that teaching is immensely complex. While basic science can offer theories and insight into how learning works, no one knows the particular students in front of her better than the experienced teacher.

On the importance of failure

2009-04-20T00:59:00.001-04:00

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

-John Dewey

I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300
games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and
missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is
why I succeed.
                                            -Michael Jordan (I love that he knows exactly how many times!)

I've been thinking lately about failure.
It came up when I was reading this great book about Stanley Milgram, one of psychology's most famous researchers. Milgram devised the famous "obedience experiments" where his participants continued to shock (or at least thoght that they did) their fellow participants into levels which would have been dangerously painful, just because the experimenter said to continue.
But he also discovered that people are generally 6 social connections from everyone in the world (six degrees of separation), by an ingenious random letter experiment. And spent his career in New York's City College doing urban psychology studies, elaborating on the social psycholgocial consequences of living in cities. There was one great study where he and his research assistants would go on the subway and ask strangers to give up their seats for no apparent reason. One of them said it was the hardest thing they have ever done. It made me wonder what he would have thought about Improv Everywhere (you have probably seen Frozen Grand Central, or the Food Court Musical, but a lot of the videos and stories are great.) or the other seemingly spontaneous crowds in public places singing and dancing phenomena.
But that is a tangent
Also, just saw Milk, about Harvey Milk, who was clearly destined for greatness beyond his post on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (although he did have some national political victories even in that role).

And both of these (combined with my never-ending dissatisfaction with my own teaching) have led me to remind myself about how important failure is to learning, and to success, and how hard it is to have the courage to fail. Success is a great, but it is essentially an anti-learning drug for our brains. Succeeding, or to put it another way, happiness, tells our mind that there is no reason to change course, or do anything different, we are going along just fine. This is not the way to learn.

So, despite being an amazingly brilliant student, and doing his ground-breaking obedience studies while he was basically an assistant professor, Milgram failed to get tenure at Harvard. Later, he failed (actually pretty miserably) on a two rounds of NSF grant submissions (in the second, a new program officer who happened to be his friend resubmitted it for him). One reviewer wrote:

This is the weakest proposal that I can recall receiving in 18 years of reviewing proposals for NSF"

The movie Milk begins with Harvey Milk saying that he is 40 years old and hasn't done a thing he is proud of. Then, he moved to San Francisco, set up a small business, and ran and lost for several elected positions 3 times, before winning his Board of Supervisors position, and vaulting to the national stage as the public face of gay America.

As I have my own sometimes-crippling fear of failure, in grant submissions, or paper submissions, or trying any writing on my own (beyond this stuff, which I am not sure whether it is good or bad). I try to remind myself that the opposite of success is not failure, but rather inaction. In fact, failure is not an obstacle to success, but often a prerequisite. Most things worth doing cannot be done well the first time. That's why other people aren't doing them.

So, I sometimes think about one of the challenges as a teacher as providing a safe space for students to fail. Students don't seem to get the importance of this, given that the word "failure" has such negative undertones (and overtones too). For too many, "failure" means that you didn't perform adequately, and that you didn't learn anything. But then we scientists go back to our lab and fail and fail and fail, learning a little bit each time. Learning any skill is the same thing. Every master carpenter or surgeon has become a master because they challenged themselves and made many many mistakes (Yes! surgeons make mistakes! Read Atul Gawande's Complications for an excellent reminder of that) If it was possible to do something without making mistakes, than computers would be doing it by now. But somehow we don't let our students in on this little secret, by expecting uniform excellence on assessments. I think one key to doing this is separating early evaluations of learning from a grade. In writing, I try to say: you have understood the article that you have read, and fulfilled the requirements of the assignment. But you have failed in this way and can improve in this way (of course I don't use the word "failed") the writing needs improvement in this way. Failure is important. Acknowledging it, correcting it if we can, learning from it if we can't. This is the key to learning. I try to do this when a particular aspect of a lesson doesn't seem to work (and sometimes I tell myself that going in front of students with less preparation is ok for this very reason). I stop and say: "Wow, that was confusing. Did anyone actually understand what I just said? Who thinks they understood half of it?" Then, maybe one person will rephrase. Cognitive psychologists call this metacognition, and many memory studies have found that increasing this leads to increased memory.

But the point is that success inhibits metacognition. If you are succeeding, why ask why? Everything is fine, don't think so much.

If a goal of a college education is that lovely buzzword "lifelong learning" I think a good place to start would be lifelong appreciation of failure.

A final thought, from Thomas Alva Edison, who I learned about from reading a kids book in the waiting room of the doctor's office a few weeks ago. First, he was not a solitary genius. He had an idea factory, where he employed many many engineers. Second, the things he "invented" were not out of whole cloth, but mostly making things better. Like a better switch for a telegraph (going from duplex to triplex, for example). The ideas were really there, there were relatively few (if any) metaphorical light bulbs going off. Just a lot of hard work and incremental progress. And a lot of failure. I'll leave you with one of his thoughts:

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Thomas Alva Edison

Cedar's Digest Weekly Week

2009-04-16T00:19:00.001-04:00

This is an old post, that I somehow didn't publish. You thought you weren't interested in today's news? Try three weeks ago! In today' snews cycle, it's ancient! It's so retro, it's back in style!

Nerds:
Jimmy Fallon is a nerd, he used his show to make a random guy a twitter celebrity

Stringing together 25 of these samsung hard drives can make your computer lightning fast. How fast? Open up all 6 Microsoft Office Programs at once. In 0.5 seconds. Nice.

A guy got his home broken in to, and he Twittered the news as it was happening (don't worry, the "burglar" passed out in his bathroom)

News

A description from WIRED of how a guy robbed the world's most secure diamond vault. (via BoingBoing)

Newspapers

Great piece on how to save journalism but lose print newspapers by Mike Davidson.

No More Money

How the Crash Will Reshape America - fascinating piece in the Atlantic by Richard Florida on how the economic collapse will weigh most heavily on those least regions involved

Knowledge (Education)

The Smart Pen (a pen that records, but links the audio recording to what you are writing) could be great for tying lectures to lecture notes. See pen demo, but also the application to an anthropology class (from Michael Wesch, that guy who did the anthropological introduction to YouTube)

Numbers

Interactive map of NYC discontent (via kottke)

More facebook findings of Cameron Marlow (facebook's resident scientist)

Nyuk-Nyuk-Nyuk

Pictures of grown up Calvin and Hobbes (via kottke)

Elmo and Ricky Gervais outtakes (via waxy)

AIG bonuses and the constraints of human intelligence

2009-03-22T23:33:00.005-04:00

AIG bailout = 178 billion

AIG bonuses = 165 million

As xkcd points out, there is a big difference between a million and a billion.

Many others have weighed in on the same point, the bonuses are only a minute fraction of what AIG got in bailout money. Others, Obama included, have pointed out that the amount of money is not really the point, but that the perception of those who got us into this mess being rewarded (with anything) is really stirring up the popular rage. I think also the very word "bonus" is also a problem point, which is why its defenders are trying to rechristen it "retention pay".

To me, this debate, and our popular understanding of the financial crisis also points out some limits of our national intelligence, but really about the constraints of human intelligence. In some ways, I think that this financial crisis is partly us flying too close to the sun, using the metaphorical wax wings of our limited number sense. I'll muse more about this in my next post, about why we are all bad at statistics.

Some of these points are taken from this piece by Jim Holt in the New Yorker on the work of Stanislas Dehaene (among others) in how our brain understands numerical concepts.

A few main points arise from the bulk of this work:

1) We are much better (faster, more accurate) at dealing with small numbers in our heads than big numbers. That doesn't sound like such bad news. But wait.... Big numbers start at 5.

2) The way that our brain represents addition and subtraction varies tremendously from how we represent multiplication and division (multiplication and division never come naturally).

3) The connection between number and physical space goes, as Dehaene puts it "very, very deep in the brain"

What does this mean for the financial crisis? Let's take number 1. The press can throw around "around 150 billion" and "around 687 million" and that actually means something very different to our brain than saying 1 or 2. Getting above 4 makes things more difficult for our brain, above 100 is like a second language you have a little practice on, above 1 million just doesn't really make sense. I think the big fuss about bonuses is because it is finally getting down to a scale that people can halfway understand. What much of the financial press, the politicians, and the financiers themselves do not understand, is that when they say the word "million" "billion" or "trillion" they are speaking in a different language than most of us understand. They have an understanding of these in the context of their business, in which they may have daily practice with scaling these numbers (it still doesn't come naturally to them, but they have extensive training). But most of us rarely think about numbers much larger than 20, and when we do, we probably need to sit down with a pen and paper. 1 billion is really more of anything than just about anyone ever has cause to think about.

