29 December 2008 Part II

From around the internet:

Another Ed Current video:

Teaching of mathematics and science

This article is well intentioned; it talks about trying to teach science by hands on stuff. But in fact, at least in mathematics, students don’t really understand the subject unless the understand the concepts in the abstract:

A new study challenges the common practice in many classrooms of teaching mathematical concepts by using “real-world,” concrete examples. Researchers led by Jennifer Kaminski, researcher scientist at Ohio State University’s Center for Cognitive Science, found that college students who learned a mathematical concept with concrete examples couldn’t apply that knowledge to new situations.

But when students first learned the concept with abstract symbols, they were much more likely to transfer that knowledge, according to the study published in the April 25 issue of the journal Science.

“These findings cast doubt on a long-standing belief in education,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology and human development and the director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State.

“The belief in using concrete examples is very deeply ingrained, and hasn’t been questioned or tested.”

Kaminski and Sloutsky conducted the study with Andrew Heckler, assistant professor of physics at Ohio State.

Teachers often use real-world examples in math class, the researchers said. In some classrooms, for example, teachers may explain probability by pulling a marble out of a bag of red and blue marbles and determining how likely it will be one color or the other.

But students may learn better if teachers explain the concept as the probability of choosing one of n things from a larger set of m things, Kaminski said.

The ability to transfer the concept from one seemingly unrelated area to another is what constitutes understanding.

Science articles:

Google maps lead to the discoveries of new species? Believe it!

Energy efficient houses in Germany: constructed so as to minimize seepage. This seems nice; I’d love one of these houses. Our old house is so drafty.

What do you do with old garlic salt? Use it (with regular salt) to de-ice roads? Note: the crews that used this salt ended up being more hungry than normal.

My new pet issue: high speed rail.
I’ve found some resources and blogs including these:

Trains for America.

Midwest High Speed Rail Association. If I have money after paying this month’s bills, I might look into joining this outfit.

Here is an associated blog.

A more familiar “pet topic”: Religion and politics (via Friendly Atheist) These are some 2008 “lowlights” which, yes, feature my favorite politician.

and of course, Pat Condell

Yes, I am enough of a realist to recognize that no politician will ever win a major election at the state or higher level without some nod to the public superstition or superstitions. The best we can hope for is what we got: someone who will at least make excellent science picks. But change takes time, and if we can continue to persuade more people that vaccinations will do more to prevent disease than saying prayers, well, we’ve made a big step in the right direction.

What makes me optimistic: it appears to me that, at least among many, that many people see their religion as more of a self help thing (something to help one’s own personal serenity and peace of mind) rather than some source of magic; that is, praying (in one form or another) can give the person doing the praying some calmness, peace of mind and relaxation in the way that, say, yoga can stretch and strengthen the body.

So, where I think that religion can provide a community and can provide techniques to improve the lives of some, I hope we can shed the superstition (e. g., the idea that a deity or spirit will intervene) and shed the tribalism that leads to such bloody conflicts such as the one we are seeing in the Middle East.

Israel and Gaza: The Daily Kos is a liberal website; many of the bloggers are Jewish and staunch supporters of Israel. So when diaries such as this one appear and get recommended, you know that things are bad:

Today I end my support of Israel Hotlist
by Chilean Jew [Subscribe]
Sun Dec 28, 2008 at 11:07:48 AM PST

Like davidminzer, I’m Jewish and descendant of holocaust survivors. Moreover, I’ve been a Zionist all of my life. I went to a Zionist school, I was active in Zionist youth groups. I’ve always been a fervent supporter of Israel as a refuge for Jews around the world who seek a place to exercise their traditions and embrace their identity in peace.

I sang the Israeli anthem in the train rails of Aushwitz-Birkenau and I pledged to fight every day of my life to make sure the savage crimes that had taken place there would never happen again. Every year I pledged: Never Again. Remember and Never forget.

Well, I haven’t forgotten. And so to honor that pledge, to honor the memory of my family members who died in those death camps and because “there comes a time when silence is betrayal”, today I finally and publicly end my support for the state of Israel.

I do this with great pain in my heart, but nonetheless with the overwhelming conviction that it is the only right thing to do. I was patient: I tolerated the destruction of the Oslo process by refusing to end or slow down the constant and criminal construction of settlements. I held my nose and stood my ground when Barak killed the final status negotiations at Taba 2001. I even remained loyal after Sharon’s massacres in the West Bank, the brutal Annexation wall, the illegal “selective assassinations” and Olmert’s war crimes in Lebanon.
I had to defend Israel and Israelis with my friends and others who demanded I be consistent with my progressive views and oppose a country that was responsible for horrible crimes against innocent human beings. “Israelis are scared, they are traumatized, you have to understand…”, “Israel is responding to attacks on itself, tell me one other country that wouldn’t respond when attacked…”, I demanded understanding, I pleaded for a fair and comparative analysis.

