It’s McCain’s turn
Here’s what I wrote while I was watching the US Open quarterfinal match between Djokovic and Roddick and when I flipped to the RNC:
The Republicans are a really big propaganda machine. They’ve got all these cheesy images behind the speakers. They also shout USA at inappropriate and awkward times. McCain (something like this): “I know many of you are going through hard times and you’re worried about your job or finding your job. Crowd: “USA! USA! USA!”
McCain says “Warshington.”
Why is McCain complaining about pork barrel spending? The war costs way more money than any pork barrel spending. And no one is dying with the domestic spending.
McCain is still going on about big spending. Hypocrite. Just threw in a “culture of life” so that he could be an even bigger hypocrite. If you want a culture of life, you can’t go starting wars and invading countries and putting your armed forces in danger and allowing tens? hundreds? of thousands of civilians to be killed. And you can’t support the death penalty.
And why are the Republicans so against judges who legislate from the bench? When the judges legislate in their favor, they have no problems with that.
Again, reason has been thrown out the door.
McCain looks really nervous. According to http://twitter.com/Slate, it’s sprawling and disjointed. It looks sprawling and disjointed to me because I’m only checking in occasionally and mostly watching the tennis match. But apparently, even when you watch the whole thing, it’s sprawling and disjointed.
Ouch… “Let’s help bad teachers find another line of work.” Unfortunately, many good teachers look bad by the measures they use. Mark says: And isn’t there a teacher shortage?
McCain can’t read from a teleprompter. I’m only tuning in occasionally and he keeps flubbing his reading.
Uh oh, now Roddick is hitting a lot of double faults. Two in a row and now Djokovic has a break point to save the 4th set. Djokovic just broke back. Djokovic is really good at lobbing.
Huh? He’s saying that he wants to keep US families from getting involved in wars so that they don’t have to endure the suffering and loss that his family and friends have. That makes no sense. And no, it’s not because it’s Djokovic or Roddick saying it. That’s what McCain says. We’re in a war now. And McCain wants it to go on.
The crowd (US Open) is excited. The 4th set is going into a tiebreaker. I’m rooting for Roddick here and once they get to the 5th set, all bets are off. Still on serve in the tiebreaker.
Wow, Djokovic is a wall with his defense. It’s now 6-5 in the tie breaker, match point for Djokovic. Djokovic serving. That’s it, that’s the match. Djokovic moves on.
Crowd (RNC) is still yelling USA back at the convention.
Oops. Apparently Djokovic said something controversial and the crowd booed and I don’t know what he said. I didn’t get anything good at the convention – only USA! USA! Stupid! And I missed what Djokovic said. It might be that he’s bitter that the crowd isn’t supporting him.
And that’s the end of the excitement of the evening.
Here’s some other assorted stuff:
- “Simply put, the United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.” For more info, here’s the full article.
- I didn’t see it, but apparently during Giuliani’s speech, the crowd at the RNC started chanting “Drill, baby, Drill!” I will cry myself to sleep tonight.
- I love twin studies. Sometimes I hope I can have twins of my own so that I can run my own twin studies. (Not seriously, but it’s still interesting to think about it.) Now there are “virtual twin” studies. These are genetically unrelated children that are raised like twins (through multiple adoptions, adoption + pregancy). So they’re the opposite of twins raised separately – same nurture, different nature. It’s not exactly a clean situation – the parents aren’t exactly “blind” in these case s- they know the kids are genetically different, and the parents may be related to one but not the other. But still, it’s interesting.
- Last but not least, the thesis is submitted! I feel an odd mix of elation and anti-climacticness. Maybe because it has taken over 3 months between walking and getting hooded, giving my thesis seminar, and finally finishing the dissertation. Yay? Again?
- I did a good job working during the day and only checking blogs after dinner.
When I read blogs as of 7/24/08, pre-thesis
When I read blogs as of 9/4/08, post-thesis
Some quick reviews
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time - This guy, Greg Mortenson, is doing great things and building lots of schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And doing it with sheer will and good-naturedness and open-mindedness. I found this to be very inspiring. It made me more confident that I am taking the best next step for my career. The writing is a little clunky at times, but the story and lessons are still really good. Here’s the link to Amazon. On Amazon, they appear to have pages for this book title as well as the old rejected title… “One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations… One School at a Time.” The rejected title sounds like something Karl Rove would have chosen for the title. It looks like the terrorism version is hardcover and the peace version is paperback. Maybe Amazon thinks that people who buy hardcover books would prefer to see what Mortenson is doing as fighting terrorism and building nations while people who buy paperback books prefer to see this mission as promoting peace?