For number 2, quick, what is 7 times 8? The only reason you know this is because you have memorized it as a fact. Just like the capital of North Dakota or what's the longest river in Africa. You may have memorized it well, but that doesn't make it any less arbitary to your brain that the other two facts. How many people in your high school class? How many of those would fit in 1 billion? Again, your brain has to go through a set of operations that you were taught, and this does not come naturally.

Number 3 illustrates why efforts to make us understand these numbers, like the example of your high school class above, will ultimately fall short. Our brain's understanding of number

is tied to physcial space (actually, our brain's understanding of just about everything is tied to something physical or related directly to our body). Which means, since your brain didn't evolve to understand what 1 billion is, it won't really help to tell you that it would be 20 million of your high schools. It doesn't help you all that much to understand that a stack of 1 billion one dollar bills would reach up to the moon (or wherever) and back. Why? Who can jump to the moon? Our understanding of physical space is related to our body, and again, anything over a small distance is quickly abstract and we need tools to understand it. What is a mile, really?

So, what is the message of all this? Well, first, people watching the news, etc, can't really understand what a billion or a trillion is. Maybe they can understand that in the past, when our government had to borrow money we had to borrow around 10 percent or so (oooh, percents, that we can understand, why? food). As the CBO says ( on "The Director's Blog" sounds like some awful DVD extra feature) :

Debt held by the public would rise, from 41 percent of GDP in 2008 to 57 percent in 2009 and then to 82 percent of GDP by 2019 (compared with 56 percent of GDP in that year under baseline assumptions).

Now wasn't that easier than me talking about trillions and billions?

So, using this as a model, I would really like to see a lot more pictures of numbers like this:

A slideshow from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the budget

Here is one example. If more people understood this simple pie chart, I think we'd have a more honest debate about budget policy.

Or how about this one:

We have an Elements of Style for prose, which is built with around a sophisticated understanding of cognitive limitations for understanding language. Now what we need is an Elements of Style for presenting numbers with a similar understanding of our limited abilities.

Edward Tufte has been harping on this point for years (even trying to write that book), as are some out there designing great graphics. But I think there could be a lot more.

Again, this isn't necessarily because of a failure of our math education system (although it may be partly that) but it is at the root a limitation of the human brain. We should acknowledge that and try to design our expressions of numbers to be clear and to the point. In the same way news anchors and print journalists alike don't use five seven-syllable words in a sentence (see how that was actually much harder to think about than two three-syllable words?) they should stop using billion and trillion as if we all understand exactly what that means.

Jon Stewart is NOT a comedian

2009-03-13T13:57:00.004-04:00

After the latest Jon Stewart beat down of a media lowlife (in this case, an entire channel, CNBC, as represented by Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli) for providing entertainment and calling it news, a similar script is playing out that did when he went on Crossfire to tell Carlson and Begala "You are hurting America"

Here is the original Daily Show video collage of CNBC missing the boat on the financial crisis, Cramer going on Scarborough Country to complain, and the entire episode when Cramer came on, or only the full Jim Cramer interview (it had to be edited down). You must watch the entire interview. You just must do it. Honestly, it is just great great television. It also works very well because Cramer actually takes Stewart and the interview seriously and makes some of the typical media arguments well enough for Jon to very effectively skewer those ideas. In this interview (not having watched his show) he is actually somewhat sympathetic, in that he is genuinely regretful. That is an emotion that I don't think I have seen on television. Because Jon is clearly using Cramer as an example here ("this song isn't about you"), unlike Crossfire, but as an example of the whole us vs them attitude (in this case main street vs. wall street) and the assumption that we have the media is on our side, when, as Jon points out, not only are they not on our side, but they are sitting on the sides, watching us get cheated, and cheering for the other side. This really holds true for just about every bit of media out there, in terms of this crisis (or even the disaster of the last eight years). Maybe if they were actually on our side, we would be willing to pay for the content that they provide, seeing it as valuable, instead of just buying stuff that they happen to advertise next to the news.

But back to the Jon Stewart media takedown script:

The "victim" expresses disbelief that someone who is "just a comedian" could criticize them.
Jon Stewart responds by saying exactly, I am just a comedian (I follow a show where puppets make crank calls) , you are supposed to be a journalist, reporting the news, not entertainment that has some sort of arbitrary and loose connection to the facts.
Jon always wins (or at least so far).
But they are both wrong.

Jon Stewart (and his underappreciated staff) are satirists.

He takes the media to task for providing entertainment, and calling it news, but he is providing the news, and calling it entertainment.
His viewers know this. The Daily Show bits have a kernel of truth. In fact, they are not really funny if you are not aware of the truth being mocked. And sometimes, when it is really good, you didn't realize the truth until you saw it being mocked.
This kernel of truth is why he is actually more trusted than most "real" newsmen. It is not because people just think he is hilarious. This is why comedy is hard, because it is really a very delicate relationship which hinges on trust. Think about George Carlin.

Why can't we compare him to Mark Twain, or Jonathan Swift, and call him the satirist of our time? The Onion is called a satirical newspaper. Why are Jon's brilliant YouTube and cable news collages (by the way, a lot lower tech than you might think, scroll down to the 4th comment) not seen as incisive satire. It is high time we accepted that The Daily Show is a piece of media satire that would make Twain proud.

Acknowledging Stewart as a satirist would acknowledge his grasp of both political truths, but also that he has feelings about this. Given that his combination of these feelings (I think a bit of truth I remember about a long profile of him by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times was along the lines of "we wake up really really angry in the morning, and have to make it funny by the afternoon"). This is when satirists shine, when there is a lot of stuff to be angry about. And there is never really a shrotage of those things.

One of the common talking points of his "victims" is that he is applying some sort of double standard, by only attacking people who aren't on his side of the political spectrum. "Speaking truth to power" - Scarborough says this, and then say, hey, he picks on us little guys. But Jon Stewart's response is that the media has power.

"CNBC could be an enormously powerful tool of illumination"

These cable news networks have the eyes and ears of their countrymen, that is power. Just ask the most powerful character in Catch-22, ex-Pfc Wintergreen, who controlled the mail room. Rush Limbaugh is owning up to his power (as being the current leader of the opposition party in this country), but somehow whenever cable media figures are caught like this by Jon Stewart, they do the "awww, poor little old me" routine.

Jon Stewart has earned our trust, as a layman, as someone who wakes up angry about the same things we are angry about. So when he says to Jim Cramer
"It feels like we are capitalizing your adventure" - we buy it, we let him speak for us, even though we know that he is not a layman, he is a millionaire himself. He hosted the Oscars! But we don't call him a celebrity misusing his bully pulpit. Why? Because he earned his pulpit, by earning our trust. Not with pratfalls, silly faces and impressions (a running joke on the show is that his impressions are awful) but by waking up mad as hell, and making that anger into laughter, without patronizing us by side-stepping the truth of that anger.

I imagine Jon would say it doesn't quite work if you take it too seriously. If he did this every week, it would start to get tiresome (although there are plenty of worthy targets). And we can stomach the anger with the sugar coating of silly photoshop puns, and there are some cheap laughs.

Ultimately, I think Jon is saving journalism, not only by practicing it, but by policing it. It is good to see that someone is putting the trust that they have built to good use.

Twitter for teachers (Tweechers?), and some thoughts about social networking in education settings

2009-03-04T01:12:00.001-05:00

Given that I am both an early adopter, and a college teacher, I have been thinking lately about integrating the latest social networking sites into my classes. First, I am going to describe the best known (to me of course) social networking sites, how they function (very very briefly, for other better intros, check out this Social networking in Plain English video, this tongue in cheek video, this non-fanatical beginner's guide to Twitter, Evan William's (Twitter CEO) recent 15 min TED talk or the NYTimes news pieces about Facebook and Twitter. By the way, even if you don't want the intro, check out the Times links. They are called "Topics" pages, and are basically wikipedia pages, focused on Times content, but not exclusively. I think they are going to make it. ). Then, I’ll debunk a few myths. Then I’ll offer some general principles, and finally a few examples that have come to my mind about their application to teaching. I would love to hear any suggestions or comments that you, the few, the proud, the 5 people and my mom that read this blog.

I’ll confine most of my comments to facebook and twitter (and address them somewhat separately), since these are going to win the social networking wars, when MySpace and the rest die out (google already gave up its entry into this field, ok, LinkedIn may continue as a professional social
network). You can consult the numbers if you want, but facebook is growing amazingly, and its users actually use it. Ditto with twitter. Interestingly, they have very similar functionality on the surface, but some small differences in function result in relatively large difference in how they are actually used.