ENOUGH. I’m done justifying crimes against humanity by a country that claims to be an illuminated western democracy. I’m done defending a country that is unwilling to grant self-determination to a neighboring people because it won’t let go of a few settlements and divide a city. I’m done tolerating the slaughtering of innocent kids, the murderous and barbaric occupation of an impoverished people, the utter disregard for human life.
Fuck them.
If they think their daily peace of mind is worth the lives of hundreds of innocent people, Fuck them.
If they think the best way to go right now would be to vote for Natanyahu (who is so far winning in the polls), Fuck them.
If they won’t bat an eye before keeping millions without electricity or water, before bombing civilian neighborhoods at exactly the time when kids are leaving schools, before breaking every standard of international law or moral decency, Fuck them.
It’s time for every true progressive in this country and around the world to do the only thing that our consciences should allow us to do, the only thing that can keep us consistent with our supposed beliefs that human life is precious and that unnecessary violence is always criminal, barbarous and unacceptable. We must demand that Israel stop violence and immediately put an end to its colonialist military occupation of Palestine.

This is a bit of a sensitive topic for me because I believe that Israel has an immoral foundation (expelling people off of their land) just as the United States does. On the other hand, if I were forced at gunpoint to live in a Middle Eastern country, that would be the one I’d choose, even though I completely disapprove of “X states”, no matter if X stands for Jewish, Muslim, Christian or whatever. Also, my best friend is a secular Jew who is staunchly pro-Israel, sometimes irrationally so (IMHO); it almost appears at times that “The Holocaust” is, to her, the world’s singular event rather than one sorry example out of many (e. g., Pol Pot, the great Communist massacres, the Mongol atrocities, or even the blood thirsty (alleged) genocide by Joshua in the Bible).

But this situation bothers me, not only because of the human misery, but also because the United States supports Israel so strongly (huge amount of foreign aid). So we have a moral obligation to put pressure on Israel; of course they can always choose do without our aid.

29 December 2008

Workout notes I am feeling much better than last week; I’ll do something but I am not sure as to what. I was thinking about swimming but today’s running weather is simply too good to pass up. So I might do another 4-6 miles outdoors (33 F, sunny).

When you live in Illinois, you have to take advantage of the dry roads when you can!
But I have to be wary of double workouts right now; I am almost recovered from my cold and don’t want to relapse.

Update: I did my West Peoria Cemetery course (one hill loop) in 54:14; I was 19:40 at mile 2 (10:10 at mile one, coughing most of the way) and the last 2 was 18:55 or 38:35 for the course I did yesterday. I think that the course is about 5.4-5.5 miles; I am not sure.

Articles:
Football.
This article argues (correctly, IMHO), that the Cowboys were the biggest flop of the NFL season this year. Sure, the Lions didn’t win a game, but they were expected to be terrible. The Cowboys went 9-7 in a season where they strutted about having the “best talent”.

But think about it: The last time the Cowboys were really good was the 1991-1996 era, when the won the Superbowl following the 1992, 1993, and 1995 seasons. Though Barry Switzer was the coach in 1994 and 1995, those were really the Jimmy Johnson teams. Since then (back when Notre Dame was an elite college team!), the Cowboys haven’t had a great deal of success. So, I suppose it wasn’t the owner that made them so good on the field, was it?

Humor:

see more pwn and owned pictures

Rate Your Students is doing a series about those “middle of the academic year” conferences which often features a “meat market” (places where prospective employers (aka “academic departments”) can visit with job seekers (aka “about ready to graduate graduate students”). Here is one such article. Note the associated artwork.

It reminds me of the 1990-1991 meeting I went to (the combined MAA-AMS meeting) in San Francisco; I stayed in a discount hotel (room with communal bathroom/shower down the hall) due to graduate student finances. So I get ready to walk down the hall and here goes this shapey lass walking down the hall to the shower clad in her underwear.

Communal facilities aren’t always bad.

Oh yeah, I did land an interview that lead to my present job.

Oh yes, this was right wen the first Iraq war was stating (Desert Storm) and the local San Francisco community were having protests all over the place. I remember one young woman, clad in jeans and a knitted poncho running down the street with her sign; she was just so eager to join the protest march. It was almost like being in a movie set from the 1960s.

Science: New Scientist is making it’s top 10 articles on evolution in 2008 available free of charge. I’ve got some reading to do! Hat tip to the Dawkins website.

From Blogs that I read….

