The first Noel, the angels did say… “No Parking”
I went climbing today. Forearms tired. Can’t type. Can barely brush my teeth. So this will be another post that will please my lazy-ish sister.
This is what my crazy new landlords did to the front of our pale yellow with light brown brick house. It says, “Don’t park here, but have a Merry Christmas!”:
So that’s my submission for the ugliest garage in San Francisco. Maybe in the state or in the country. I hope they don’t paint the rest of the house to match the garage. I start singing Christmas carols every single time I come home. Who knows what would happen if the whole house were bright red and green?
This is the side entrance for the elves:
Here’s a post for my sistah
I like clouds.
Tamales are yummy.
They have corn and meat. You can eat them with salsa.
“Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices” – I disagree with how the study was conducted and therefore, I disagree with their conclusions
There’s a study about learning theory published in this week’s issue of Science. “The Advantage of Abstract Examples in Learning Math.” There’s also an article about it in the NYTimes. “Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices.” Even though this study is getting a lot of press (as of this afternoon, it’s the top article on the the NYTimes’ list of most e-mailed articles), I think the study is really flawed. So I want to publish my own thoughts on this article before people go and change how they teach math based on this one study.
The study’s goal is to determine whether teaching using abstract ideas or with concrete examples is better for helping students recognize and deal with novel situations and problems. I agree that it is an interesting goal. They teach some undergraduates a set of “mathematical” rules and operations using either 1) only abstract symbols, 2) one of various concrete examples, or 3) a concrete example followed by the abstract symbols. They then give the subjects a new situation involving a children’s game that uses what the authors say are the same rules and operations and determine which students are best able to figure out the novel situation. They conclude that teaching with only the abstract ideas was the most effective by their measure, using one of the concrete examples was the worst, and using a concrete example followed by the abstract ideas was better than using only the concrete example, but not as good teaching only in the abstract.
All these conclusions depend on what abstract and concrete situations they use, so let’s examine that.
The game situation used to evaluate the learning of the subjects much more closely resembles the abstract/symbolic example in that the task is to memorize a set of symbols and rules for combining them.
The concrete example, on the other hand, involves a “real world” process that combines two volumes of liquid and the operation is based on what happens when you combine two liquids. (*See explanation below if you’re interested.) The concrete example makes sense, but it is inappropriate and unhelpful for helping students accomplish the evaluation task. The objects in the evaluation task don’t have different volumes, so the concrete learners are not only required to determine the rules of the operation, they also have to determine how the various volumes map to abstract symbols. The researchers are requiring the learners with the concrete example to learn more information and solve a harder problem. Plus, the evaluation situation doesn’t look much like the concrete training example. So I’m not surprised that these subjects had a harder time with the evaluation task.
Teachers use concrete examples to provide more meaning and context to the abstract math. For example, if you’re teaching addition, the concrete examples you use might involve fruit in a basket and determining how much fruit you have after adding additional fruit. This example would provide a real world situation that students will recognize and it gives something for the students to visualize or imagine when they’re solving “pure” addition problems. Good concrete examples are related to the abstract concepts that you are trying to teach. The “concrete” learning situation modeled in this study is analogous to teaching addition by having students determine the total amount of fruit in a basket after adding additional fruit, but first, you have to slice up all the fruit and rearrange the slices.
All this study shows is that if your testing situation is more like what subject group A has been trained on and less like what subject group B has been trained on, group A will perform better on the evaluation. If, instead of an evaluation based on symbols, the researchers tested their subjects with a situation involving pie slices or stacking blocks or filling baskets with apples, I am pretty confident that the “concrete” subjects would have performed better. But a study like what I am suggesting, even though it better reflects real teaching methods and learning goals, would have not gone against “conventional wisdom” and would not have gotten published in Science and the New York Times.
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*The operation in the concrete example is: combine the volume of liquid in two containers (that will fill 0 or 1 full containers and there will be some remaining) and take the remaining volume. If the remainder is 0, the answer is a full container.
Described more abstractly, if we are looking for the answer (r), and we are given the volumes of the starting containers (vA, vB), and the total possible volume of the container (vTotal):
r = (vA + vB) mod vTotal; if r = 0, set r = vTotal
Corn, corn everywhere and not a kernel to eat
From Freakonomics: Some guy inherited $70 million and asked some ex-street hustlers/gang members how they think he should donate it. They had very wise and well-spoken words that I should not even try to summarize because I couldn’t do it justice. But I will insert a brief quote, from Shine (but the other quotes are great too!):
“I can’t tell you how many n– -s do stupid shit because they couldn’t get no food. Lot of people rob and steal to put some food in their belly. Make sure people got food. A man stops feeling angry against the world when his belly is full. That’s what I’d tell the brother to do with his money. And, make sure the older folks got food, not just the kids.”
