Tag Archives: education

ignorance and confidence

I always suspected that ignorance and arrogance were closely related, and that the truly competent know their limits and are appropriately uncomfortable when beyond them. But now here is proof!

In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

May 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

  • MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
  • Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
  • We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
  • There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
  • Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
  • There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
  • Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
  • Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

  • Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
  • I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
  • May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
  • Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
  • Painless vaccines may be on the way.
  • The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
  • Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
  • The UK may have hit “peak car“.
  • Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.

Robert Reich vs. Amanda Ripley

Interesting ideas. Free college, free child care, and universal health care are the kinds of bold ideas we need to be talking about to build a resilient 21st century economy.

I recently read The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley. I liked the book because although it followed a plot of human interest and anecdote to keep the reader engaged, it had a hard core of data underneath. Data doesn’t always lead you down the path you expect, and sometimes it doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. For example, there is no clear evidence that better outcomes are linked to teacher pay, class size, or funding levels, three of the policies Robert Reich advocates above. What seems to make a difference is very high expectations of both teachers and students. Finland for example closed most of its teacher colleges, moved the few remaining into a few elite universities, and made them hard to get into and hard to successfully complete. Those who successfully complete them do get paid well, but there are other countries like Spain and Norway that also pay teachers well and don’t have nearly as good outcomes. High expectations can also come from parents, but they have to be academic expectations. Parental involvement is not that helpful if it is focused on sports and activities other than academics. Parental involvement outside of school, such as reading, is also very, very important. You come away from the book kind of scratching your head about how important school really is and whether any of it is really under your control as a parent, but at least you know the factors outside of school are important and under your control.

Scratch and Raspberry Pi

Here’s an article about how Scratch (a programming language supposedly any child can learn) and Raspberry Pi (a computer that costs less than $50) fit together.

We’re huge fans of Scratch here at the [Raspberry Pi] Foundation. It was designed to teach young people how to program but it’s a great learning tool at any age: you can build your first program in minutes and pick up fundamental concepts very quickly. Whilst having fun. Sneaky!

If you’ve never tried Scratch before then today is the day to boot up your Pi and have a play. If you are Pi-less then you can use it online, but you’ll be missing out on the best bit of all: physical computing with Scratch. It’s probably the easiest way to hook up sensors, LEDs, buttons and motors to the Pi

Stellarium

Stellarium is free, open source software that simulates the night sky as it would appear from anywhere anytime (no foolin’ I promise). It’s used by professional planetariums, but you can download it to your Windows, Apple, Linux or Ubuntu machine.

Here’s one more fun thing – a simulation where you can change the mass of the Sun, Earth, or Moon and see how it affects the orbits of all three. If you make the Sun too big, the Earth gets sucked into it, but if you make it too small, the Earth just flies out into space. It just reminds us that we are lucky to be here. There’s also a similar simulation where you can make up your own planets and see how they would orbit a star and each other.

kids and risk

I like the way Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, talks about risk:

I think that we are thinking like lawyers a lot now because our society is so litigious, especially in America. For instance, one kid fell off a swing, maybe 20 years ago, broke her arm, sued the park district, and suddenly park districts across America started taking out high swings, they started taking out teeter-totters – see-saws – they started taking out merry-go-rounds. And so they started thinking like lawyers and then we started internalising the idea that, like, “Oh my God! It must be very dangerous for our children to do these things if they’re being removed from regular life.” And everything started seeming so dangerous that we sort of forgot, like, yes, some things are a little dangerous – you go on a merry-go-round, there’s a chance you’ll fall off, there’s a chance you might, your kid might break an arm. There’s also a chance they’ll have a fantastic time, they’ll lose weight, they’ll be fit, they’ll have something fun to do after school instead of just turning on the TV or going to the computer. But we always think in terms of the what if? worst case scenario, and that’s thinking like a lawyer. Because a lawyer could go to court and say, “We knew that these merry-go-rounds are dangerous! And why did they have one there? I’m asking you!” And we think ahead to that point and get rid of anything fun, even if the risk is tiny, because we think a tiny risk even is not worth it.

