Category Archives: science-y observation

Hop Three Times and Twirl Before Typing This

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If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you ARE! Crash Davis

The Quirkbook

“Making a list of superstitions / foolish consistencies / lightweight OCD behaviors e.g. I always put my RIGHT shoe on first. You?”
[…]
“In what order shall I put my gear on? What is practical? What feels right? You know, I like putting my right skate on first. I can’t tell you why, but the order feels important. Right skate, then left.”

We killed them. 9-3. Sure, they started by playing half their game because they were already in the playoffs, but after I scored that hat trick in the first period, they woke up. We slapped them around for another two periods. It was glorious.

I credit the skates. No, I credit the skate application process.

It’s that story that goes through my head each morning as I stare down. I remember deciding to care about how I put things on my feet. It’s a silly superstitious quirk transformed into an unavoidable daily routine and that’s why I twittered it. I wanted to know who else was saddled with these foolish consistencies.

There seems to be a strong tie between superstition “ritual” and sports.

I have a mild OCD about the iron. I almost always double-check that it’s off and unplugged before going out, because it’s one of those mindless “routine” things that you’ll falsely remember doing. Even if you didn’t do it today, you might paste in the memory of any of the other hundreds of times you’ve done it. (And by “you” I mean “I”)

I don’t think things like “wiring the + wire to the + lead and — to —” or “don’t lick the high-voltage connection” count as superstition.

I’ve known women who had to sleep on a particular side of the bed, so any impulse I might have had for this OCD has vanished — it’s not a battle worth fighting. (You’re in bed with her. Wrong time and place to pick a fight.)

More Intellectualism

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Some good followup to the whole why-are-math-and-science-such-small-portions-on-the-plate-of-intellectualism and all of the tangents (too math-y? juxtaposed topics, perhaps?)

Fear and loathing in the academy and Assorted hypotheses on the science-humanities divide at Adventures in Ethics and Science. A lot to chew on (or gum, if you are so inclined)

The best reason to learn something is that learning it is a fun thing to do with your brain. Learning math and science can make your brain just as happy as learning humanities and arts, so who wouldn’t want to be an intellectual omnivore?

Indeed.

The Return of the Natural Philosophers

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Whilst scurrying through the intertubes, I ran across a post entitled Should We Ban Physics? at Overcoming Bias.

At the recent Global Catastrophic Risks conference, someone proposed a policy prescription which, I argued, amounted to a ban on all physics experiments involving the production of novel physical situations – as opposed to measuring existing phenomena. You can weigh a rock, but you can’t purify radium, and you can’t even expose the rock to X-rays unless you can show that exactly similar X-rays hit rocks all the time. So the Large Hadron Collider, which produces collisions as energetic as cosmic rays, but not exactly the same as cosmic rays, would be off the menu.

I think the context of worrying about the end of the world is misplaced. What science could you do if you were limited to strictly observing natural phenomenon, and couldn’t fashion experiments that involved “novel physical situations?” Astronomy and biology, if you were doing them last century, or even earlier — can you even make a lens under such a guideline?

It’s unfortunate the details were no forthcoming; there were some physicists at this conference and this is an interpretation of the proposal. But it sounds like a policy suggestion made by someone who doesn’t have experience in doing science.

From a summary of some of the discussions, though, it seems like there was a whole lot of this genre of conjecture with a hefty dose of science fiction along with the science.

They envision desktop nanofactories into which people feed simple raw inputs and get out nearly any product they desire. The proliferation of such nanofactories would end scarcity forever. “We can’t expect to have only positive outcomes without mitigating negative outcomes,” cautioned Treder.

What kind of negative outcomes? Nanofactories could produce not only hugely beneficial products such as water filters, solar cells, and houses, but also weapons of any sort. Such nanofabricated weapons would be vastly more powerful than today’s. Since these weapons are so powerful, there is a strong incentive for a first strike. In addition, an age of nanotech abundance would eliminate the majority of jobs, possibly leading to massive social disruptions. Social disruption creates the opportunity for a charismatic personality to take hold. “Nanotechnology could lead to some form of world dictatorship,” said Treder. “There is a global catastrophic risk that we could all be enslaved.”

I think this is akin to the stance that nanotechnology is morally unacceptable. The steps between where we are and where would have to be for this to be true is huge (and a similar stance is taken with AI); the scenario is proposed seemingly without any regard for how difficult it is to predict the future of technology .