First, social networking is not a place (despite the fact that some people waste time on facebook, these same people could also waste time on the phone), but a tool, a method of communication. I think it is far more valuable to think of facebook and twitter as more like the phone, or email, than some sort of web destination. In fact, what facebook does is consolidate several methods of communication that have been available for years. This is also a useful analogy when someone gives the kind of reaction that John Stewart recently gave about Twitter: Basically, why would we want more inane chatter, updating every second with the meaningless trivia of our lives? I happen to agree that I don’t want more inane chatter. But twitter and facebook don’t have to be this. Just because personal
video cassette recorders mostly played porn in the 70’s and early 80’s doesn’t mean that they were useless, just that the real good uses hadn’t been discovered yet.

So, if these sites are communication tools, what kind of communication do they afford?

Facebook:

First, you can use it to email, or send messages. These are simple messages (you can’t attach
files) but you can attach links and send to multiple people at once, and just about anything else that email does.

Second, you can chat online. Facebook shows you which of your friends are online, and you can request a chat with any of them.

Third, you can post links or notes. This is basically a blog. You can link to a page and put a comment of your own. Or you can write a note and post that.

Fourth, you can update your status. This is a very brief 140 characters (or so, I think) on what you are doing right now, thinking right now, etc. See the NYTimes on status update style.

Fifth, you can add photos and videos.

Finally, there are any number of applications that you can “plug in” to your facebook page, whether it is tracking your travels, your reading habits, a scrabble game, or any number of virtual gift giving applications.

So, if each of these things is basically possible with just email, why join facebook? Why the craze? Why bother using it with teaching?

Two things set facebook apart.

First, on just about any of the above things, you can comment about some piece of information that your friend has posted. Every single thing on facebook is the potential beginning of a (mostly small talky, chatty, but it doesn't have to be this way) conversation. This is where the connections happen. Just like our brain, the magic is in the connections. By the way, our brain has 100 billion neurons,
but 0.15 quadrillion synapses (an average of 1500 connections per neuron). This is like having
571 facebooks, with everyone having 1500 friends). Think of that next time you lose your keys. Admittedly there is a lot of inane chatter on facebook (which I actually think is a lot more valuable than people might beleive, but that is for another time) but sometimes facebook absolutely shines as a communication medium. Here are a few brief greatest hits from my friends (please share one if you can, I'd love to hear more):

First, I had a friend who was scheduled to leave on an international trip from DC, but had forgotten her passport in Milwaukee. She changed her status update to that, with an "oh no" added at the end. Within a few hours, someone had suggested getting someone to get let into her apartment and fedexing it to her overnight. Then, someone else said they were in the neighborhood and could do that this afternoon. They did it, and she was on her way a day later. What's amazing to me is that the different friends who helped did not need all of the information, but that the value was in the sharing.

Second,I have a few academic friends who post queries, such as the poet who asks "what is the best way to lecture about Sylvia Plath" or the philosopher who asks "Is the tendency to redeem the bad a virtue of character?".

Second, the news feed. The news feed takes any of the above pieces of information (excepting the messages that you send directly to a friend, but also including other pieces of info from applications) and randomly posts it to your friends’ news feeds. You can then choose to hear more or less about certain friends, or about certain kinds of information (I personally like to hear all the status updates, but don’t care who my friends are friends with, or when they update their profile).

What about twitter?

Twitter, at first glance, is just the status updates function of facebook. Only 140 characters. That is how it started. But now it has added the ability to post pictures. And links. Here is a good beginner’s guide to twitter.

The key point to both of these tools, just as any previous communication medium, is how many people you know who are using it. The first telephone really wasn’t that helpful. Nor were the first 100 people who bought one all that enthralled with it.
The telephone is only helpful if everyone has one. This is what has happened with facebook. When everyone is on it (and everyone will be, your parents, your grandparents, your kids) it will be amazing, and it will start to replace the phone. Already, I haven’t seen any data on this, but I am virtually certain, it is the most permanent part of a college student’s online identity. My students rarely use email, and may change email addresses often, or even change phone numbers (and addresses), but no one could imagine changing your facebook identity, and going through the trouble of re-gathering your whole social network.

A few myths to debunk.

First, the internet is not a monolithic medium (hopefully we are beyond that, but it bears being
repeated). Meaning, spending hours on the internet actually tells you very little about how someone spends their time, whether it is useful and cognitively demanding, etc. One could be spending hours making stupid and mean chitchat on a discussion board, or participating in a real discussion about politics in Zimbabwe, or gathering expertise and skills and contributing to a bustling online
community.

Likewise, facebook and twitter use is not monolithic. Some update their status with a lot of meaningless moments about what they are eating, how long the commute was, how they are happy the weekend is here, etc. (no offense, I do this a lot too: sample recent status update: Hmmm, Brussels sprouts). But there are also real problems that are solved, magically and miraculously, by a hive mind of one’s trusted acquaintances. I personally have had face-to-face contact with a childhood friend who currently lives in Venezuela who casually mentioned in his status update that he would be swinging through the Bay Area. He didn’t even know that I lived there, but we had dinner, reminisced about old times, and now have had several conversations online (via facebook, and this blog) about the death of
newspapers.

Twitter is also not monolithic, and while its beginnings are so simple and austere, its use has evolved to include some really interesting possiblities. A plant can twitter when it needs water, a drawbridge can twitter when it is up or down. It is only a matter of time before your parking space twitters when it is empty.
So, some people use twitter as a way to exchange little thoughts with their friends about a great sandwich, and some use it for marketing (see LA-area Korean taco truck). What interests me about twitter is its integration of your friends with celebrities and outside news sources. In facebook, the only communication is two way.
A friendship must be two way, so celebrities would not likely have 16000 friends, because each of these 16000 would have access to all of their status updates, some of which would be personal (although there is a way to tweak this, facebook doesn't make this easy - the become a fan mechanism doesn't integrate well with the rest of your facebook experience). On twitter, the relationship can
be one way. You “following” someone, and that person “following” you are separate things. So I can get Shaq’s tweets without him paying any attention to me. (What’s interesting, is that this actually is not as one way as it sounds, even though Shaq has 180,000 followers, he still manages to add a personal touch to his twitter usage, see great story about meeting some fans in a diner, after he announced he was there on twitter).

Ok, so general principles.
Why should teachers care about these tools? First, because students use them. I am sure you could tune into a conversation in the teacher’s lounge ten (maybe fifteen) years ago about email and how it was something teenagers were using to send meaningless po trivia and vastly important teenage gossip, and how there was little use for zapping instant messages to students. Second because
they can be very powerful tools for learning.

How can they be valuable tools for learning? Because interaction is central to these new modes of communication. Facebook’s mechanism for comments make it so quick and easy to have conversations (again, based on any bit of information) that makes Blackboard style “forums” look very clunky in comparison. Also, I think that students come in with an interactive frame of mind. They come at
it as participants, not as passive viewers, and leveraging that in our teaching can help. Just as turning off the lights and showing a video in class can put students in passive movie watching mode, I think putting class content on facebook and twitter can help students want to participate.

They integrate many media (websites, text notes, photo and video) in a seamless and easily usable way.

So 140 characters is a very small nugget of information. As I tell my students who complain about 2 pages not being enough to summarize a 17 page article. If I told you to do it in a setence, you could, if I told you you had a paragraph, you could. I think condensing thought into such a small chunk can actually be really valuable, and encourage an attention to the detail of words (do you really need that "the"?) that is a great way to teach writing. Think editing and grading tweets sounds ridiculous? Why any more ridiculous than the standard 500 word essay?

They can be used to engage what I feel to be a vital part of critical thinking, which is perspective taking.

Ok, a couple of examples.

First, in my cognitive science class last semester, one of the student’s favorite classes was when the philosophy professor and I co-taught, and co-guided the discussion on the section on language. Seeing both the perspective of the cognitive psychologist and the philosopher, and seeing them interact, was really valuable to the students. This could happen on facebook in the comments as a philosopher, cognitive scientist, etc, weigh in on a piece of reading (or movie, or link, etc), even if only in a few words as a comment.

Second, someone is twittering the diary of an 18^th century farm girl. Someone also began twittering masquerading as Shaquille O’Neal, with witticisms reminiscent of Shaq’s style. This got me thinking that it might be cool to have historical figures twitter in a history class. I am teaching history of psychology next semester, and I am imagining Sigmund Freud having a few tweets, (“Just got out
with a patient, Whoa, Anna O.”) then Jung coming along and responding then a little back and forth (maybe even excerpts from the Freud-Jung letters), then Skinner. Then later thinkers. This could take place in concert with the discussion in class. I was thinking of assigning each person in class a role to play.
What would Freud think about Maslow?
What did Skinner think of William James?
What would either of them think of modern neuroscience? These are really hard questions, but make you really understand the theories and worldviews of these thinkers. I think that kind of perspective taking is at the basis of critical thinking, and could be a great use of twitter in class. It could also be tremendous fun.

