Tuesday, August 16, 2005
People and animals respond to novelty
Put a new object into an animal’s cage. It will be investigated immediately. Some species, like apes, will play with it for a while. A new restaurant comes to town and everyone wants to go there. Sometimes a new car model that is very different, like the retro looking Chrysler PT Cruiser or the new Morris Minor will attract buyers due solely to their novelty. I call these novelty cars. Often, enthusiasm fades after a time and the car is pulled from the market. In what passes for pop culture, often driven by TV and magazines, novelty is king. The new pop stars, the new look, the new sound etc. draws people like moths to a light. Often, novelty is the only asset and the ‘buzz’ dies down and people move on to the next novelty.
Your own facts
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts," said the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "Facts are what separate good political reporting and analysis from hot air.”
The frog experiment
The frog experiment...Put a frog into a pan of hot water and he will jump out. Put a frog into a pan of cool water then gradually raise the temperature to a boil. The frog will stay in the pan and die.
Jury selection
"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
- Mark Twain
- Mark Twain
Model High School
CBS had a story on 60 minutes about the most highly rated High School in the country, located in southern California. Children from as far away as India and Taiwan attend the school. There is a waiting list to get in and academic standards are very high. Video showed mostly oriental faces in the class room. They noted in the segment that this shows there is hope for American education and this school could serve as a model. How absurd! Let’s see them take gang-bangers from east L.A. and have the same success! When your students are pre-screened , well prepared and from highly motivated homes you cannot claim the school is a “model” for other schools who have to deal with the real world. Note also that the U.S. spends more per capita on education than any other nation. The Washington, D.C. schools have the highest spending per student in the country.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Is it Real Science?
NY Times reporter Paul Krugman comments on how we lay persons can be deceived by fake "science".
"There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that non-scientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitist who think they're smarter than the rest of us."
As a co-author of technical papers I experienced the peer review process. Journals that publish peer reviewed papers are called refereed journals. In legitimate science research the researcher writes an outline of his findings with enough detail for other experts in the field to judge if his work is worth publishing. His outline is sent to several experts for comments and these comments are reviewed by a committee. The committee is conscious of their Journal's reputation for quality research and decides if the full paper will be accepted for publication. The full paper is then available to anyone interested, usually only other people working in the same field. This process is called peer review and usually weeds out poorly done research. Also, researchers are very conscious of their reputation and do not want to risk ridicule from their peers.
"There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that non-scientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitist who think they're smarter than the rest of us."
As a co-author of technical papers I experienced the peer review process. Journals that publish peer reviewed papers are called refereed journals. In legitimate science research the researcher writes an outline of his findings with enough detail for other experts in the field to judge if his work is worth publishing. His outline is sent to several experts for comments and these comments are reviewed by a committee. The committee is conscious of their Journal's reputation for quality research and decides if the full paper will be accepted for publication. The full paper is then available to anyone interested, usually only other people working in the same field. This process is called peer review and usually weeds out poorly done research. Also, researchers are very conscious of their reputation and do not want to risk ridicule from their peers.
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