Schrodinger's Cat's Exam Score

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I was attempting to collapse a wave function Thursday — the A/C for the office has been taking much of the past week off, with promises of its imminent repair since Monday. The one working chiller has the capacity to cool the building only a few degrees below ambient, which was nowhere near adequate with the thermometer reading in the mid-90s (ºF). So rather than continue to self-baste at my desk, I wore shorts, hoping that this action would induce the chiller to be fixed, via a combination of superposition, Murphy’s law and passive resistance: a working chiller makes shorts both superfluous and marginally inappropriate, and all will subjected to my pasty-white legs until the system is fixed (and they are quite distracting, though I am informed that “running away screaming” does not count as swooning). Alas, the wave function did not collapse to the desired state, though it was a much more pleasant day yesterday, so my office was more-or-less tolerable.

But the thought of collapsing wave functions reminded me of a phenomenon I observed many times during the years I spent as an undergrad and grad student: the student who doesn’t show up to class when the exams are handed out. The professor will usually tell the class when the exams will be returned, and it’s often delayed one or two class sessions. In a small school, that’s because the professor is grading them him- or herself, and it takes time, and in a large university it’s often because they will be graded by the TAs, and most of them won’t do it until the night before (or wee hours of the morning of) the deadline. But there’s always that handful of students who don’t go to pick up the bad news, and it’s almost always bad news — from what I observed, the correlation is pretty strong between poor performance and not showing up to face the reality. For a long while I did not understand this, as it required going to the professor directly and asking for the exam, rather than being a momentary “Bueller” on the lips, though the propensity for the student to sit in the back of the class would add some time and attention to this evolution. Still, I don’t see that comparing to the one-on-one in the professor’s office.

But then I learned of coherent superpositions in quantum mechanics and it all began to make sense. One has not failed (or done poorly) on an exam until one has been handed the papers with all the red marks. Aha! By failing to retrieve the exam, all grades are still possible, and a poor one has not yet been earned. (Though that’s not quite right, either. Good grades are earned, poor grades are given. i.e. “I earned a ‘A,'” as opposed to ” the teacher gave me a ‘D'”).

(Update: Paraphrase: “Tom, it’s fixed. Put your damn pants back on”)

Plan IX from Outer Space

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Title IX Takes on Science

Men once greatly outnumbered women in collegiate athletics—Title IX brought equality. Men currently outnumber women in science—could Title IX have the same effect? Associated primarily with sports since its inception 26 years ago, Title IX actually applies to sexual discrimination throughout education. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the National Science Foundation and NASA, at the behest of Congress, are quietly investigating whether the science departments of universities might be in violation of Title IX.

Yes, gender discrimination is a problem in science, when one is addressing the lack of equal participation and representation. Of this I have no doubt. The question is whether it is the only problem, or just one of many. (It is ironic that many of the discussions about this topic are so unscientific, because they assume that other factors play no role without having adequately established this) The issue here, though, is whether the comparison to sports is an appropriate one to make. It’s not.

Men and women don’t compete with and against each other in these sporting events. Title IX has been very successful at expanding womens’ participation in sports, because it focused on equality of opportunity and did not assume equality of ability — women are not fighting for a roster spot on a single football, soccer or baseball team, etc. Title IX did not require adopting direct competition between the sexes; there are obvious physiological differences that make this impractical. Certainly there are situations where the women would do better (the uneven parallel bars in gymnastics springs painfully to mind), but would have anywhere close to a 50-50 mix in most sports, if we had mixed-gender teams and ability were the only metric? The lack of opportunity for women that prompted Title IX was the lack of teams on which they could compete, and one could (and did) create and fund these teams. The situation in science is very much different in the difficulties that exist and the solutions that can be proffered.

Pumping Those Neurons

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Brains on the Line

NFL players’ Wonderlic scores, compiled according to position. Some of the highest scores belong to the offensive linemen, particularly tackle. I played offensive tackle in high school (ha!), but that had a lot more to do with being big and slow vs being smart. (and I wasn’t smart enough to avoid getting my leg snapped into pieces, either)

The End of Theory. Not.

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A couple days back, Chris Anderson at Wired posted some junk about large volumes of data making the scientific method obsolete, misapplying George Box’s quote, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” I was a little too distracted to respond, but it didn’t exactly escape the notice of the science and skeptic blog-o-icosahedron.

Bee over at Backreaction responds. Several links to other responses at the end.
Update: Good Math Bad Math reacts as well

Game Theory

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A side comment by Matt about quizzes triggered a thought (so many of these interactions are induced rather than spontaneous)

I have all my old lecture notes and materials so the only real thing I have to do is make up new quizzes. Students are good at nothing if not gaming the system and they’d notice repeated quizzes pretty quickly.