…in the same day that I’m saying children should go to the park, 769 children will be diagnosed with diabetes,” – that’s in the United States. That’s twice as many as 10 years ago. Nobody says, “How dare you let your child stay inside! What if they get diabetes?” Nobody says that. “How dare you let your kids stay at home just watching TV – they’re gonna get depressed, they’re gonna get fat, they’re not gonna have any friends, they’re not gonna have memories of their childhood.” Nobody thinks about the trade-off. Everything is straight to: you let your child have one iota of freedom, what if something terrible happens. They see the iota[?], they see the rape, murder and dismemberment and they try to put them together and of course it doesn’t work. What I’m suggesting is let your kids have the kind of well-thought-out freedom with you training them. Train them to cross the street, train them, “Don’t go off with strangers”, train them to swim. You know, I do think our job is to keep our children safe, but I don’t think that the outside is so unsafe that we have to regard it as Predators’ Ball every time you open the door.

I agree with most of this, except that the outside really is unsafe, not because of predatory humans but because of motor vehicles – you really can’t “train them to cross the street” safely because the streets are not designed safely. In reasonably developed countries that are not at war, I am positive that cars are the biggest source of violence against children. Of course at the present time we need to train our children to cross our unsafe streets as safely as possible. We also have to accept the risk that they can cross the street exactly the way we train them and still never come home. If we don’t want to accept this risk, then we can’t continue to accept unsafe street designs. Politicians and planners and engineers who perpetuate unsafe street designs, and all the rest of us who complacently accept them, are the real murderers and dismemberers of children. The solutions are known. This is a risk to children we really can do something about. Let’s do it!

homework

Surprisingly, serious studies of homework can almost never prove that it has any benefit at all.

And the result of this fine-tuned investigation?  There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”

This result clearly caught the researchers off-guard.  Frankly, it surprised me, too.  When you measure “achievement” in terms of grades, you expect to see a positive result — not because homework is academically beneficial but because the same teacher who gives the assignments evaluates the students who complete them, and the final grade is often based at least partly on whether, and to what extent, students did the homework.  Even if homework were a complete waste of time, how could it not be positively related to course grades?

And yet it wasn’t.  Again.  Even in high school.  Even in math.  The study zeroed in on specific course grades, which represents a methodological improvement, and the moral may be: The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.  (That’s not a surprising proposition for a careful reader of reports in this field.  We got a hint of that from Timothy Keith’s reanalysis and also from the fact that longer homework studies tend to find less of an effect.[5])

This is hard to swallow. Obviously, from our adult life experience, most of us know there is such a thing as learning by doing. To really master a concept or come up with a new idea, you have to struggle with it on your own over a period of time. Homework seems like it could prepare children to do that as adults, so if it is not, either the kind of homework given is the wrong kind, or it’s given at the wrong age where kids are not yet ready to benefit from it.

DIY programming and robotics stuff

Here’s some programming and robotics stuff that could be useful for education and do-it-yourself projects around the house. Oh, the things I could do if I didn’t have to work for a living…

  • The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It’s capable of doing everything you’d expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games.

  • Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for anyone making interactive projects.

  • VEX IQ is a robotics platform designed to transform STEM learning for young students and their teachers. Students as young as 8 can jump right in and snap robots together using this intuitive, toolless platform while educators can utilize the free VEX IQ Curriculum to help teach them valuable lessons and skills that are needed in today’s changing world. The VEX IQ Challenge, presented by the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation, gives students affordable access to the inspiration, excitement and learning that comes from participating in a STEM challenge.

robot library of the future

This is an interesting article by Philadelphia Inquirer critic Inga Saffron about the new library at Temple University, which is going to use robots to retrieve books. This allows the books to be stored in a very small space, and the rest of the building to be used for technology, meeting rooms, collaborative work spaces, and social spaces. This is based on warehouse technology used by Amazon and others, and has already been implemented at the North Carolina State University library.

Joe Lucia, Temple’s dean of libraries, believes these buildings are the most inclusive spaces at a university and serve as an “academic Switzerland.” An engineering student may never wander into the humanities building, he explained, but all students need to consult a library’s holdings. The library’s location on the new central quad will cement its place as Temple’s community center. Besides the glass reading room, the building will be packed with study rooms, seminar rooms, digital work spaces, as well as a ground floor café-and-study area that will be open 24 hours.

