Chaos Program

Students’ Understanding of the Equal Sign Not Equal, Professor Says

When I saw the above headline, it automatically became in my mind a candidate for stupidest headline of the week. It turns out, though, that there’s some actual insight lurking in the study referred to in the article (find the summary here).

The example of an incorrect but common view of math is described by a simple example. 4+3+2=( )+2. Good math students say the answer is 7. Bad (but in the US very common) math students say the answer is 11. Given just that fact, I would have thought, “Huh? How the hell do you come up with 11? You have to be a moron!” It turns out, all you really need is to have been taught to solve problems without ever being taught the meaning of the arithmetic involved.

And to learn this, we go to an insightful video TED talk by a teacher named Dan Meyer (Math class needs a makeover) in which he talks about “paint by numbers” math (a wonderful phrase I found in the side notes but don’t remember him actually saying in the video). In paint by numbers math, kids learn how to plug numbers into a pre-existing equation and crank out a result. Meyer disparages this kind of teaching and the students who excel at it, which I think is quite unfair to those students. They’re just doing what they’re told and trying to do it well. And a good number of those students go on to learn real math. Okay, a bigger number of them go on to be assistant managers at Wendy’s but that’s not the point. The point is that if satisfying the teacher is that easy, blame the teacher.

(For the record, I was one of the students who knew there was an equation but if I didn’t remember it off the top of my head, wouldn’t bother to look it up because that’s BORING).
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Sometimes the mind wanders. Sometimes complete sentences come out.

1. Buying textbooks is a decent measure of the priorities of a school. Going to the bookstore is always an exercise in horror. Even if I have the money, I’m still shocked to find out how much they want for every title. Then when classes are done, there always seems to have been at least one book – costing anywhere from $65 to $200 – that you never even cracked the cover on. They didn’t care much about the class or the needs of the students, did they?

2. More and more schools are responding to the criticism above by offering e-books as an alternative. These cost maybe 20% less than the hard copy but they are invariably so loaded up with DRM  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management)they are almost useless. For general reading, I often buy e-books. For classes, I spend the extra cash on a physical book. Either way, I curse the publishers, the school, the professors and my bank account, not necessarily in that order.

3. For a long time I thought that it was a sign of getting older when I would open a web page and instantly hit the hot keys to increase the font size. It happens a lot. It might also be a sign of setting my screen to a high resolution because there is NEVER enough real estate on the monitor (Even when I use 2, apparently). Either way, I’m starting to think that someone, somewhere should at least try to figure out if their pretty design is at all usable by people like me. The average age of the population keeps going up. This probably does not indicate that the average level of patience with tiny text is also going up.

4. In college programming courses, I learned almost nothing about testing. Come to think of it, I didn’t learn much about that in science classes either (believe it or not, labs don’t count. That’s rarely more than learning techniques, rather than learning how to test a hypothesis). This raises the musical question, how has civilization survived with so little understanding of how to tell if a thing works?

5. On a similar note (get it? note?), how do systems that clearly don’t work get to be institutionalized? See this fascinating Wired Danger Room article (that I found by way of the indispensable Slashdot) for at least one example of what I mean and a sign that there could be hope. Hope is good. There should be more of it.

6. The concept of “Minimum Viable Product” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product) can’t survive a committee. Every member has their own idea about “minimum” that may or may not have anything to do with what the project really needs. More likely it reflects what someone WANTS it to have (If this were not true, there would be no such thing as politics). So minimum becomes a moving target as we keep trying to cram more features into it. There’s a definite flaw in this approach but it seems to be very common.

7. I recently read a book on managing a project portfolio. I suppose managers would find it a wonderful how-to manual. Typically for today’s management texts it was almost fanatical in pushing teamwork and consensus. It also insisted that all decisions be well grounded in “adding value to the company.” But consensus and consistently adding value to the company are both principles that are deadly to bold decisions and new research. I worry about discouraging those things. Not that adding value to the company and consensus are bad. Of course they’re not. But if your vision goes no farther than that, your endeavor, whatever it is, is doomed and well it should be.

8. Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. It’s one of the only pieces of advice I have always followed.

Have a good summer.

Can an article – written by a professional journalist for a national news magazine – credibly claim that there’s a creativity crisis in America? Isn’t the act of writing the article itself creative? Doesn’t that mean something?

Well, no.

By way of Slashdot (here) I found a Newsweek article (here) that made the highly controversial claim that American children (6th grade and under) are less creative than previous generations and advocated project-based learning in the classroom as the “scientific” solution.

I really wish that people who write about science would try learning a little first.Really I do.