When I TA’d I did labs, but the same idea applied. It was assumed that the students had access to old lab reports and exams (especially if they were in a fraternity or sorority) so the one thing we could make different was a question or two tacked on to the end of the calculations. And that did trip up a couple of students, who had obviously just copied from some old report to which they had access. Professors had various strategies about re-using questions, but I think the use of computers has made it far easier to keep a large database and mix-and-match questions that simple memorization of old exams prohibitive for introductory classes.

When I was teaching in the navy it wasn’t an issue. Quizzes didn’t count toward your grade, so there was no real incentive to cheat, other than trying to get out of some extra problems to be worked because the instructor might assign them to people who failed several quizzes. There was no master file of exam questions because they were treated as restricted material — the students did not keep them, and they were strictly accounted for. But to cut down on the possibility of some “oral tradition” information flow between the different classes in session, questions were not re-used until the class that had taken that exam had graduated.

We had one incident that occurred just before I had transferred into one division — an exam went missing. The most likely explanation is someone miscounted, but what was recorded was that there were 126 exams (and they were numbered) and after the exam was administered #126 was nowhere to be found. So the exam was assumed to have been compromised for future tests, and all of the questions on the exam had to be removed from the exam bank. As it turned out, I inherited the job of writing that particular exam, so it fell to me to repopulate the stockpile — two brand spankin’ new questions per exam for the next year, so I got a lot of practice coming up with new material. Which isn’t that hard, because an old question with new numbers and solving for a different variable is a “new” question. The use of old questions wasn’t laziness, though — we didn’t grade on a curve, and the goal was to test each class the same, so you kept statistics, and made tests that had a predicted result of between a 3.1 and 3.2 on a 4.0 scale. A venerable question was well-trusted, and a new or changed question could throw the result off. If a class got an unexpectedly high or low score (usually low), an audit was initiated to try and ensure that there was nothing hinky going on. This was especially odious for the early exams, before the class had a chance establish itself as being above- or below-average. If a class had underperformed on earlier exams, tanking a later exam didn’t raise eyebrows. But at least once the conclusion was that it was the Russian judge a new question or two were harder than had been predicted, and had shaved a few tenths off the score.

But even within that strict paradigm, an exam-writer could game the system a little. No matter how much you’d drill it into the students’ heads to skip a tough question and go back to it later, there were those who didn’t. They’d invariably leave an easy question or two blank because they took too much time on another question that they still got mostly wrong. So putting tougher questions toward the front would tend to lower scores a little bit.

Maybe I'm Amazed

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I’ve read on a couple of blogs about The Amaz!ng Meeting 6, (TAM6), with some promises of summaries. A couple have been posted. (I’m still waiting on reports from some of you. Listen, I’m not joking. This is my job!)

The Bad Astronomer thinks it was the Best. Meeting. Ever.

Neurologica posts some thoughts

Moo gets an incomplete, having promised some cool hushhush surprise in a teaser.

Dueling Blogjos

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So, Blake wrote a post on What Science Blogs Can’t Do

Deedle dee dee-dee

Brian at Lealaps weighed in

If you know absolutely nothing about evolutionary biology, physics, ecology, or any other discipline you care to name you are not going to find the equivalent of a college course here on the science blogosphere. That doesn’t mean that it is not possible to gain some science education from the continuing efforts of so many writers, however.

Doddle da da-dum

So did I

Deedle dee dee-dee

Chad at Uncertain Principles responded

The mistake Blake is making is the flip side of the mistake in the most recent Ask a ScienceBlogger. The questioner in that case erred by thinking of blogs as a research tool, while Blake is erring in the opposite direction, by thinking of blogs as a teaching tool. In reality, they’re neither primarily about research, nor about teaching.

Doddle da da-dum

(End banjo/guitar parallel before the squealing starts)

I agreed with a lot of what Blake said. And I think that both Brian and Chad make some good points. And it’s a good thing I’m not running for office, lest someone call me a flip-flopper, but I think the real issue is everyone is arguing somewhat different points and there is not so much disagreement as all that.

It occurs to me I should also say that I’m not insisting that agreement be required here. Agreement is boring. Everybody is entitled to their opinion — and this is largely a discussion of opinion — and there’s a lot to be learned from looking at things from another perspective. So while I enjoy the saying “Opinions are like assholes: I don’t want to hear yours,” it’s not an actual maxim I apply.

Here’s more of what I would have written had I had more time the other evening, and what I have in response to the other posts. There are some closely-related but still distinct issues being addressed here: what roles do science bloggers play, what roles should they play, what role can they play and what roles do they want to play. And the answers will be different, depending on which question you are asking.
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