Arguing with our Ancestors

Madeline de Figueiredo used AI to recreate her late husband Eli’s voice and read his last email aloud. For a moment, the words seemed to have their speaker back. Later, the system offered advice so unlike him that she ended the experiment.

Sheep Among Wolves II: The Sheep Who Smell the Wolf

The wolf does not need every sheep to trust him. He needs them to distrust the sheep who can smell him.

Popular folklore tells us that the flock is protected by the "sheepdog"—the rare, fierce guardian who keeps the predator at bay. But the wolf’s most effective strategy is not to outfight the sheepdog; it is to convince the flock that the dog's bark is actually a conspiracy against them.

About NSEFL

A lighthouse is an odd place to escape responsibility. Its keeper may never meet the people using its beam, never see their ships, never learn whether tonight’s work saved a life. The keeper tends the lamp without expecting a report from every ship that passes. The light travels farther than the keeper’s knowledge of its consequences.

Being Taught to Count

A boy asked me how long I’d been teaching. When I said fifteen years, he asked whether I was burnt out.

I told him no. That probably eighty percent of my interactions with students are positive. I enjoy being around them. They leave me with a weird hope about the future.

GrAss: a teacher-designed grading assistant

I've been working on a project for a while now and wanted to share a brief glimpse of it and also kind of document what has been occupying my time: GrAss: teacher-designed AI & grading system. 

Strongest Evidence Yet (Again)

The LZ paper reports one 248-keV event at 2.6σ global significance—interesting, but explicitly not a discovery. That makes an epistemic angle stronger than the claim that 'dark matter IS found.'

Performance Curves in Education

A student writes, “Increasing effective nuclear charge decreases atomic radius.” It may have been memorized, reconstructed from an electrostatic model, copied from a friend, or polished by AI. The words alone cannot tell me which.

Learning & Moral Geometry

I remember a poster quote:

“To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

What Actually Carries Forward

There’s a familiar complaint in classrooms: “We’re never going to use this.” At the level of content, that objection is often correct. Most students will not carry specific formulas or niche facts into their adult lives in any direct way. This is often true in physics and chemistry, my subjects. But the mistake is in stopping the analysis there.

The ADHD "Natural Fix"

NYT:

Normally, when someone is unfocused and at rest, there is synchrony of activity in brain regions known as the default mode network, which is typically more active during rest than during performance of a task. (In contrast, these brain regions in people with A.D.H.D. appear functionally disconnected from each other.) Dr. Mattfeld found that adults who had had A.D.H.D as children but no longer had it as adults had a restoration of the normal synchrony pattern, so their brains looked just like those of people who had never had it.

WE don’t yet know whether these brain changes preceded or followed the behavioral improvement, so the exact mechanism of adult recovery is unclear.

But in another measure of brain synchrony, the adults who had recovered looked more like adults with A.D.H.D.

In people without it, when the default mode network is active, another network, called the task-positive network, is inhibited. When the brain is focusing, the task-positive network takes over and quiets the default mode network. This reciprocal relationship is necessary in order to focus.

Both groups of adult A.D.H.D. patients, including those who had recovered, displayed simultaneous activation of both networks, as if the two regions were out of step, working at cross-purposes. Thus, adults who lost most of their symptoms did not have entirely normal brain activity.

Dismal Disconnect

I read the other day that 80-some percent of college graduates do not have a job lined up after May. This is not surprising. Today I was reading that solutions to this problem look far and away, since colleges, students, and employers do not share the same perspectives:

"Busteed said that 96 percent of the college provosts Gallup surveyed believed their schools were successfully preparing young people for the workplace. “When you ask recent college grads in the work force whether they felt prepared, only 14 percent say ‘yes,’ ” he added. And then when you ask business leaders whether they’re getting enough college grads with the skills they need, “only 11 percent strongly agree.” Concluded Busteed: “This is not just a skills gap. It is an understanding gap.” ...the success stories shared a lot of the same attributes that Gallup found to be differentiating. In successful programs, said Auguste, “students got as much applied, hands-on experience as possible, whether in a classroom or on a job site. Schools, colleges and training centers had close partnerships with regional employers, industry groups and skilled trade unions to stay up to date on job-relevant skills. And students or working learners got a lot of coaching and guidance to understand how to trace a direct path between their training today and careers tomorrow.”

Pretty discouraging...

Creative combinations: Lennon and McCarthy

Brooks thinks that Lennon's chaos and depression needed McCarthy's meticulous pop to make a final product. And he thinks all creativity relies upon the dialectic:

But sometimes it happens in one person, in someone who contains contradictions and who works furiously to resolve the tensions within. When you see creative people like that, you see that they don’t flee from the contradictions; they embrace dialectics and dualism. They cultivate what Roger Martin called the opposable mind — the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time. If they are religious, they seek to live among the secular. If they are intellectual, they go off into the hurly-burly of business and politics. Creative people often want to be strangers in a strange land. They want to live in dissimilar environments to maximize the creative tensions between different parts of themselves.

