Two plus two is possibly equal to Four

Jen pointed out this Op-Ed piece in the LA Times from yesterday. Perhaps this sheds light on how one student saw fit to actually call me a "moron" in their written evaluation of my stint as a TA this past fall...

May 24, 2005
COMMENTARY
Right, Wrong ... What's the Dif?
Often, kids, your high self-esteem isn't warranted.

By Marlene Zuk, a biology professor at UC Riverside.

"Is this one right?" The student points to a line on a test paper and peers anxiously at me. The exam is two days away, and I have given the class a version from a previous year so that the students can see what kinds of questions to expect.

"No," I say gently, "that's not right," and proceed to explain what is wrong with the answer she wrote. Questions 2, 3, 4 and 5 suffer the same fate, but No. 6 is, in fact, correct, and I tell her so. She beams. "Oh, great, I feel better. I'm really getting it!"

That the course — animal behavior — is one in which quantitative reasoning is important only makes her unfounded optimism more alarming.

Her reaction is not unusual. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, my students exhibit an unswerving confidence in their own abilities. They earnestly assure me that despite test scores in the single digits and an inability to answer questions posed by their teaching assistant, they really know the material: "It just doesn't show in my grades." The implied fault, no doubt, is mine, for giving such unfair and inappropriate exams, but it is never clear just why they do think they understand the material.

They readily confess to me that they have not consulted the text and do not remember my lecture. They have nothing to say about the concepts we've covered. Yet somehow, a kernel of faith stays resolutely sheltered in each undergraduate bosom — they believe honestly and with conviction that they get it, and therefore deserve a high grade.

Don't get me wrong. I hardly expect all students to understand the material immediately, or even ever, and I also realize that my teaching could be confusing or badly organized. Wrong answers are part of the game. What I find troubling is the lack of concern about their ignorance or poor performance, the epidemic of what a colleague of mine calls unwarranted selfregard.

On that same practice test, another student came to me with a problem she had tried to solve; it required comparing two lines on a graph, each of which represented the number of eggs laid by a different group of individuals (female blackbirds nesting in male territories either with or without additional females).

The question asked where a point on one of the lines satisfied a particular condition, and only one answer was correct. The student for some reason had redrawn the lines, as if rewriting the birds' reproductive history, with the two lines suddenly veering off into a fantasy of communal egg-laying. It was as if she had taken a graph of the exports of China and France and merged them into a new country with a single product.

Once again, I explained how to answer the question, and once again the student was pleased. The error was just a trivial difference of opinion. "Yeah, I get it," she said. " I was just thinking of it differently." You say tomayto, I say tomahto.

No, I wanted to say, you weren't thinking of it differently, you had it completely wrong; you didn't understand it at all. But like her many compatriots, she was unlikely to acknowledge that, or admit to a mistake even when she created a version of reality never seen on a map, or in the actions of a blackbird.

Students have always deluded themselves, of course, and hope has always sprung eternal, or at least until final grades appear. And at least some in my classes really do eventually master the material. But confident placidity in the face of error seems to be on the rise.

Maybe it's all that self-esteem this generation of students was inculcated with as youngsters, or maybe it's the emphasis on respecting everyone else's opinion, to the point where no answer, even a mathematical one, can be truly wrong because that might offend the one who gave it. Maybe they think they should never let me see them sweat.

These explanations all seem too facile as I gaze into their smiling faces and feel like an academic Cassandra, predicting doom and disaster where they see only cheer. As graduation nears, I wonder whether they will become surgeons happily removing the wrong organs or just sales clerks unconcernedly giving incorrect change.

Be worried, I want to tell them. Then I realize they don't know the meaning of the word.

Like shooting fish in a barrel

There was a quarter page ad in the Sunday LA Times today for an all out extravaganza titled the "American Idols Live! Tour 2005".

Sponsored by whom?

Pop tarts.

Let's welcome the new guy

Yesterday, Los Angeles voted in the first Latino mayor since 1872.

This is great, especially since the current mayor is so nonexistent in my LA experience that I only know him from his political scandals and a brief vision of him waving as I starting to run 26.2 miles with approximately 20 billion other idiots back in March.

I must gripe, though, about voter turnout. The mayoral campaign was a bit tiring, and yesterday was simply a runoff vote after the field was narrowed to two candidates a few months ago. Still, the LA Times is reporting appalling numbers of only about 440,000 total votes. Sheesh!