Let’s start with the setup: A longitudinal study by E. Paul Torrance (Wikipedia bio; obit; Books by Torrance on amazon) in which young children were tested for creativity, then followed for decades and their creative achievements recorded. The conclusion was that it was a good test, that people who scored high in creativity while very young, often went on to be highly creative adults. Longitudinal studies (Wikipedia definition here), by the way, are hard to do well but can lead to very rich data sets that can be useful for far more than originally intended.

So far we’re in “duh!” territory. The big take-away is that psychologists were thrilled and amazed to find out they could measure creativity. They may also have been wrong but we’ll get to that. Psychologists were also interested to find out that creativity and intelligence did not necessarily go together. Again, “Duh.” Anyone who’s ever seen an interview with Ozzy Osbourne (or any of a hundred others I could name – sorry Ozzy. You’re still great!) could have told you that. Of course, they are not mutually exclusive either. Frank Zappa proved that!
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I had a slightly weird encounter yesterday with Google Social Search. This is a beta product (which in Google-land doesn’t really mean anything) that shows you results from your search that are found via your “social circle.” I ran a search and noticed this new and unusual thing at the bottom of the first page of results.

At first, I thought it was amusing. Then I thought it was creepy. Then I decided it was just annoying. Let’s examine the meaning of this service by going through each of these points in turn.

Amusing: My search was a catch all for material on an academic subject. It doesn’t matter which one. School’s out but I’ve been gong to school so long, sometimes my brain just gets in that mode. I had already tried searching Google Scholar and found some interesting stuff, and a lot of other stuff that I could not afford to buy. The ridiculous price of so many scholarly and scientific publications is a pet peeve of mine (I don’t mind them making a buck. I just mind that they jack up the prices so high that published research is effectively hidden from most of the world, especially me). So since I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to shell out for a very few articles that might or might not be relevant, I decided to broaden the search and see what regular Google would bring up.

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Continuing the subject of bad science (previous installment posted as Who writes this stuff anyway?), we have a study (described here) that explains that people with jobs requiring a lot of creativity often feel overworked and may find themselves sucked in outside work hours.

Sounds like an ordinary IT job to me!

Anyway, Like most science these days (or maybe it’s just science reporting, though I suspect it’s both) they seem to be unaware that correlation is not causation. What that means in this case is that it may NOT be that it’s the creativity required by the job that causes the result. It may be that people who demonstrate the capacity for creativity may get loaded up with work because, well, because that’s what it takes to get it done. Anyone who has ever supervised others knows that for a tough problem, you need someone who works hard, thinks sideways (I was going to say “outside the box” but that would be the opposite of creative, wouldn’t it?) and doesn’t let go of a problem just because the work day is over.  You want someone who will solve it for the pleasure of solving it, not just for the money or because someone who told them to.

When you find those (few) people, you treasure them. You also work them just as hard as you can get away with because there are more problems to be solved than good creative problem solvers to throw at them.

Again: Sounds like a basic (good) IT worker and an average IT job. I suppose other jobs may have similar characteristics. I just haven’t had one of those.

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The title of this post is something I once heard a newsroom editor yell (in slightly less family-friendly form) while editing the news. Being a sciency type myself, I am most likely to have that feeling when looking over the science news. The headlines reproduced below are from the last few days and I just couldn’t resist commenting on them.

New gene therapy proves effective in treating severe heart failure

You mean, there’s such a thing as mild heart failure? For the record, I don’t want that either.

Link identified between lower IQ scores and attempted suicide in men

The key word is “attempted.” The smart ones succeed.

Eyes of cattle may become new windows to detect mad cow disease

Yes. Especially when they’re red and glow. Stay away from those cows. (believe it or not, the article actually discusses looking for glowing bits in the retina, under a microscope though. Much less funny when you put it that way).

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A while ago my boss and I had a discussion about how to interview candidates for a programming job. Not being a programmer himself, the boss wanted me to supply some good questions that would show depth of programming knowledge, especially Ruby on Rails, which is what our site (http://trailmeme.com – tried it yet?) is built in. I think he was a bit surprised that I had very little interest in asking those kinds of questions. Once I explained myself, he was willing to trust my judgment (which is a nice thing to have in a boss). But he isn’t the first person to find my approach to interviewing candidates to be different from the norm. This tells me that the rest of the world is doing it wrong and there is need for me to explain some basic principles for the benefit of all those less enlightened than myself (for those who are humor impaired, just ignore the completely insincere self-aggrandizement in the previous sentence and move on).