Alright, I’ll stop there.

I’ll leave you with a few tools that could help you with similar projects. Tweetlater lets you schedule tweets to appear later, so you don’t have to go on every day, but you could write 40 one line tweets for Freud in advance, and have them appear twice a week. Tweetvisor organizes into conversations, and helps with multiple accounts. Tweetree also helps with conversations and embeds the multimedia so that you don’t have to click on a link.

Thanks for reading, I'd really love to hear what y'all think. Naysayers welcome.

What's the big deal with Twitter (and Facebook)

2009-02-16T00:36:00.000-05:00

What's the big deal with Twitter?
This post is about the "latest" social networking craze of very short personal updates, sent fairly often.
People do this on Twitter, or on Facebook status updates. Many people think these status updates are frivolous, trivial things that young people with too much time on their hands do. I think that if you pay close enough attention, you can see the amazing potential that these tools have.

First, the small bit of emotional currency exchanged by sharing a bit of yourself to your acquaintances (that's who "follows" you on Twitter, or your "friends" on Facebook) is actually important, and real. Increasing the strength of connections between you and your acquaintances is basically what facebook and twitter does, and to me it is really interesting how amazing this can be.

Two examples:
Me reading about a grad school acquaintance's exploits and witticisms (and responding to them, this is key) led her to ask me a more serious and personal question about the job search, which also led me to spend more time and energy answering it. None of this took place over the phone, but our connnection is a lot better than if we had just gone our separate ways.
A childhood friend sent a status update saying he was coming to the area to his facebook friends, and we ended up hanging out and catching up.

Second: Keeping track of all your acquaintances, whether by twitter or by facebook, is a way of storing all their collective knowledge and wisdom, for whenever you need it. James Pogue, the technology columnist for the NYT put it this way:

"I was serving on a grant proposal committee, and I watched as a fellow judge asked his Twitter followers if a certain project had been tried before. In 15 seconds, his followers replied with Web links to the information he needed. No e-mail message, phone call or Web site could have achieved the same effect. (It’s only a matter of time before some “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” contestant uses Twitter as one of his lifelines.)"

I've seen this work as well on facebook. Every now and then, someone will post a question. Friends will then respond. I've seen some amazing group problem solving at work on facebook. One was someone was in DC and forgot their passport in Milwaukee. Within hours, one of her friends suggested a solution and another was in a position to implement it.

The third thing I see from twitter is the potential to mix personal and societal news sources. A twitter account could include your mom and dad, as well as Shaquille O'Neal, Tina Fey ("I don't know why I bother chewing corn anymore") and other celebrities. It could include links to your favorite blogs or columnists. I am also intrigued by other uses of twitter, like letting you know whether a drawbridge is up, or when a plant needs water (each of these is now available).

Finally, I don't really use twitter. Why? I only have 8 followers and 8 following. Facebook on the other hand, I have close to 200 friends (although most of my friends have much more), and I use it all the time. These tools are only as useful as your social network.

Cedar's digest guide to the financial crisis

2009-02-07T03:08:00.000-05:00

Ok, so, I am trying to post something every week now. We'll see how long that lasts. This week, a collection of thoughts and links on our financial crisis, with a psychological approach.

For beginners, or people interested in seeing a quick visual way of looking at how things went down, take a look at the long flow chart over at FlowingData. I like it that it is a timeline, which includes both events and quotes. I am sure that it simplifies some complex issues, but it is overall pretty good introduction. Another excellent introduction is, amazingly enough, from This American Life, on NPR.

Second, I have been thinking a lot about Jared Diamond's book, Collapse, in relation to the financial crisis. The book tracks the collapse of different civilizations, from the Anasazi, to Easter Island, to the Scandanavians in Greenland, to modern day Rwanda. One of the central themes of the book is that people do not plan ahead. Period. Across cultures, across times, climate, weather, whatever. If there is a 5 year period of great rains and crops, people feel great, they have more children, then, when it is followed by a 10 year drought, thousands (if not millions) of people die, whether by starving, or by killing each other. This same pattern is evident in the way that the financial industry calculated and assessed risk (see NYTimes Mag on risk and VAR). In short, the complex statistical model that was used, only used a few years in the past, and had no way of predicting how big the risk was (it could predict with reasonable accuracy 95% of the time, but it had no way of predicting how big the gain or loss could be the other 5%). The other problem with the model was that it became the industry standard. For an industry that purports to solve problems with competition, no one seemed to see anything wrong with a monopoly of risk models. If competition and diversity is good, they should be good there too.

What about the psychology in these economic events? I think it is most useful to apply what we know about psychology to three particular phenomena. First, the securitization and separation of the mortgages from a relationship between lender and borrower to one between a complex and dispersed network of investors and a borrower. Second, the attack on "corporate greed" and executive bonuses. Finally, what to do in the future.

When the mortgages started getting sliced and diced and sold as securities, and later more like bonds, it effectively transformed something that was long term and low risk into something short term, with varying levels of risk (the NYRB has a good review of the history of this: Jeff Madrick on "How We Were Ruined and What We Can Do"). Combined with all of the de-regulation of the 90's, form my perspective, the chief effect of doing this was that a long-term loan now became a short-term security. In doing this, it was in everyone's best interest to prop up the housing market, and in no one's best interest to evaluate the long term. I think psychology research (and Diamond's book too) show that people do not need help reacting to short term incentives (there are various cognitive biases which show how our memories are short, our decisions are based on more recent events far more than they should be, etc), but what we need government, or rules, or groups of reasonable people to do, is help us keep our long term interests in mind. The financial system was in effect an echo chamber for our worst short term impulses.
This leads me to attacks on corporate greed, and the hubbub over executive bonuses (and bonuses in general) on Wall Street. I think to label it greed is counterproductive, and seeking to "punish" the leaders of these companies is distracting from the real issue. Punishing the people, and ignoring the incentive structure that drove their decisions, will just get us into this same mess again. So, what were their incentives? The "efficient markets hypothesis" would say that the stock price is all the incentive a company needs, and that things will work themselves out. This is clearly not the case. So what was the problem? Was it a few greedy nakers who took too much risk and got caught gambling with more money than their companies had? No, it was an entire industry that was encouraged to gamble. We should have realized this with Enron (and many did, despite the "no one could have seen this coming" attitude that Greenspan et al take now). When everything that the company was evaluated on was tied to the stock price, the very smart Enron people (Andrew Skilling especialy) figured out how to effectively make the stock price go up (again, mostly in the short term) without actually doing much else (i.e. generating anything else of real value). Saying that they got personally rich misses the point, just as it does in the current situation. The bankers, and the companies they ran, were only looking in the short term, because that is what the system they were in supported, in addition to the fact that this is the way people think. Rather than attack corporate greed, or 40,000 dollar toilets, or whatever, I would hope that we would realize that this isn't just a few bad apples, or even a bad tree or two, but bad soil we are talking about here.

So, the future. I have tried to learn enough about our money system to figure out what the proposed solutions are, but I haven't heard enough talk about the above in stark terms; that what supported this mess was a massive reliance on short term strategies, and in the market's ability to police itself. We don't just need more effective policeman (to prevent future Madoff's) but we need an enitrely different incentive structure. I can accept that entirely nationalizing the whole financial system might not be optimal, but neither is a situation where we have individual banks and bankers taking risks that they know will be insured by the federal government if they fail, but if they win they get the profits. It seems like when talk gets to the terms of some of these deals, there gets to be some concern that if the deal isn't good enough, if there aren't enough incentives for the companies to participate, they won't want to, so we need to make the terms good enough for them. I have been disappointed in is that no one takes the next step and says, well, the current incentive structure has gotten us into this mess, why are we still acting as if it works? This smart guy (Sal Khan, he has over 700 youtube videos explaining math, finance, physics, and programming) has proposed that maybe the entire financial system is corrupted, and it might be cheaper and easier to invent an entirely new one. In other words, the point of the financial system is to move money from people who don't need it right then (savings, investments, etc), to people who do need it (startup businesses, building projects, etc). Why not invent a new system, knowing what we do now? Sounds crazy, but I think that is a good start. Recognizing that the system is fundamentally bankrupt, not just a few bad apples. Michael Lewis and David Einhorn in the NYTimes
have a good long op-ed that I think everyone should read.
So, this post is far too long, obviously, but I think approaching the financial crisis like a psychologist yields the following insights: A) the bankers were not greedy and evil, just acting according to the incentives that were in their situation, B) to fix the situation, we will have to change these incentives, not just the personel, and weeding out "good" banks from "bad" banks.