Just a bit of something to take my mind off of the spectacular play-off flops by Chicago and Dallas…

44-6???? At least the Bears made a game of it.

A conservative calls for an extra tax? No, I am not kidding:

Krauthammer dispenses with the phase-in and calls for an immediate $1 a gallon gas tax increase, offset by reducing other taxes so that the overall effect is revenue-neutral (thus the Net-Zero in his headline). The beauty of a gas tax is its simplicity, although there might need to be various offsets and exceptions to make such a system palatable.

Follow the link for details. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing the money going to help out the various high speed rail projects as well as public light rail for the urban and suburban folks.

Science

Origins of eukaryotes (living things that have cells with nuclei; e. g., us, the various plants, etc. The commonly taught hypothesis is the “three domain hypothesis“; Professor Moran points out that this hypothesis is not a “done deal” and shouldn’t be taught as if it were.

Of course, I have no credentials to have a valid opinion on this matter. But I present this to demonstrate an example of honest disagreement and honest uncertainty in science. No one just “toes the line” because “the powers that be” says so.

Gravity: do neutrinos have anything to do with it?

One of the great mysteries of modern physics is why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces (strong, electromagnetic, and weak). Many great minds have worked to incorporate gravity into the same sort of relativistic quantum field theory that we use to describe the other three, and have failed more or less utterly for decades. Is there something fundamentally different about gravity? Einstein’s general relativity, which links gravity to the warping of spacetime in the presence of matter and energy, is extremely successful in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena from very short (millimeter) to very long (solar system) distance scales.

One might argue that GR is not working perfectly well on galactic or larger scales – unless and until we can identify the nature of the dark matter causing galaxies to rotate in a way which apparently violates Einsteinian/Newtonian gravity, and causes the lensing of light from very distant (billions of light years) galaxies.

Bob’s short paper, presumably a precursor to a much longer and complete description of his work, brings together several different lines of thought from different subfields of physics, including particle physics and condensed matter, to propose a new theory of how gravity arises. In a single sentence, it goes like this: What we know as gravity is actually the result of interactions with relic neutrinos, which satisfy all the conditions necessary to form a superfluid once the universe has expanded sufficiently. Oh, and another sentence, this time from his concluding paragraph:

“…WIMP dark matter scenarios are inconsistent: WIMPs cannot both be decoupled and localized for the age of the universe.”

That is to say, we cannot have dark matter particles of mass of the usual magnitude (the 100 GeV scale) and expect them to behave classically for the age of the universe.

Of course, at this stage, this is conjecture. But again, this shows how honest ideas come about.

Science Illiteracy Yes, even my favorite politician takes a (deserved) hit here. But at least Obama has made some excellent science appointments and he appears to be the type who will listen to reason.

By Steve Connor, Science editor
Saturday, 27 December 2008

When it comes to science, Barack Obama is no better than many of us. Today he joins the list of shame of those in public life who made scientifically unsupportable statements in 2008.

Closer to home, Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith faltered on the science of food, while Kate Moss, Oprah Winfrey and Demi Moore all get roastings for scientific illiteracy.

The Celebrities and Science Review 2008, prepared by the group Sense About Science, identifies some of the worst examples of scientific illiteracy among those who profess to know better – including top politicians.

Mr Obama and John McCain blundered into the MMR vaccine row during their presidential campaigns. “We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate,” said President-elect Obama. “Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it,” he said.

His words were echoed by Mr McCain. “It’s indisputable that [autism] is on the rise among children, the question is what’s causing it,” he said. “There’s strong evidence that indicates it’s got to do with a preservative in the vaccines.”

Exhaustive research has failed to substantiate any link to vaccines or any preservatives. The rise in autism is thought to be due to an increased awareness of the condition.

I do take exception to the first statement, given Obama’s excellent science picks.

Society and Religion

This post is a few paragraphs but I love this line:

“It is neither emotionally nor spiritually deficient to reject religions that seek to infantilise us with impossible beliefs. “

Can I get an (r)Amen?

Here is another lovely nugget:

Here is an enjoyably impudent piece of research from Innsbruck University. People were observed buying newspapers, using an honesty box to pay. They were interviewed later – so the person with the clipboard seemed unconnected with the newspaper purchase – and asked about age, occupation and attitudes. Men cheated more than women; people over 50 cheated more than the young; higher education made no difference; and by a long chalk churchgoers cheated most. This may be a statistical anomaly. But we all know one thing: religion no more makes people good than lack of it makes the rest of us bad.

Ok, in my defense, when I get coffee from our lounge, (35 cents a cup by the honor system) I sometimes put in 1 dollar and get one cup then the next day get another cup but put in nothing figuring that I had already prepaid the day before.