Chaos Program

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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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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If I had a bigger brain, how many more languages would I be able to say, “The check is in the mail” in? Wouldn’t it be nice to be smart enough to answer the important questions (some of them may even be more important than that one)?

The nature of people with big brains has been a favorite science fiction theme for many years. I’ve seen it done in an old episode of Outer Limits and a much newer episode of Farscape, for example. In an excerpt from their book Big Brain, published online in Discover magazine’s December offerings (here) Gary Lynch and Richard Granger come up with some interesting thoughts on this question. I’ll say up front, this was interesting enough reading that I bought the book and really hope it’s not completely obsolete by the time I have a chance to read it (Do you think there might be a flaw in my reading strategy?).

According to a blurb about the book on Discover’s website (here) Lynch is a psychiatrist and Granger a cognitive scientist, which seems to mean they are doing a little more than speculating about the subject. The hook they use to get into it is the skulls of a pre-human species of hominid called Boskop (named for the place the skulls were found). Measurements of the skulls indicate that the brains of the Boskop people were roughly 25% larger than those of modern humans. From this, Lynch and Granger calculate an average IQ for Boskop of 150 which is 50% higher than the human average. But according to the excerpt they’re gone, now. Boskop became extinct maybe 10,000 years ago. We did not.

Were Boskop not as smart as the brain size calculation seems to indicate? Or was intelligence not an important thing 10,000 years ago? Hmmm. 10,000 years ago. Isn’t that about the time the last ice age ended? Maybe their brains overheated as the temperature went up. No, that sounds a little far fetched

Anyway, there are serious flaws in calculating intelligence based on brain size alone. The biggest one is that brain size is only one parameter in intelligence. Whales have bigger brains than humans but are not necessarily smarter. The convolutions in the cerebral cortex make a big difference. Roughly speaking, the more complicated the folding of the cortex, the smarter a species will be. This is why humans are (mostly) smarter than whales. [For a decent discussion of brain size see this article at HowStuffWorks.com]

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I’ve discovered a new science. I’d like to say I founded it or invented it but there are already brilliant people doing interesting work in the field. They just don’t know they share a common field.

To begin, consider this story from Wired about a bizarre scientific paper on the development of a zombie plague. The paper itself (link) is a little dry, though it’s interesting if you can wade through the math. If not, read the Wired story. The basic idea is this: Some mathematicians (with quite a bit of time on their hands, apparently) developed the math to model the spread of a zombie infection. They concluded that, unless humans respond quickly with extremely large amounts of violence, the zombies win, civilization collapses and the human race is ultimately annihilated.

The paper assumes slow zombies, not fast or smart ones. It seems reasonable that both of those situations would make things harder for humanity, most likely. It also assumes that normal human replacement (birth and death) does not take place, since newborns eventually die and the newly dead are a perpetual source of zombies, which means the zombies win. The paper models multiple scenarios, including medical treatment for zombieism and the effect of quarantine procedures on the spread. Factors considered in developing their solutions include rates of transmission, the outcome of encounters (fights) and the effect on the spread of destroying zombies so that they can no longer spread the infection. In other words, despite the seemingly whimsical nature of the subject, this is real science.

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Robots are in the future. They are in the present, of course, but most people today don’t consider some preprogrammed floating arm on an assembly line to be a true “robot.” We learned what a robot is from science fiction and that’s what we’re all waiting for, often with dread (Don’t think so? Try googling “robot apocalypse.” Wait, let me try it first. 139,000 results. Hey, cool! T-shirts!)

Anyway, in anticipation of the day when robots are the smart, helpful servants/terminators of science fiction fame, lots of people have tried to come up with rules that robots could be programmed to follow to make everything better. Obviously the trend began with Isaac Asimov’s infamous 3 laws of robotics (Follow the link. I’m not going to repeat them here).

Asimov’s laws were pretty good, though his own stories involving them pointed out some flaws at least in potential implementations. Speaking as a programmer, believe me that implementation is an important point with any software. Give 2 programmers the same 3 rules to implement in a very complex system and you will find the two systems do not act quite the same. One programmer checks for compliance at the beginning of a decision, the other checks afterwards. Maybe they have different ways of checking, besides. The outcomes are often the same but there may be huge differences in some situations.

That different people approach the same problem in different ways is just a fact of life that may result in great differences between robot behavior, too. Anyway, because of these and other considerations there have been numerous attempts to update Asimov’s laws. For example a hliarious one I found a few years ago (and can’t seem to find the link for anymore) expanded the 3 laws to 10 (I think) and claimed to have patented them – thus ensuring no one would ever have the slightest interest in using them, even if they turned out to be perfect.