Some other random links that I have found interesting about this: What a modern depression would look like... from the Boston Globe.
A brief piece about why money has no value, from Patrick Rhone. I have been thinking about this idea more and more too, and how the financial crisis makes it more apparent what things have real value including obvious things like food, shelter and family and friends, but also less obvious things such as skills of making stuff that people can actually use. As things become more and more expensive to get from China, a lot of things that were once disposable (like, say, shoes) now need fixing.

Thanks for tuning in. Next post will be a light one, about how to get more out of twitter, or, for those of you who would never join in a million years, what the big fuss is about.

The Impending Death of Newspapers

2009-01-23T17:08:00.007-05:00

Lately I have been obsessed with the impending death of newspapers. While I don't sit down every day and read a newspaper, I just can't imagine life without the New York Times (here is a scenario by which the NYT goes bankrupt by May, from the Atlantic Monthly). And I have some nostalgia for newsprint, but really, not that much. So, here are a few thoughts, in random order, annotated with some of the sources that have led to these thoughts:

What is dying? The traditional print edition of the traditional hometown newspaper is dying. I think making it this specific is important, because news itself is not dying, just the version of it that many of us had become comfortable with. Interesting thing about it, is that newspapers knew this a long long time ago:

"The industry has understood from the advent of AM radio in the 1920s that technology would eventually be its undoing and has always behaved accordingly."

From Jack Schafer's great piece at Slate "How newspapers tried to invent the web and failed"
Here is also a cute little piece on the evening news about the newspaper delivered over the phone to a personal computer (my favorite bit is how the guy using this service is given a caption of "personal computer owner")

So, newspapers have known for along time that they were going to be done in by technology, and mostly their efforts have been to stall the technology, not to adopt it and change their business model. One interesting point I hadn't totally realized until I read this piece in Philadelphia Magazine was that while the editorial content obviously has more competitors now that everyone has a blog, the reason for the financial failure in newspapers is almost purely from the lack of advertising (although I suppose that does eventually come back to the fact that the eyes are going elsewhere, so advertisers follow the eyes). So, really, Craigslist is mostly to blame for taking down all these papers. Funny that craigslist founder Craig Newmark has made zero dollars on all his fame. But anyways...

Given that something is dying, what is going to stay? Will the freedom of the press become just as irrelevant as our freedom to choose our electric company? Will there be no more press? I think what will mostly happen is that newspapers will stop entirely doing those things that they have been not doing well for years now. (This point is made in more depth by Clay Shirky on newspapers and online media) Personal ads, reporting on things that others do much better, such as sports scores, etc. What I hope, and I think this is reasonable, is that they continue to do well those things that they have done well, which is to provide a good forum for the columnists and thinkers we have come to know and love (any look at the most emailed at NYTimes usually includes Krugman, Brooks, etc), deep investigative reporting, and organizing the mountains of information available these days to anyone with an internet connection.
Why newspapers should be endowed nonprofits, from the NYT

Regarding the first: Now that you can get an email digest of someone' s columns, or have an RSS feed in your personal page (iGoogle, or yahoo, or whatever), the brand of the person is getting to be bigger than the paper. Of course this did happen in the past, but not as much as now. There is no more paging to your favorite columnist, you just go straight to that, skipping the masthead. As times go on, I wonder if people will more and more simply subscribe to their favorites, and not bother with the traditional front page at all, until a big event happens. I find myself doing this now. I don't think this is a terrible thing, that the name recognition of the writer means more than the paper. Check out Christopher Hitchens on being waterboarded (I forget where from). Or Roger Ebert, a brand unto himself, and worth it. Great film critic, but also cultural commentator. The value of the written word persists. The Huffington Post recognizes this, and gives the byline a much much bigger font size than traditional media.

Regarding the second and third: Deep investigative reporting is not what it used to be. Cultivating sources and getting to stories that are neglected and not told elsewhere will still happen, but not with nearly the kind of frequency as it has in the past decades. What will increase, I believe, will be more opportunities to use a sophistication with data and multiple sources of information and consolidate it into one easy place. The NYTimes is finally discovering that there are more ways to add value than the text narrative, and they are expanding their definition of journalism to meet their readers.
Some good examples of this:
NYTimes introduces Congress API and an interactive visualization of all of the parking tickets for one year in NY. Also recently announced: The Best Sellers API, where programmers can take the data (and there is a lot of great data) of the NYTimes best seller list, and put it to good use, like a book suggestion program. There was a profile in New York Magazine of the new New York Times journalist/programmers. The NYT is now having a big fun "hack day" for programmers to come up with cool ways to use all the data that they have (they adopt an Open Source attitude, towards this at least).
The Boston Globe has filled a photography niche with its The Big Picture, a really nice website of news photos (check out their Earth from Above)

Part of the problem that newspapers have is that the public's trust in them has both eroded and splintered. Maybe people didn't entirely trust Hearst newspapers, but they were pretty much the only game in town, so they got all the trust that people could give to a media institution. Now you can instantly cross check the NYT, Wash Post, Daily Kos, HuffPo and Daily Kos. There are so many little niches that the one behemoth that provides everything just doesn't work anymore. This trend is accentuated by the ease of aggregation of content from many sources. It is actually very easy to pull together your own "newspaper" of sorts, with sports done by ESPN, politics by 538, everything else by Jon Stewart and Colbert . Of course what happens is a Big Sort, but for media, such that I could go a week without reading anything I disagreed with, which I don't think is actually a very good thing, convenient in the short run, but I think a long term bad. The other thing in addition to aggregation is the value of a trustworthy filter for the mountains of news and information that come from everywhere.
Some filters that I have found useful are:
http://waxy.org/links - quick links to interesting stuff, videos, news stories, etc. Has a nerdy flavor (some video games and comics and computer stuff)
http://www.kottke.org - Also very nerdy, but every third or fourth link is something fascinating
that you wouldn't have found anywhere else
Give me something to read, an aggregator that gives you a few things to read, based on what other people (who use a service called instapaper) have bookmarked. This is really interesting because it basically spits out at you an interesting or noteworthy piece from anywhere, but mostly The Atlantic, The New Republic, WSJ, NYT, WaPo, NYRB, New Yorker, the Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, which no one has the time to read all of them. The toread tag on delicious works similarly
There is also: the most emailed news, a site that aggregates the most emailed news stories across newspapers

I should just stop, and of course say that just about nothing from this post is original, but that I thought many of my readers (all 5 of you) might find some of this interesting given that some of it has come from sources that might not pass your radar screen. It is, after all, Cedar's digest.

Excel Geeks everywhere...

2008-12-02T02:19:00.001-05:00

I've got something for you...
Watch this video, then bookmark this site, I am sure you will be back
http://cleanupdata.com/#video

It is called Magic/Replace, and it is basically a smart spreadsheet program that knows what you want to do with your spreadsheet. You just have to watch the video.

Track where the flu is, by tracking google search terms

2008-11-11T19:26:00.000-05:00

How might you know whether there is a flu outbreak coming to your state? If you only knew how many people are getting flu medication... But, a reasonable proxy is tracking how many people use the Google for flu remedies. I think this is a great use of google data, and not at all an invasion of privacy. Sometime the urge is to protect all of your data, and search terms as your own private information (that's right, most people don't want anyone knowing that they googled "Sarah Palin bikini pictures"). But giving that information in aggregate, with no identifying information, other than state and zip code, can be really valuable, for tracking diseases.

Here is the link, check back to see when the flu is coming ot your state...

Does it work? Here is a retrospective analysis, using CDC figures of the past, compared to google search terms. Nice.

Why Obama will win

2008-10-15T14:43:00.001-04:00

I have to share a few interesting links, and how Barack Obama has already won.

First, from a focus group done by a republican consultant in an Upper Midwestern state, described in Ben Smith's blog:

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

This is how badly the Republican brand is damaged by Bush. Obama is starting to get some votes from racists (link to story of a 95-year old grandfather who urged his grandson to "Make sure you vote for that colored boy"), from people who think he is Muslim, and from people who think he is going to be a bad president. That's how low the bar has been set.

So, this is already looking really, really bad for McCain.

Now, the next thing, what most distinguishes the Obama campaign is not the speeches (although they are great) or his own remarkable story, or even the disgust that people feel toward Bush, is the community organizing that he has done. A New Yorker writer (I forget who) described seeing Obama speak and feeling inspired and uplifted, but coming out and not really having a great idea of why, or what Obaam said to make him feel that way. What the Obama campaign has done is channel that inspiration into a coherent and sophisticated political machine. What that means is that not only are there record number of donors, but also that there are record number of volunteers, and that the time of these volunteers is used efficiently and effectively.