Another interesting note is that ADHD and giftedness are hard to distinguish, thought to be parallel, and may be in "co-petetion" [sic] with one another. The ADHD helps generate constant novelty, while the giftedness acts as a filter, recognizing good ideas from bad. Although tons of people say things about how famous writers, inventors, scientists, etc., were ADHD or 2e, the truth is that you have to have focus and drive to be successful on that level. And drive is not necessarily easy to get or keep.

PS: I'm reading Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land right now.

A brave new world

Friedman is not my favorite columnist by a long shot. Many times I glance at his column and think, "He's recycled this garbage again?" He seems to repeat the same thing about our world being "hyperconnected" and "flat" every week, and just looks at a different implication of it: education, industry, entrepreneurship, etc.

But this week I liked the way he summarized things: we live in "A brave new 401(k) world, where we all take the bar exam, and are measured by the most-emailed list." His explanation follows (my emphasis added in bold):

Organization psych in NYT Mag

Adam Grant's money quote:

Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.

Great read. I will check out the book.

Too much choice in higher ed?

After the recent exposure of the weakness of our undergraduate education that I lamented publicly, I find this a compelling point:

Recent work in psychology, marketing, and behavioral economics, however, presents compelling evidence that more choice is not always better. Why? Because while “homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi... the folks that we know are not like that… They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008, pp. 6–7). Homo sapiens can make mistakes, and the way choices are structured can affect how frequent and severe these mistakes may be.

Mistakes can happen, for example, because of pure cognitive overload. When it comes to complex decisions with long-term implications, individuals often struggle to determine which factors are most important, to gather all of the relevant information, and to appropriately weigh the costs and benefits in a final calculation. For students trying to choose the right courses, just acquiring all of the necessary information, let alone absorbing it, can be prohibitively time-consuming. Details about course content are often located in one place, course schedules in another, and program rules and requirements in yet another—often in a several-hundred-page academic catalog. Some pieces of critically important information, such as instructor quality, may not be revealed until after a decision is made.

So it isn't just that students are studying less (which they are). They are also paralyzed in some way by the choices before them and as such never fully commit. College is a time of freedom from choice rather than commitment to a career path.

The majority of college professors believe in God

So basically it's time to quit whining about colleges "making" students into atheists, as I've pointed out before.  (Although college does make them more liberal, and conservatives have all but vilified the intellect.)

According to their study 51.5 percent of professors, responding to the question of whether they believe in God, chose the response, "While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God," or the statement, "I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it." While atheists and agnostics in the United States make up about 3 and 4.1 percent of the population, respectively, the prevalence of atheism and agnosticism was much higher among professors: 9.8 percent of professors chose the statement, "I don't believe in God," while another 13.1 percent chose, "I don't know whether there is a God." In other words, religious skepticism is much more common among professors than in the general American population. However, the majority are still believers.

How do these numbers break down by discipline? Gross and Simmons explore how belief in God is distributed among the 20 largest disciplinary fields. In terms of atheists, professors of psychology and mechanical engineering lead the pack with 50 percent and 44.1 percent respectively. Amongst biologists, 33.3 percent were agnostic and 27.5 percent were atheist. Interestingly, 21.6 percent of biologists say that they have no doubt that God exists. In contrast, 63 percent of accounting professors, 56.8 percent of elementary education professors, 48.6 percent of finance professors, 46.5 percent of marketing professors, 45 percent of art professors, and 44.4 percent of both nursing professors and criminal justice professors stated that they know God exists.

Gross and Simmons also attempted to discover the proportion of professors who think of themselves as religiously progressive, moderate, or traditional. They found that professors in the social sciences and humanities are more than twice as likely identify themselves as religiously progressive (32.5 percent and 35 percent, respectively), while a larger number of physical and biological scientists see themselves as moderate (32.2 percent) as opposed to progressive or traditionalist.

The research also describes the religious affiliation of professors in the United States: 37.9 percent can be classified as Protestant, 15.9 percent identify themselves as Roman Catholic, and 9 percent as "Other Christian." Jewish professors make up about 5.4 percent of the sample, and 2.6 percent are Muslim. Overall, 18.6 percent stated that they were "born-again Christians." Around 46 percent of professors who identified themselves as "traditionalist" were also born-again Christians. Although, as noted above, 51.5 percent of professors say they believe in God, 31.2 percent claim to have no religious affiliation. In other words, they don't belong to any particular religion, but still believe in a higher power.

Bauer is a dolt

The comparison of SC's poor to "stray animals" by SC Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer is old news.  It may be what earned him only 12% of the vote in the gubenatorial primary here despite his huge name recognition advantage.  But in looking back at something else he said at the same meeting as the now-infamous remarks, I genuinely wonder how people this dumb gain so much power and influence:

Bauer went on, and he claimed, "I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina," adding, "You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period."