I remember being interviewed for a position once where the interviewer asked questions straight out of What Color is Your Whatever that Silly Book Was? One of the questions was, “What would you say is your greatest weakness?” I decided this would be a bad time to mention my disrespect for people who ask questions like that. Instead, I made up a line about not thinking in terms of weakness, instead playing to my strengths. He liked that answer but didn’t hire me anyway. Maybe he thought I was trying to hide a deep disrespect for authority. More likely he found someone he could get for less money.

Anyway, this is lesson one: Don’t ask questions that encourage people to be less than completely forthcoming or honest. Sometimes that may be hard to avoid. “Why is there a 2 year gap in your education?” If the answer is, “I was on trial for murdering a professor but got off because he deserved it,” it is very unlikely the interviewee will actually explain this. On the other hand, who cares about a gap in education, or even in employment? You can read a lot of programming stuff while waiting for the jury to bring back a verdict.
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I’ve been taking a class in computer forensics and, possibly because the textbook is very dull, sometimes my mind wanders to odd implications of what I’m reading. There are some known facts about most operating systems that work in favor of forensic investigators. For example, the contents of deleted files linger on a system, sometimes for a very long very long time. The traces can be found and reconstructed by someone with the right tools and know how.

There are times when there are legitimate reasons to try to avoid this. The most widely known of these is when the defense department gets rid of old equipment. It’s important to wipe the data on a hard drive in such a way that it is close to impossible to recover, in order to protect defense secrets. And whatever porn and games the poor defense workers may have downloaded during lunch.

What about resistance members (assuming there are any) in totalitarian countries (assuming they can even get their hands on a computer)? Don’t they also have legitimate reason to hide the traces of what they’ve done? How about spies? When someone from a free country tries to gather hidden information in a totalitarian country (let’s say British spies in Iran, since the Soviet Union is gone and the CIA is not what it once was), being caught could mean torture and death. For them, having an operating system that reliably deletes evidence could literally be a life saver.

That was what got me thinking, wouldn’t it be goo dif those people had access to an operating system that automatically did things to protect their lives? read more »

It seems that everywhere I look lately there’s news about a new “weakness” found in the RSA algorithm. This has been reported with headlines screaming about the “severe” weakness and how everything in the universe that is encrypted depends on RSA. For examples of those rather overheated stories look here and here.

Let’s have a moment of sanity please. The sky is not falling. The attack described depends on manipulating the power supply of the targeted system, making tiny changes in the voltage to generate bad output from the algorithm. It’s a very interesting attack technique but the actual risk of it happening in the real world is incredibly low. Anyone who can get close enough to manipulate the power to a unit can do lots of other much more interesting things to it.

In general, no one can get close enough to perform this kind of attack.  Locking the doors on the server rooms is a standard IT practice. You see, most criminals who get close enough to attach the equipment needed to play games with the power supply are much more likely to simply unplug it and steal the computer.  We guard against that sort of thing and, incidentally, against creative attacks on the power as well.

This is just one more example (in a nearly infinite list) of why the news should never be taken at face value. Read carefully. THINK. Apply salt liberally and move on to something less ridiculous.

The big tech story of the week is the one about Google making people mad with it’s new “Buzz” service. The most interesting aspect of this story is that everyone seems to have gotten it wrong.

Here’s the short version of the story: Google has some new social media application that makes all your email contacts into “friends” in the social networking sense and a lot of people objected to that, claiming that email contacts should be kept private, not advertised to the world as a friends list. This is stupid on so many levels – Google, their users, all the “analysts” – it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll start at the beginning as far as I knew it.

The other morning, as I do most mornings, I brought up my gmail account and glanced to see if there was anything new. There was some kind of banner or thing about something called “Buzz.” I immediately thought “Hmm. Could this be a whack at Yahoo’s boring Buzz bookmarking service?” But no. I saw that my boss had already been there and made a comment. I also saw that to reply to his comment I had to create a “profile” that would make all of my email contacts into friends who I could then get Buzzy with, or some such thing.

I decided not to create the profile because I don’t use my gmail account for general email purposes. I have a yahoo account for that. My gmail account is mostly for poetry and other writing. I use it to communicate with the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, a lot of editors and a few close friends and family. It’s the kind of account – intentionally – receives the kind of joke emails that people forward all the time. In other words, while it’s a public address, I tend to use it for more private purposes.

Weirdly, Buzz shows that I have 6 followers, including 4 who do not have public profiles – which I also do not have. How do you follow someone who does not have a profile to follow? And if you don’t have a profile, how is it possible to follow someone else without a profile? What the hell is going on here? read more »