But at the same time, the rate of obesity in the U.S. is skyrocketing! I went to a talk yesterday Steve Schroeder at UCSF. He used to be the President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and his talk was about how foundations can affect change in the U.S. One of the most striking things that I realized from this talk was how bogged down policy makers are because of corporations and lobbyists and that whole mess. So foundations are often better able to tackle issues that the government is afraid to take on. I’ve been thinking about getting into science and/or education policy, but maybe working with a foundation is the best way to go. I don’t know that the grip that corporations and their lobbyists have will be loosening up anytime soon.
Back to obesity. Another striking thing was a time-lapse series of maps showing obesity rates in the U.S. over time… I actually had seen this speaker give a talk previously and I had seen these same slides before and I remembered that it was striking. But even remembering that, I still couldn’t help but exclaim at how fast obesity is increasing. It’s really an epidemic. And man, things are bad in Mississippi… the speaker said that when he goes to Alabama and Georgia, they always say, “Thank goodness for Mississippi!”
So why are people hungry and getting more obese all at the same time? I think it (at least partially and probably significantly) comes back to the government and Big Agriculture and how the government subsidizes the production of corn that’s going into the production of nutrient-poor foods. And the subsidies are going into the pockets of big corporations rather than the pockets of farmers. How about this suggestion for how to use the $70 million… subsidize fruit and vegetable farmers to help them grow and fresh and nutritious food. By subsidize, I mean bypass the government completely. Then the struggling farmers who are growing actual food can be helped, people will have more affordable nutrient-rich foods, and the obesity epidemic will be slowed.
Or even better, what if we could somehow use the money to stop corporations and their lobbyists from having such an enormous influence on our country’s policies? That would be great and that would solve a lot of other problems too… health, insurance, climate change. Unfortunately, it seems like $70 million is a small drop given how much money is coming from the corporations.
It’s starts with “Reduce”
The phrase is “reduce, reuse, recycle.” But in what I see written about being green, people very often forget the reduce part. One exception is the folks at Grist. Reusing and recycling is all good, but don’t forget the reducing!
Have a Happy Reduced Earth Day!
Speaking of reduced, the strength in my hands is greatly reduced. I went climbing for the first time in 5 years. I won a free quarter pass for the climbing wall at UCSF! You can read about it yourself in the Synapse… but look for the photo of May Chu in which you will find a photo of me and my prize, not a photo of May Chu. So after climbing, I’ve had trouble picking things up, I could barely eat my noodle dinner with chopsticks, but fortunately, we didn’t lose our volleyball game with my reduced grip! We won! Thunder, thunder, Thunderforce, Hooooooo! My team is the most awesome team in the whole world!
On an unrelated note, David Cook on American Idol should have sung “Close Every Door” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It’s my favorite song from Andrew Lloyd Weber. That would have been amazing and perfect for him and it would have really placed him high above the rest of the contestants. Actually, maybe closing every door is reducing as well. And reducing the other contestants to be non-competitive is also reducing.
Let’s all reduce!
But don’t reduce how much you donate to good causes. Like Best Buddies! Shameless plug here… My sister is riding a bike for a really long time to raise money. If you want to help her out, you can go here.
Since it seems like it’s so easy to reduce, maybe the phrase should be “reduce, reuse, recycle, then reduce some more.”
My post might need to be reduced… I’ll make the next post shorter.
Does Hillary need a pillow?
Here’s Stephen Colbert’s (as always, hilarious and so true) recap of the most recent debate. (Sorry, I couldn’t get it to embed properly.)
Colbert: “For moderator, ABC courageously chose George Stephanopoulos, who owes his career to the fact that he was Bill Clinton’s communications director, so he was objective. In the sense that everybody knew his bias.”
Obama: “I think the American people are smarter than that.”
Colbert: “Smarter than that? No, thank you!”
There is also an independent discussion of the six degrees of Adolph Hitler. Or maybe it’s just two degrees.
A Passover and Easter mystery
Why is Passover happening in April while Easter was a month ago in March? The events that are commemorated by Easter are intricately linked to Passover and usually, these holidays occur at the same time within one year. A quick Google search didn’t turn up anything useful. Maybe someone out there is better than Google and can tell me?
Have you ever seen a tamarind? How do you make tamarind juice from that?
Tamarinds look like turds! They’re brown, dry and the insides are pasty, like dried fruit in the form of a turd. It’s actually pretty tasty – tangy and sweet. And the juice is really tasty (like in the rainbow salad at Burma Superstar! Went there tonight!). But it’s also very liquidy! But how do you get juice from something that’s so dry! Apparently it involves some mushing and dissolving of tamarind paste into water. So they say. “They” being websites on the internet. I’m not sure I believe that, but I will continue to enjoy tamarind juice.