The definition of aghast

From the Washington Post

Kan. Debate Challenges Science Itself

By JOHN HANNA
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 15, 2005; 10:46 PM

TOPEKA, Kan. -- The Kansas school board's hearings on evolution weren't limited to how the theory should be taught in public schools. The board is considering redefining science itself. Advocates of "intelligent design" are pushing the board to reject a definition limiting science to natural explanations for what's observed in the world.

Instead, they want to define it as "a systematic method of continuing investigation," without specifying what kind of answer is being sought. The definition would appear in the introduction to the state's science standards.

The proposed definition has outraged many scientists, who are frustrated that students could be discussing supernatural explanations for natural phenomena in their science classes.

"It's a completely unscientific way of looking at the world," said Keith Miller, a Kansas State University geologist.

The conservative state Board of Education plans to consider the proposed changes by August. It is expected to approve at least part of a proposal from advocates of intelligent design, which holds that the natural world is so complex and well-ordered that an intelligent cause is the best way to explain it.

State and national science groups boycotted last week's public hearings, claiming they were rigged against evolution.

Stephen Meyer, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design, said changing the schools' definition of science would avoid freezing out questions about how life arose and developed on Earth.

The current definition is "not innocuous," Meyer said. "It's not neutral. It's actually taking sides."

Last year, the board asked a committee of educators to draft recommendations for updating the standards, then accepted two rival proposals.

One, backed by a majority of those educators, continues an evolution-friendly tone from the current standards. Those standards would define science as "a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." That's close to the current definition.

The other proposal is backed by intelligent design advocates and is similar to language in Ohio's standards. It defines science as "a systematic method of continuing investigation" using observation, experiment, measurement, theory building, testing of ideas and logical argument to lead to better explanations of natural phenomena.

The Kansas board deleted most references to evolution from the science standards in 1999, but elections the next year resulted in a less conservative board, which led to the current, evolution-friendly standards. Conservatives recaptured the board's majority in 2004.

Jonathan Wells, a Discovery Institute senior fellow, said the dispute won't be settled in public hearings like the ones in Kansas.

"I think it will be resolved in the scientific community," he said. "I think (intelligent design), in 10 years, will be a very respectable science program."

Evolution defenders scoff at the notion.

"In order to live in this science-dominated world, you have to be able to discriminate between science and non-science," said Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "They want to rewrite the rules of science."

(originally pointed to by Eschaton)

Who is leading who, again?

Good editorial on the swift non-consultation of Dubya while the capital was briefly considered to be under terrorist attack this week, with evacuations and all the trimmings... because he was on a bike ride.

That's right: The most powerful figure in the world was not disturbed in the middle of what was momentarily regarded as the most urgent threat to the homeland since Sept. 11, 2001, because he was getting some midday exercise.

...

And by yesterday, the White House admitted no fault. They weren't wrong in Iraq, even though weapons of mass destruction were never found. They're not wrong here.

"This was an instance where presidential authority was not required, because we had these protocols in place after Sept. 11," McClellan said.

It all begs the troublesome question that will dog his next three years in office: What else doesn't the president need to know?

(Brian McGrory in the Boston Globe, May 13, 2005)

Pelswick

I think this means that I know who my guardian angel is.

Thanks, Nicktoons.

Low-cost space shuttle replacement proposal

I'm mostly blind from eye doctor pupil dilation, so this post will serve as a reason to go back and look at this stuff further when I can actually read it. Still, the Slashdot capsule review looks pretty interesting.

Space Race 2: son of shuttle (Washington Times)

t/Space Offers an Option for Closing Shuttle, CEV Gap (space.com)

Frazz gets is right again

Moby rocked the house

Jen and I saw Moby perform at the Wiltern Theater on Saturday. It is always great when electronic-focused artists can produce an amazing live show. We saw him at a free Boston Hatchshell outdoor concert in (1999?) right before Play went bonkers on the airwaves. I keep forgetting how small he is, too.

He performed songs from all over his history, so you had new stuff off Hotel and songs from Play of course, but also old favorites like "Go" and other bits of his earlier driving techno. This time around, Moby has an incredible female backup singer (a quick search of the Internets say her name is Laura Dawn) who performed live renditions of most of the female vocal samples from his music, especially the blues stuff. This was by far the most amazing aspect of the show.

We were also treated to a great opening act, always a bonus. Buck 65 (more expensive than 50 cent?) is described as a rap artist from Nova Scotia, and I guess that's his pedigree. Jen and I decided he was more of Tom Waits with a turntable and David Byrne's stage presence/antics, producing a sound we can only assume Soul Coughing would be doing today if they hadn't imploded. He would describe his next song as, for example, "a mix of Charlie Parker, Kraftwerk, and ZZ Top", hit play on his system to get the beats going, and launch into a great beat poet rendition of new lyrics, and mix in some well done scratching. I couldn't tell if his songs are actually constructed from the samples he hinted at, but it was pretty funky and original. I declare this my first exposure to a new genre called electronic post-folk.