Let's leave aside for the moment the politics of this statement.  Bauer is right:  the painfully obvious fact is that poverty is correlated to poorer educational outcomes.  But he's an idiot in the way he links them:  the correlation between poverty and low test scores is not caused by allowing poor children to receive free lunch.  It's one thing to not have an IQ of 140, and quite another to be so completely clueless about the logical fallacy being committed here (cum hoc ergo propter hoc).

How anyone could graduate from college -- just a USC business bachelor's degree, but still -- and display this stunning a lack of critical thinking skills is amazing.  How that same person could go on to be the second most powerful person in state government is criminal.

Open-source textbooks

The NYT has a good article on the push for more open-source textbooks. Here are some chemistry-related resources I put together a while back:

Open-source textbooks

• CK12.org - physics, biology, calculus, engineering and more
  

Other open-source chemistry textbooks

• General Chemistry Virtual Textbook, Stephen Lower
• Chemistry Grades 10-12 Free High School Science Texts, by FHSST Committee
• Concept Development Studies in Chemistry, John Hutchinson
• Quantum States of Atoms and Molecules, Hanson, Zielinski, Harvey, & Sweeney
• Basic Principles of Organic Chemistry, Roberts, John D. and Caserio, Marjorie C. (1977)
• Intro to Organic, William Reusch

Useful wikis

• College Cram Chemistry Wiki, topical
• Scholarpedia (peer-reviewed wiki)

Resources for open-source textbooks

• Textbook Revolution (general resource)
• Flat World Knowledge Publishing (general resource)
• Making Textbooks Affordable (general resource)
• CCCOER (general resource)
• Curriki (general resource)
  

IQ stuff

Kristof writes an interesting piece in the NYT on IQ:

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.

Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life.

Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back.

“Bad environments suppress children’s I.Q.’s,” Professor Turkheimer said.

One gauge of that is that when poor children are adopted into upper-middle-class households, their I.Q.’s rise by 12 to 18 points, depending on the study. For example, a French study showed that children from poor households adopted into upper-middle-class homes averaged an I.Q. of 107 by one test and 111 by another. Their siblings who were not adopted averaged 95 on both tests.

Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.

Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s I.Q.’s drop or stagnate over the summer months when they are on vacation (particularly for kids whose parents don’t inflict books or summer programs on them).

Professor Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes. The Milwaukee Project, for example, took African-American children considered at risk for mental retardation and assigned them randomly either to a control group that received no help or to a group that enjoyed intensive day care and education from 6 months of age until they left to enter first grade.

By age 5, the children in the program averaged an I.Q. of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group. Even years later in adolescence, those children were still 10 points ahead in I.Q.

Professor Nisbett suggests putting less money into Head Start, which has a mixed record, and more into these intensive childhood programs. He also notes that schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program (better known as KIPP) have tested exceptionally well and favors experiments to see if they can be scaled up.

Another proven intervention is to tell junior-high-school students that I.Q. is expandable, and that their intelligence is something they can help shape. Students exposed to that idea work harder and get better grades. That’s particularly true of girls and math, apparently because some girls assume that they are genetically disadvantaged at numbers; deprived of an excuse for failure, they excel.

“Some of the things that work are very cheap,” Professor Nisbett noted. “Convincing junior-high kids that intelligence is under their control — you could argue that that should be in the junior-high curriculum right now.”

The implication of this new research on intelligence is that the economic-stimulus package should also be an intellectual-stimulus program. By my calculation, if we were to push early childhood education and bolster schools in poor neighborhoods, we just might be able to raise the United States collective I.Q. by as much as one billion points.

That should be a no-brainer.

As I've said before, I don't put much stock in basic IQ tests if the results are anywhere between -1.5 to +1.5 standard deviations from the mean. Outside of that, you can probably roughly correlate an IQ test to basic intellectual ability by labeling someone as "bright" or "dim" I guess. My interest in the genetic basis for intelligence is especially acute in these "outliers" as I figure they have the most to show us about differences in brain development and structure. It would be fantastic to learn that a simple drug or developmental program could raise IQ, but my hopes for such genius will probably remain unallayed.

Speaking of stasis

The statistics for adults who are scientifically illiterate haven't changed much since I commented on them in 2007:

* Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
* Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.*
* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

Compare that to the numbers from 2006, reported as the % answered correctly (2006 SE, Table 7-10):

1. The center of the Earth is very hot. (True) 78
2. All radioactivity is man-made. (False) 73
3. It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. (True) 62
4. Lasers work by focusing sound waves. (False) 42
5. Electrons are smaller than atoms. (True) 45
6. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. (False) 54
7. The universe began with a huge explosion. (True) 35
8. The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. (True) 77
9. Human beings are developed from earlier species of animals. (True) 44
10. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (Earth around the Sun) 71

This isn't high-minded snobbery. This is basic shit about the world around you. This is also why the US is beginning to suffer greatly as the scientific prowess of foreign nations increases and our native scientists, though superior at what they do, dwindle in number with each passing year.