What does this mean? When someone volunteers to canvass a neighborhood or make phone calls, they could be total strangers to the callers on the other end, but the Obama campaign matches demographics and other variables to try to get a best match between the volunteer and the people they are talking to. The voter registration effort is run like a swiss watch.

All this occurs under the radar, because it has a relatively minimal effect on national tracking polls. And of course the story may become that people were so nervous about the economy that they overwhelmingly chose their pocketbooks over their misgivings about Obama. But I think the real story is that Obama actually backs up his words with deeds. And so far, those deeds have been how he organizes his campaign. And it is done with very careful attention to the bottom-up effects of voter registration, voter turnout and neighbor to neighbor interactions.

Using Amazon's mechanical turk for social science research

2008-10-12T16:40:00.000-04:00

Have you all heard of amazon's Mechanical Turk? Basically it is a place where you can post a task to be done over the web, and how much you want to pay for it, and then people can sign up and do the task. Basically it is for tasks which a large group of people are better than computers. So one task might be, classify these images as either people, places, or animals, and for each 10 images you classify, I will pay 1 cent. I have heard of people using it as a transcription service, but splitting up their audio file into hundreds of little bits, paying a cent or so for each, and then sending it on. From my recollection, this resulted in someone paying 10 or 15 bucks for a transcript of an hour-long interview. Nice.
So, now, people are starting to realize that this might be a good use for social science research. Look at this guy's blog post on how he used it for some basic moral psychology research:
http://anyall.org/blog/2008/01/moral-psychology-on-amazon-mechanical-turk/
In all that I have read, it seems like the data you get is actually pretty good, and amazingly cheap and fast (You can get thousands of responses within a few hours). I am trying to think of some good applications of this, but probably not in perception. Any thoughts out there on this?

The Future of Comunication

2008-09-27T23:46:00.001-04:00

The head of IT at Amherst College compiled the technology use habits of his incoming freshmen (class of 2012). Here it is.
Some tidbits:
There are 438 people
99% have facebook accounts
1% have landlines

The personal landline is a technology that will be obsolete relatively soon. Why have that, when you have caller id, and even web based filtering systems like Google's Grand Central?

Year that an incoming Amherst College class first created a
Facebook group so that they could socialize and otherwise get to know
each other prior to arriving on campus: 2006.
By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts.

By the end of August! (that is, before school starts). I remember having the awkward roommate conversation with my soon-to-be-roommates, but this is incredible. The level of social knowledge and connection that they enter with just amazes me. This is probably not true everywhere, but it is still an incredible difference with how college students interact. It is also amazing how facebook has become the dominant social network. I am sure MySpace still has plenty of subscribers, but facebook will win in a few years. I am already bugging all of my non-facebook real life friends to join. Ultimately, the strength is that it does facilitate face to face communication. The next time I see one of the friends that I occasionally facebook, it will be a much richer and more intimate social interaction. This is what I imagine happens at Amherst. By the time you arrive on campus, you already know who is from your hometown, which classes are the hard ones for freshmen, which dorm is freezing in winter, etc.

Another one:
Of the 438, only 14 brought desktops.

The desktop computer is now a corporate, business machine. I think this is probably true in a lot of places, laptops are how students (and 18 year olds) deal with computers. What comes with this is an expectation that any bit of information is readily available at any time. I've had students whip out theirs in the middle of class to answer a question raised (although in some cases, their answer is actually not really on the mark).

Anyways, the future is an interesting place.

Sarah Palin's email address hacked

2008-09-17T14:22:00.000-04:00

So, you may have heard (by reading the NY Times article this past Sunday) about some of Sarah Palin's secretive practices as mayor of Wasila and governor of Alaska. One of the interesting tidbits was that she used a private email address to conduct official government business (as some in the current Bush administration have also done, especially in the Monica Goodling fiasco). Here is one quote from the article:

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

and another choice section:

While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”
Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account “when there was significant state business.”
On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”

But here is the big news, that personal email account has been hacked, and the password was released to a hacker forum, which you may recognize from another piece in the New York Times Magazine on the hacker (or troll) culture (here is the link to that). Here is the extensive summary of events as to how this happened. But if you want a very brief summary from me:

1) Account was hacked (actually two :gov.sarah@yahoo, and gov.palin@yahoo), password was released to hacker forum, screenshots were taken of the inbox and some emails within. (It was confirmed as her actual email address)
2) Some of the screenshots reference people in Alaska government, including the Lt. Gov. Parnell
Some of the screenshots are of family photos
3) A good samaritan took the password, changed it, and announced his intention to turn it back to Gov. Palin on the forum, by copying his message to one of her contacts. (but he didn't black out the new password, doh!)
4) Everyone tries to go on and change the password at the same time, causing Yahoo to lock the account.

5) Gov Palin is notified of this security breach, and immediately deletes both accounts. This could be viewed as destruction of evidence, since those emails are possibly involved in several current legal battles.

6) There is currently an internal battle on the hacker forum, as the members post and re-post compilations of the screenshots, and moderators take them down.

There is also a summary on digg.

I guess John McCain should teach her how to use email...

Comparing the Obama and McCain tax plans

2008-09-14T00:26:00.003-04:00

From chartjunk (a blog dedicated to eradicating bad charts, named after a term Edward Tufte coined): They have redone the Washington Post's chart which compares the Obama and McCain tax plans. Rightly pointing out that the top two brackets represent only 1%, but yet get around 20% of the physical chart. Their chart is more honestly to scale (or at least tries to be). It is on top, and the WaPo is below

Check out the whole original post, if you want more details.

Use this to complement your use of http://www.Obamataxcut.com
At least one of these pictures belongs in an ad somewhere (or am I just a huge nerd for wanting a bar chart in a political ad?)

Hilarious translation of freestyle rap battle

2008-09-11T13:00:00.000-04:00

Ok, a break from the political rage, for a little fun, courtesy of Waxy Links, my favorite one stop for everything cool but not yet popular on the web:
Check this out from CollegeHumor:
Translation of a freestyle rap battle

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

It is not really necessary to watch the original, but you can if you want:

Also, a list of songs related to the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider: here.
And just in case you were wondering if the LHC has destroyed the earth yet, you can check this handy website:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Also, fun with names:
NameVoyager shows the popularity of your first name over time and World Names Profiler shows where your last name is popular.
Apparently Riener is big in Austria and Hungary.

How much is an Obama Presidency worth to you?

2008-09-10T01:27:00.000-04:00

For those of you (I think maybe 3 or 4 of my friends read this) who do any sort of political action or Obama-related advocacy, I think this is a useful tool.
http://obamataxcut.com
You could also, put in your own yearly income, family's filing status, etc, and check out what an Obama presidency would be worth to you... and then donate it to Obama, I would suggest.
Not that he is in dire straits, for those of you who have been fretting because of the polls, please check out more detailed and sophisticated analysis from some people who know their numbers and how to read a poll:
Summary here of a lot of findings (I know it is on super lefty Daily Kos, but their approach to polling often tends to be reasonable and measured)
Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com, talks about why, after the conventions, more Republicans might pick up the phone, whereas before they were embarrassed. But this fact can bias the polls.

Also, consider this basic fact, there are far more registered democrats than republicans now (this has not always been the case). This is something that is more certain than the polls (this is not people on the phone, but actual voter records).

Anyways, I am still going to go out on a limb and predict Obama to get more than 300 electoral votes. You heard it here first (ok not first, but still early).

and you know how he is going to do it? By being a community organizer. And people will look back and consider the irony, that he was insulted with that at the Republican convention, and yet his attitude towards the ground game, and the get-out-the-vote machine he has built (starting with the primaries, remember he won the Texas caucuses?) will eventually win him the election.

Palin's handwriting on an earmark

2008-09-04T13:43:00.001-04:00

I just can't resist posting this one, there is a document obtained by the Washington Independent (I know, I've never heard of them either) that has Palin's handwriting announcing an earmark with pride. You can read about this theme in her past at the ultra-liberal, angry left bazaar that is the Daily Kos, they often overreact from my point of view, but this one diary is a good one. And that image is just great.

McCain doesn't really want to keep running

2008-08-29T15:03:00.001-04:00

My theory: McCain is sick of running for President, dealing with the Rovians, dealing with an increasingly less enamored press corps, and running against Barack Obama. You may have heard about his recent interview with Time magazine, which you can read (McCain's prickly TIME interview) but listening to it is also available (the MP3)
I think his nomination of Sarah Palin for VP is also illustrative of his disillusionment with running as a Republican this year and having to deal with all the other VP candidates. My prediction: He is going to lose as big as is possible, in almost all of the swing states.