The wealth of work spaces is made possible by the automated book-retrieval system. The new library will be about 200,000 square feet, roughly the same as the existing Paley Library, built in 1966 by Nolen-Swinburne. (It will probably be retrofitted for classrooms.) But because the automated system allows the new library to store books in tightly packed trays, storage will take up just 10,000 square feet. The ratio is almost the reverse at Paley, which has open stacks. Because the books will be protected in their own concrete room, the new library can have many more windows. It is sad that the one place where windows are scarce is on the side facing Liacouras walk. Long blank walls could be off-putting on such a pedestrian stretch, and Temple officials say they are exploring some design changes.

One of the good things about the automatic book-retrieving system is that it’s already been tested at Snohetta projects such as the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The system delivers the books within five minutes, and it’s become such an attraction that students are known to take selfies with the robot.

This also makes me think about the future of urban retail. Who will need big box stores with shelves packed full of duplicate items? Instead you can have showrooms with just one of each item, or even holograms, for people who want an up-close look at an item they have already seen on the internet at home. The actual items to be purchased can be stored very compactly in the back, basement, or second floor of the store, and retrieved in minutes by a robot. For that matter, why would you want to carry a bulky item home if it can be delivered to your door within a few hours. In that case, it doesn’t matter if the warehouse is down the street, on the edge of town, or out by the airport or rail station or factory that actually makes the items. Each retailer doesn’t need to operate its own warehouse and delivery system. If 3D-printing technology really comes into its own, this system would get even more interesting.

December 2014 in Review

At the end of November, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give December posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-12):

  • When you consider roads, streets, and parking, cars take up more space in cities than housing. (-2)
  • The latest on productivity and economic growth: Paul Krugman says there is risk of deflationary spirals in many countries, and the U.S. economy is nothing to right home about. (-1)
  • There are a few legitimate scientists out there warning of sudden, catastrophic climate change in the near future. (-1)
  • Automation (meaning robots and AI) is estimated to threaten 47% of all U.S. jobs. One area of active research into automation: weaponry. Only one negative point because there are also some positive implications. (-1)
  • Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood is a depressing but entertaining reminder that bio-apocalypse is possible. (-2)
  • Before the recent rains, the drought in California was estimated to be a once-in-1200-years event. Major droughts in major food growing regions are not good news, especially with depletion of groundwater, and loss of snowpack and glaciers also in the news. (-2)
  • William Lazonick argues provides evidence that the rise in the gospel of shareholder value correlated with the growth slowdown that started in the 1970s – his explanation is that before that, retained earnings were a cornerstone of R&D and innovation in the economy. Loss of a point because it’s good to hear a dissenting voice, but the economy is still run by disciples of the profits for now. (-1)
  • Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are warning that the U.S. financial system may still be dangerously unstable. (-2)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • There are some new ideas out there for teaching computer programming, even to young children: Loco Robo, Scratch, and for-profit “programming boot camps”. (+1)
  • You can now get genetically customized probiotics for your vagina. (+1)
  • There are plenty of ideas and models out there for safe, walkable streets, some as simple as narrower lanes. But as I point out, the Dutch and Danish designs are pretty much perfect and should just be adopted everywhere. (+1)
  • I linked to a new video depicting Michael Graves’s idea for “linear cities“. These could be very sustainable ecological if they meant the rest of the landscape is left in a mostly natural condition. I am not as sure about social sustainability – done wrong, they could be like living in a mall or subway station. This was one of my all-time more popular posts. (+1)
  • There are new algorithms out there for aggregating and synthesizing large amounts of scientific literature. Maybe this can increase the returns to R&D and help boost innovation. (+1)
  • There will be several international conferences in 2015 with potential to make real progress on financial stability and sustainability. The phrase “deep decarbonization” has been uttered. (+1)
  • Some evidence suggests that the oceans have absorbed a lot of global warming over the past decade or so, preventing the more extreme range of land surface warming that had been predicted. This is a good short- to medium-term trend, but it may not continue in the long term. (+0)

change during December 2014: -12 + 6 = -6

Hope for the Future Index (end of December 2014): -2 -6 = -8