There was only one annoying story. We arrived semi-early, so we hung out against a dividing wall between sections of the general admission floor. When things filled up, this presented an opportunity for jerks to crowd us a bit, especially this one idiot. He was obviously wacked out on ecstacy or something, and is the type who can only dance by throwing elbows around. After getting knocked about, and becoming generally annoyed by his need to have full conversations with his companion, I finally poked his shoulder. Explaining how he was pushing me against the wall and too much in my face and would he please try to step forward a little bit must have harsed his mellow, because they moved to a different section. Score! Jen pointed out that this works two ways and I will probably be the asshole in his story about the show today, but feck 'um.

Thank you, Hallmark

Gee, without the help of you and the rest of the advertising community, I might have forgotten about my mother.

Cripes.

Sad Destruction of a Scientific Legacy

From the Thursday, May 5 LA Times Obituaries:
I hope this poor guy wasn't too bummed out by the turn of events. I suspect he was only trying to cure disease, only to have those results co-opted. It's likely that he never had much profit sharing, either...

Ed Schantz, 96; Helped Purify Toxin Used in Botox Injections

Ed Schantz, 96, a researcher who was a pioneer in purifying the toxin used in Botox injections, died April 27 in Madison, Wis., a family spokesman said.

In 1946, Schantz and colleagues purified botulinum toxin type A - the poison that causes an often fatal form of muscle paralysis called botulism - in a crystalline form, which allowed researchers to study it in greater detail, according to the Botox website of Allergan, Inc., which acquired the rights to distribute the toxin in 1988.

In the 1960s, Schantz found that in small doses the botulinum toxin could stop the muscle spasms that cause certain illnesses. One of the first medical uses was to treat crossed eyes, which are caused by an overactive eye muscle.

Today, injections of the botulinum toxin, in the commercial form of Botox, are used to smooth out wrinkles.

A native of Hartford, Wis., Schantz earned a degree in biochemistry at Iowa State University and a master's degree and PhD at the University of Wisconsin.

He began his career as an Army officer at Ft. Derrick, Md., during World War II, where he was the first to purify and grow "red tide" shellfish toxin, another deadly substance.

New Postage Stamps Honor Four Scientists

Wed May 4, 3:32 PM ET

The post office turned its attention to science Wednesday, issuing four new stamps honoring pioneering American scientists.

"These are some of the greatest scientists of our time; their pioneering discoveries still influence our lives today," John F. Walsh, a member of the U.S. Postal Service's board of governors, said in a statement.

Featured on the 37-cent stamps:

_ Josiah Willard Gibbs, who lived from 1839 to 1903, was a pioneer in the study of vector analysis, electromagnetic theory, statistical analysis and thermodynamics. He earned the first doctorate in engineering to be conferred in the United States. He taught at Yale University and was the author of several books and scientific papers.

_ Barbara McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize in medicine for her discoveries in genetics. She was among the first scientists to study the way genetic material controls the development of an organism.

_ John von Neumann was one of the top mathematicians of the 20th century. He helped develop a machine that became a model for modern computers, worked with Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study and was a consultant in the project to build the first atomic bomb.

_ Richard P. Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965 for work in quantum electrodynamics. His work included diagrams that help visualize the dynamics of atomic particles.

First day of issue ceremonies were being held at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., with the 37-cent stamps going on sale nationwide on Thursday.

(From Yahoo News - AP and my buddy Jen C.)

Comedy Gold

'Daily Show' Personality Gets His Own Platform (NY Times...a registration-free link, in theory)

By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: May 4, 2005

Stephen Colbert, who plays a phony correspondent on the fake-news program "The Daily Show," is getting a real promotion.

Comedy Central said yesterday that it was giving Mr. Colbert his own show: a half-hour that is expected to follow "The Daily Show" on weeknights and will lampoon those cable-news shows that are dominated by the personality and sensibility of a single host. Think, he said, of Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews and Sean Hannity.

Where "The Daily Show" and its host, Jon Stewart, generally spoof the headlines of the day (and the anchors and reporters who deliver them), Mr. Colbert's program will send up those hosts who have become household names doing interviews and offering analyses each night on the 24-hour cable news channels. The program, which is expected to begin appearing on Comedy Central as soon as early fall, is being produced by Mr. Stewart's production company, Busboy Productions.

(first seen on my favorite pinko commie America-hating blog, Atrios)