Great quotes from the convention

2008-08-27T14:02:00.001-04:00

Here are some great quotes from the convention, in case you were busy preparing for classes and missed all the speeches. Just a few of my favorites:

"People who live in seven houses shouldn't throw stones" - Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota)

"You know, it was once said of the first George Bush that he was born on
third base and thought he'd hit a triple. Well, with the 22 million new
jobs and the budget surplus Bill Clinton left behind, George W. Bush
came into office on third base -- and then he stole second. And John
McCain cheered him every step of the way." - Gov. Ted Strickland (Ohio)

The future of the browser

2008-08-27T00:27:00.001-04:00

I've seen some of the videos on concepts that Mozilla has done on the future of the browser, and I haven't been all that impressed. You can see for yourself if you are interested: It is called Aurora
But this new thing is definitely much more in line with what I think could be the future, and I am going to use it right now. It is called Ubiquity, and it is trying to integrate the many ways we interact with the web.
They give the example of how we might plan a trip, email a friend our itinerary, add the event to our calendar, search through maps, etc. Take a look at the tutorial, I think we will be hearing a lot more about this very soon.

Does the Pope sh*t in the woods?

2008-08-18T01:33:00.002-04:00

Ok, this is pretty cool. The USGS (US Geological Survey) has set up video cameras in remote areas in Glacier National Park. The cameras go on with a motion detector, and transmit via the internet.
Here is the whole article about it
And here is a video with three bears interacting with a wolf.

Hamlet (as if written only in Facebook new feed updates)

2008-08-07T20:53:00.003-04:00

From McSweeney's internet tendency (those who brought you the hilarious lists), comes...
Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)

A favorite excerpt...

The queen is worried about Ophelia.

Ophelia loves flowers. Flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers. Oh, look, a river.

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float.

Samantha Power in the NY Review of Books

2008-07-28T23:30:00.002-04:00

Samantha Power reviews a few books in the NY Review this month. It was a good review of the abuses of the Bush administration (and how they are not an exception, but the culmination of conservative foreign policy), but also notable for a few great quotes that I hadn't read elsewhere:
Here is the full article
The quotes:

"Based on my experience in talking to al-Qaeda members," John Cloonan, an FBI counterterrorism specialist testified to Congress recently,

I am persuaded that revenge, in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland, is coming, that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.[4]

and this from everyone's favorite worthless neocon, Douglass Feith

In 2003, for instance, when the reporter Jeffrey Goldberg told Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, that US troops in Iraq had not been greeted with flowers, Feith said that the Iraqis had been too spooked by the presence of Saddam supporters to show their true emotions. "But," he said, "they had flowers in their minds."

There you have it. It is the liberals who are wishy washy, but "flowers in their minds" from one of the architects of the Iraq War. That quote should have had more legs, because to me it just epitomizes the refusal of any of the civilian officials in the Pentagon to take in anything from the outside world to inform their beliefs and policies.

The Onion predicts the future...

2008-07-23T23:18:00.002-04:00

From January 17th, 2001, the Onion headline:
Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

Sadly pretty accurate. One could look today and think "You couldn't even make this stuff up." But then... someone did, just for the sake of comedy.

How Walkable is San Francisco?

2008-07-15T01:13:00.002-04:00

What I have always wanted when we go into San Francisco, is an easily readable topographical map. This is a reasonably good start... except note that basically, most of the city is barely walkable. This is from some guy named Lee Byron... mashing up some different maps.
Here is his site, and the large version of the map:
Mapping Walkability in San Francisco
Of course, the best would be if Google maps had a whole set of options built right in, so that you could click to view "walkability", or "playgrounds with mulch or rubber, but not sand or dirt", or something like that. That would be awesome.

"Make a n**%a wanna invest in PBS"

2008-07-11T12:25:00.001-04:00

Nas' new video about Fox News (Sly Fox). I don't think I would have ever heard the above line, but it is there, and other good ones too.

Ira Glass on practice, failure and storytelling

2008-07-09T00:09:00.002-04:00

I think this is a great little piece on storytelling, the value of failure, and how to get good at something. I am going to find some excuse to make my students watch it.

Interesting takes on Bill Gates, on the occasion of his retirement

2008-07-01T00:25:00.001-04:00

Anil Dash says that by combining Microsoft with the gates Foundation, what he has essentially done is impose a 100 dollar per white collar worker "cure AIDS tax" or "stop malaria tax" on every corporation in the developed world. Interesting reading...
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2008/06/bill-gates-and-the-greatest-tech-hack-ever.html

And I enjoyed reading a rant of an email that Bill himself sent on one frustrating episode he had with a Windows product.
You can read his whole 4 page email here:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

Bush impersonator reads kids letters

2006-04-24T13:14:00.001-04:00

Pretty funny concept

Manage your email

2006-03-14T14:15:00.000-05:00

Here are some links for managing email (both those you have and those you send)

For those of you who sometimes have problems managing email, it can seem like you spend more time doing less work. Below are a number of resources for various aspects of managing email, from getting your own inbox under control, to making sure other people respond to you emails.
My own system involves:

Mozilla Thunderbird as the email program,

three filters:

One to gray out anything not addressed to me

Two to send email from two distribution lists (Teachers of Psychology, Tomorrow's Professor) immediately into their own folder (I can catch up once a week)

When I send a message, it is bcc'ed to my gmail account, so I have an easily searchable archive of what I have sent.
UVA's greylisting service

Two guides for getting your inbox under control:
http://www.43folders.com/izero/

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/getting-to-done/getting-to-done-communication-a-guide-to-email-triage-156948.php

Email overload (lots of information about handling email)
http://itzy.wordpress.com/

like: how to keep track of overdue responses:
http://itzy.wordpress.com/2006/02/06/how-to-keep-track-of-overdue-responses/#more-15

"Googling" your emails
http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000168.html

Color code messages that are addressed to you
For thunderbird
http://carl.evankovich.com/2006/03/02/color-code-email-messages/
For outlook
http://itzy.wordpress.com/2005/12/27/how-to-color-code-your-messages/

National Archives video online

2006-02-25T22:38:00.000-05:00

Google video is putting video from the National Archives online for all to use. Pretty cool idea, except it is a little buggy right now. WWII newsreels, NASA films, and films from the departmet of the Interior are up for the first round.

http://video.google.com/nara.html

from lifehacker

Harry Frankfurt "On Bullshit"

2006-02-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

Video interview from Harry Frankfurt - author of "On Bullshit"
This interview is two tweed jacket academic talking heads, sitting in front of stacks of books, talking about bullshit.
Both hilarious and insightful.
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/video/frankfurt/

Manage your email

2006-02-08T13:40:00.000-05:00

Some tips on how to manage your behemoth of an inbox
http://www.43folders.com/2006/02/06/email-ninja/

Superbowl commercials

2006-02-06T11:35:00.000-05:00

Complete superbowl commericals,
http://video.google.com/superbowl.html

Free information from your phone

2006-01-26T21:03:00.000-05:00

1800 555-TELL gives you all sorts of information from your phone
(directions, news, sports scores, etc)
1800-FREE-411 offers free 411 services.

For each, you may have to listen to a brief ad, but it is unlikely.

23 Uses for your thumb drive

2006-01-19T15:25:00.000-05:00

Useful article from PC World on what you can do to soup up your little ol' USB drive
link

One example: TO synchronize between computer and drive, use the Microsoft Windows XP SyncToy

Free online stock photos for presentations

2006-01-18T09:23:00.000-05:00

Tired of clip art? Google Images not giving you what you want?
Try this link for a list of places that provide free images
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/01/where_can_you_f.html

from lifehacker

Handy little option

2006-01-06T15:07:00.000-05:00

For those who like to see how much is in their folders without any crazy right clicking...
http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/

from lifehacker

Fun with Photoshop

2006-01-05T13:26:00.000-05:00

The website fark.com has a photoshop contest every now and then. Some of them are great.
I like this one :

Here is the link for all of them:

Attn: Amazon shoppers

2006-01-02T14:43:00.000-05:00

Amazon has a price guarantee such that if an item you buy goes down in price anytime within 30 days, you are entitled to the difference in price. All you have to do is email them, and they mail you a check. See this link for a more thorough explanation
But that would mean you would have to check back on the prices of things you bought, which is a hassle.
There is a nice website that will track this for you:
http://www.refundplease.com
So, for each item you purchase just enter in the price, the ISBN (for books) or the ASN (for everything else) and your email address, and they will tell you if the price drops. Pretty handy.