Greens Day and Chocolate
I went to the SF Chocolate Salon yesterday. There were lots of chocolate makers and confectioners and there were lots of chocolate to sample, but that wasn’t the highlight of my day. I’ll get to the highlights of the day later.
A ceramics buddy of mine who is a Guittard of the Guittard Chocolate Company had given us a tasting tutorial one night at the studio, so it was nice to have that preparation when sampling more of their offerings and other companies’ chocolates as well. Guittard had the widest variety and I enjoyed their flavors the most. My head and mouth and nose were all very stimulated and each variety was very different from the next (anything from berries to bananas to anise and more) and also very good. I really liked the Sur del Lago from Venezuela. Scharffen Berger’s chocolates are good, but they don’t have a lot of variety and there’s only really one bar (70%) that I really enjoy. The 60% bar is kinda dull and not as bright as the 70%. Amano might have more bars that they make, but they didn’t have many for us to taste. While they were interesting, many of the bars had weird plastic or gasoline flavors and that overwhelmed the chocolateness.
A photo of some of what Guittard had to offer at their table.
Most of the tables had chocolate treats. They were pretty tasty, but there were no confectioners that really distinguished themselves and their products in my mind. Christopher Elbow’s chocolates might have been the best, but still nothing blew me away. I got tired of eating these and I kept wishing that there were more chocolate bars for me to taste and compare. A big problem was that everything was so sweet! I think that the confections would have been tastier and more interesting if the sweetness didn’t overwhelm the other flavors. If I ever get into the business of making chocolate confections, I would make things much less sweet!
Christopher Elbow’s chocolates, for display only. They showed us all these varieties but they were only letting people sample three kinds.
They also had chocolate-inspired hair style demonstrations from a salon that specialized in multi-cultural hair. I think the multi-cultural thing is supposed to be the connection to chocolate. While we were waiting to get a table at Greens Restaurant (hold on, hold on, I’ll get to that part soon!), we sat through a chocolate body frosting demo. They had chocolate, paint brushes, and stencils and I guess it’s supposed to be romantic and fun, but the final result looked like moles.
We also tasted some wine with chocolate, but the wine wasn’t very good. And the wine was causing some weird reaction in my mouth when it was mixed with chocolate and it was not enjoyable at all. I’ll just drink wine (good wine) and eat chocolate separately from now on.
We were quite exhausted after eating all that chocolate. Many of us were in chocolate comas:
But one of us couldn’t get enough chocolate and needed a take out box:
The real story is that he couldn’t finish the samples that he was getting and needed a place to hold the chocolate overflow.
Okay, on to Greens! I’ve been wanting to try brunch at Greens and since the chocolate affair was at Fort Mason, we decided to hit Greens. So did a lot of other people. We wound up waiting 2 hours, but it was worth it. It gave us a chance to rest after eating so much chocolate. And the food was really good. Since Christina was complaining about some people having nicknames on the blog while she didn’t, I’ll start referring to people with nicknames. Bourbon Red and Poblano had a Mexican-flavored scramble with the fluffiest tastiest eggs that I have ever tasted. Big Ben had fettuccine with asparagus. And I had a butternut squash gratin with the squash and other vegetables (including poblanos) topped with a fromage blanc custard (I guess that’s the gratin part). There were also cipollini onions and polenta cakes on the side. It was amazing. Unfortunately, there are no photos partly because Poblano was making fun of me for taking so many pictures of food. So I kept the camera in my bag and just enjoyed my food. Number Seven and his Wifey decided to leave before we could get seated at Greens, but hopefully they’ll have an opportunity to go back and have brunch at Greens sometime! With a reservation made in advance!
My Greens Day didn’t stop there. One of Deborah Madison’s (original chef at Greens) recipes from her Local Flavors cookbook was included in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. And it was perfect for this time of year. Asparagus and Morel Bread Pudding. Yes, a savory bread pudding! Brilliant! I couldn’t find morels (I’m so jealous that Bourbon Red got to go morel hunting when he was in middle school. That sounds like fun!) so I used enoki and what I think were oyster mushrooms instead. I made some modifications (soy milk instead of cow milk, two extra eggs because four didn’t seem like enough). The bread was dark so that’s why it looks so dark in the photo.
The resulting bread pudding was delicious and I will be able to enjoy delicious leftovers for a while:
Next time, instead of soaking the bread in the milk and then adding the eggs later, I will try mixing the eggs into the milk first before soaking. I think that will make the bread more custardy. There were walnuts in the bread that made it extra tasty, so next time, if I use bread with no walnuts, I might add some on my own.
Mystery photo of the day
A prize goes to whoever can guess what this photo is of. (If you will be using one of these yourself soon, you do not qualify for this contest. I know who you are!)