No set of robotics laws could possibly be perfect (see above) and personally I question whether such laws, themeslves are even possible. But it’s an important exercise to try to figure out how to make robots safe and controllable, you know, to avoid the robot apocalypse. An interesting attempt to update Asimov’s laws came out of Ohio State University recently, where some researchers reformulated the laws to make less sense and have even more loopholes than in the original version.

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Every time the power goes out, I have to re-install the driver for my wife’s printer. Every time, including (once again) today. I live in the country, beyond the suburbs into cow country, where it seems sometimes that the power goes out every time there’s a high wind. It doesn’t stay out for very long. Usually no more than ten minutes or so. That’s still enough to make me reinstall the driver. Oh! And VMWare player, which I use on my own computer. I figure that’s a bug that was probably fixed in a newer version but the last time I tried to upgrade, it completely hosed my network connections. After about 4 hours of fighting with it, I downgraded again. It works.

There’s actually a point to this other than just complaining about computers. I make my living (such as it is) with the things. Complaining about them is just part of the job. The bigger point is that, believe it or not, the computer age is still very young and there’s a lot we don’t fully understand about how to make software operate to our satisfaction. Things that should be easy aren’t always and benefits we think we should see sometimes don’t materialize.

Which brings me to the subject of a very interesting recent report (actually a thesis) summarizing studies of how students use software intended to help them learn to do arithmetic word problems. For a short article about the paper, see here. For  the paper itself, go here. Three studies are considered. The purpose was to learn about how students interact with educational software when there has been a breakdown situation. That is, when they get the wrong answer, what do they do?
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Where I make snide – I mean informative – comments about stuff that caught my attention, instead of the usual long-winded ranting. I’ve been thinking about this for a while because often I see something, think of a paragraph or two, then get bored and wander away. But maybe sometimes a paragraph or two is enough! First up:

New Test For Detecting Fake Organic Milk

I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this one. You mean there’s a problem with knock-offs of organic milk? Of course there is! Damn that supply and demand! People are willing to pay extra for a product they can’t identify, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when there are distortions in the market. That’s what art fraud is all about, after all. Tell a collector you’ve discovered a brand new Vermeer, then sit back and watch the bucks roll in because even the experts can’t tell the difference! (It happened during World War 2. See The Forger’s Spell)

Here’s a thought: If you can’t tell the difference, then maybe it’s not worth the extra money.  (The milk, anyway. The fake Vermeer’s in the book I referenced were terrible. The experts were idiots, which is a lesson we’ll go into at great length some other time)
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At my job we encourage people to use Test Driven Development (TDD). The short explanation of that is that before you write a line of program code, write a test for what it is supposed to do. I confess I don’t always adhere to this. For me the rule would be more like, test early and test often. Testing is a skill and it can be hard. Testing first is also a skill. Like any skill it takes time to learn (and I’m getting better at it all the time!).

For years now, though, I’ve found that even my sloppy and less-than-perfectly skilled approach to testing seems to be too much effort for some people. At a previous job I routinely heard other people complaining that some system/server/software was broken when, in fact, their own code (or configuration or approach or whatever) was really broken. My colleagues and I would say something like, “Did you try it from a different computer?” And, as often as not, when tried on a different computer it worked fine. Reboot and try again. Don’t place blame before you’ve gathered the relevant information. Thank you kindly, call again soon.

See? It’s not just programming. Programming is just an environment where testing is measurable and has well developed tools.

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Is security a science? (I mean specifically computer/Internet security here.) Maybe the question is trivial but sometimes I wonder. The question occurred to me as I was reading a section on cross-site scripting attacks in Ed Skoudis’s excellent book Malware: Fighting Malicious Code, which is the textbook for a class I’m taking. Being a curious sort of guy, I tried it out. I took a prototype web site I had developed for my job and inserted some javascript into a text field, just to see if it would work. It did.

I had the advantage of knowing that I had not included defenses against such an attack in the code because it was a prototype intended to work through a problem, not an actual attempt to build a real live website. It was never going to see real life on the Internet. Well, it seems now that this may not be true. I’ve moved on to other things while that old prototype site has been handed to another programmer to build out into a more complete system. I guess I’d better warn the programmer that he has to include some kind of white listing or tag stripping in the data entry fields before it goes live.

Monday I guess I’ll add it to his backlog. It’s already on mine for the current project (at least, I hope it is!).
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