Printable coupons

2005-12-21T15:38:00.000-05:00

How about some last minute shopping?
Printable coupons to lotsa stores that you actually might go to (like BestBuy, Banana Republic, Borders)
http://www.wow-coupons.com/all-printable-retail-coupons.php

McSweeney's Lists

2005-12-20T20:58:00.000-05:00

From Dave Eggers and his type of folks, their internet magazine is called McSweeneys
It contains an unsung, yet hilarious group of lists.
Here is a list of my favorite lists
One of my favorites is:
Implausible Claims
Made by Vanilla Ice in His 1990 No. 1 Hit "Ice Ice Baby."

It's not easy looking hard while eating a cupcake

2005-12-19T22:42:00.000-05:00

Funny video from Saturday Night Live.
Chronicles of Narnia rap
http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zLElfJ9YCh0

I Love [the] New York[er]

2005-12-18T15:32:00.000-05:00

Great magazine. Here is a list of what I think are the best articles of the year:

Burkhard Bilger's "The Egg Men" - Egg cooks in Las Vegas

John McPhee's "Out in the Sort" - What you never knew about UPS, the life inside the hub in Louisville.

Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Climate of Man" - Two part article on global warming

Tad Friend's "Secret Agent Man" - A Profile of a non-Hollywood, Hollywood agent

Jerome Groopman's "A Model Patient" Simulation in medical training

Richard Preston's"Capturing the Unicorn" Making a digital copy of a famous tapestry uses lotsa computers and advanced math

Margaret Talbot "Darwin on the Dock" - The newest trial of evolution vs. intelligent design with some colorful characters

How-to Do just about anything

2005-12-16T20:51:00.000-05:00

Wiki-How
http://wiki.ehow.com/Main-Page
wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest how-to manual. With your contributions, we can create a free resource that helps people by offering clear, concise solutions to the problems of everyday life. wikiHow currently contains 3961 articles written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers. Please join us by writing a new page, or editing a page that someone else has started.

Voicemail by email

2005-12-14T22:36:00.000-05:00

from lifehacker

Manage your voicemail from your email program with GotVoice

GotVoice Net lets you manage your voicemail online using an email program (Microsoft Outlook®, AOL, MSN, etc.) or your own personal GotVoice web page. The GotVoice Net Web Interface makes voicemail accessible virtually anywhere you log onto the Internet - at home, at work, when you’re traveling, even in a coffee shop hotspot.

Tricked Out Desktops

2005-12-13T18:43:00.000-05:00

Check out the tricked out desktops from Lifehacker readers
http://www.flickr.com/groups/lifehacker-desktop-showandtell/

Many ways to make Windows (or Mac) look nicer, and easier to use.

Pavement Illusions

2005-12-11T22:14:00.000-05:00

This guy rocks. He paints on pavement in 3-D.
Julian Beever

PhotoStory - Ken Burns-ify your photos

2005-12-10T21:37:00.000-05:00

The first link of the day is from Microsoft, of all places. A fun little app that lets you go all Ken Burns on your pictures.
Download the app, import pictures, record voice-over narration, zoom in and out on your pictures, choose your music, and you're done.
It is called PhotoStory 3 Download here
Referred by lifehacker

Book Review - Freakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

2005-11-09T15:11:00.000-05:00

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, William Morrow $25.95

Freakonomics, immensely popular and critically acclaimed, promises to help us see through the eyes of the most interesting economist today: Steven Levittt. Despite being marketed as a surprisingly interesting book about the normally dull field of economics (as its title suggests), this book offers much more than a new perspective on an old field. Indeed, as Levitt himself admits early on he knows very little (and has very little interest) in economics as currently conceived.

What Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner do offer is an integrated and fascinating way of looking at the social sciences. Whether examining crime in cities or baby-naming habits of wealthy and poor parents, Levitt looks at the available data, and draws novel conclusions. The topics he considers are of great interest to all social scientists. Psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists have considered the causes of crime, effects of parenting, and the consequences of drug trafficking, but few have arrived at the incisive and unique conclusions in this book. Levitt’s creative and unique perspective leads the reader to wonder how he became an economist. In an alternate life, Levitt may have been a standup comedian, humorously comparing dealing drugs to working at a fast food joint. In this one, however, Levitt the economist analyzes the financial ledger of a drug dealing gang, and finds amazing similarity with McDonald’s corporate structure.

Following in the footsteps of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and Blink, Freakonomics explains complicated problems with compelling data described in simple and elegant prose. While the conclusions may not always be completely satisfactory (indeed, some are quite controversial) it is impossible not to be fascinated by the approach.

Book Review: The Three-Pound Enigma - Shannon Moffett

2005-11-02T21:51:00.000-05:00

The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the quest to unlock its mysteries

By Shannon Moffett $24.95 Algonquin Books

What could be more fascinating than the human brain? In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, Shannon Moffett takes us on a journey to meet the people who study the brain and learn their discoveries. Written as a series of essays, interspersed with little tutorials describing the brain at different periods of development, The Three-Pound Enigma provides a lively, yet meandering, tour through the modern science of the human brain. Rather than describing the facts of the brain in detached and scholarly style, Moffett humanizes the quest for the brain’s secrets by visiting the sundry cast of characters, which include renowned philosopher of the mind, Daniel Dennett, dream researcher Bob Stickgold, and neurosurgeon Roberta Glick.

While this approach may make each individual essay more interesting, ultimately the focus on personal narrative undermines the coherence of the book. The collection thus seems like a series of episodes in a PBS series rather than a unified volume about modern cognitive science. Rather than gently guided from one topic to the next logical step, the reader is awkwardly shuffled from a dream laboratory, to the controversial (and some would say marginal) topic of dissociative identity disorder (or multiple personalities) to the infant field of neuroethics. Despite this flaw, and the weakness of certain chapters relative to others, those who enjoyed Sacks’ Anthropologist on Mars or other popular work on the brain should find this book an engaging read about the fascinating bridge between brain and mind.

Book Review: Fool's Paradise - Stewart Justman

2005-11-02T21:49:00.000-05:00

Fool’s Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology, by Stewart Justman. Ivan R. Dee, September, 2005. $27.50

You have heard of Dr. Phil, you probably have friends who have adopted the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you may have even nodded blandly upon hearing that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Most take the ubiquity of pop psychology for granted, and if the number of books sold is any index of public opinion, many agree with its many principles. Stewart Justman, winner of the PEN Award for his previous book The Seeds of Morality, exposes pop psychology as a corrosive force in American popular culture. Rather than ignoring the clichés of self-awareness and self-affirmation as harmless, Justman traces the history of pop psychology to the utopian movements of the 60’s, and finds a rotten core of self-help rhetoric misappropriated from the civil rights movement. While each self-help book he mentions claims to be the one truth, Justman maintains that each has the same message: Society has robbed you of your authentic self, and only this book (or this charismatic television personality) can help you regain it.

Justman ably skewers the world of pop psychology with comparative references to every main text of the past 30 years. Yet despite his convincing critical analysis, this reader remained curious as to the popularity of pop psychology. Their message of focus on the self and disavowal of all else is ultimately a detriment to the goal of happiness, but what in their message makes it so appealing? Justman’s scorn for the denizens of pop psychology comes at the cost of compassion for their “victims.” His book is thus more of a screed (albeit a witty and eloquent one) and less of the gentle reeducation more appropriate to his goal.

Book review: My Freshman Year - Rebekah Nathan

2005-11-02T21:46:00.000-05:00

My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, by Rebekah Nathan. Cornell, September 2005, $24

While the “Ivory Tower” of higher education in American is often faulted for being out of touch with the country around it, it is an open secret among academics that many are similarly out of touch with their own students. In this fascinating ethnography, “Rebekah Nathan” (a pseudonym for Cathy Small, recently unmasked by the New York Sun) relinquishes her job as a professor of anthropology at “AnyU” (actually NAU = Northern Arizona University) and enrolls as a freshman to become one of those students with whom she has shared a campus, but little else.

Engaging yet scholarly, Nathan applies the techniques of anthropological field research to the modern undergraduate experience. Through formal interviews, informal data collection (such as topics of conversations of passersby, and ethnic diversity in a dining hall) and detached observation, Nathan explores college life with the eye of a social scientist, but from the perspective of a student.

While the anonymity of a pseudonym promises juicy details, there were few to be found. Some insights presented in the manner of an objective anthropologist effectively illustrate prevalent trends (such as attitudes towards cheating), but overall this tone undermines the narrative at the heart of the book. Indeed, Nathan is most compelling when relating her own preconceptions as a professor to her new life as a student. From scheduling constraints, to riding the bus system, to balancing difficult required courses with easier electives, the realities of being a college student surprise Nathan and will be a welcome reminder to many readers in the academy. While the book presents a portrait of today’s student in which classes often take a back seat to socializing, jobs, and extracurricular involvement, Nathan’s experience reminds the rest of us to be compassionate. In their shoes, we would be the same way.