The Soul of a Chef: The Journey to Perfection – Sequel to The Making of a Chef. Very interesting insights about cooking and chefhood. The first section is about the certified master chef exam. The second is about a chef from Cleveland, Michael Symon. And the last section is about Thomas Keller and the French Laundry. I’m finding the section on the French Laundry to be particularly interesting. Hearing Thomas Keller explain his insights and thinking to the author really fits with how, not reading this philosophy beforehand, I responded to the French Laundry experience. They really spent the time to balance the flavors and portion sizes, and they took great care and effort to get the most flavor and color out of every ingredient, and that really came through when the plates arrived at the table. I talked about “magic” in my French Laundry reports, but it turns out that it’s not magic. It’s chilling the vegetables before blanching and then chilling them right away. It’s straining sauces 20 times so that they’re incredibly smooth. It’s washing bones before roasting them for a stock. One thing that really impressed me is that they realize that a lot of effort and sacrifice goes into the raw ingredients – both with meat and vegetables. And fungi as well? So because of that, they treat the ingredients with as much care and respect as possible. And they are careful to use every last bit of every ingredient. But then again, they do talk about how if something isn’t blanched right or isn’t chopped right, it has to be tossed. So that’s a bit of a contradiction. But I guess if you just always do it right the first time, then there’s no need to waste the food?
Range – This last one is a restaurant. I was pretty impressed and if I weren’t moving to NYC soon, I’d probably go back. There were some really good items that we ate, and there were some things that really made me say “wow.” For example, it turns out that lime and chive are a really good combination and really made the goat cheese and sorrel stuffed ravioli with lime butter and chives appetizer really pop. Other highlight dishes included the
- puree of squash soup with sour cream and dill – This soup had a really nice kicky flavor.
- roasted chicken with a broccoli rabe, toasted almond and sausage bread salad – different from Zuni’s version; equally good, but in different ways. Zuni’s version has really tasty big pieces of bread. And a few other ingredients, but it’s mostly bread. Range’s had vegetables, lots of nuts, and sausage, so there was more variety for your bites. And I liked the lemony-ness. Chicken was impeccably done. One thing that could have been improved was that the veggies in the salad were too salty. But overall, I enjoyed the dish. It also makes really yummy leftovers – I tossed my leftovers with some extra bread, tomatoes, and some of the dressing that I had made for my tomato bread salad and it was a spectacularly delicious lunch.
- cornmeal crepes with blackberries and wildflower honey gelato – the cornmeal crepes were so delicately flavored and textured. Really yummy. I expected the wildflower honey gelato to be delicate as well, but it was more like “pow!”
- bittersweet chocolate and armagnac souffle – Pretty perfectly done souffle.
I also tried one of their cocktails. I had heard that they were supposed to be good. And when we arrived in the restaurant, the air smelled like fresh citrus. Figuring that the citrus smell was from all the drink preparation, I decided that since the air smelled so good, the drinks must be good too. So I tried the sungold zinger which is 209 gin, sungold tomatoes, agave nectar, and lemon. I love sungold tomatoes. It turned out to be much more lemony (Meyer lemony) than sungold tomatoey. So it was good, but it was not what I was expecting, so that was disappointing. If you call it a sungold zinger and not a Meyer lemon zinger, I’m going to expect more sungold tomato flavor.
One last thing - I saw balut eggs being sold at the egg stand today. If you don’t know what balut is and you want to find out, you’re going to have to do your own google or google image search. I don’t want to put in links or images and then be responsible for grossing someone out. But my question is if I buy balut eggs from the egg guy at the market, can I incubate it and get a duckling?
10 Things to Add to My Worry List
Sigh… This “10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List” just highlights what’s wrong with science is reported.
Just because there’s a new study that seems to contradict previous studies, doesn’t invalidate the previous studies. They’re all valid and their results have to be interpreted all together, taking into account how the studies were done!
And just because something was found to be true for certain cases, you can’t apply it to all cases. #3 on their list is particularly bad. It just means that the situation is more complex. Just because you found some examples that go against the overall trend, you can’t use those examples to deny the overall trend!
The rest of the list is reported in these black and white blanket statements. Sigh.
And scientists, don’t think you are immune from my wrath. I heard this physicist on NPR talking about how quantum mechanics is the real truth and what we observe in the real world is just a “reflection” of quantum mechanics. Okay, fine, that’s a little exaggerated, but wasn’t my main issue. Then he started talking about how people don’t understand quantum mechanics because we are evolved to understand classical physics. He didn’t say that this was his hypothesis or guess. He didn’t say whether or not there was evidence for his claims. He just said it. Stop doing that. Some person out there is going to go out there and start telling his/her buddies about how we’re not evolved to understand quantum mechanics and say that because a physicist on NPR said this, it must be true. Or they’ll use it as an excuse to not to try to understand quantum mechanics. NPR physicist… please put some qualifications on what you say – which things are conjectures, which things have or don’t have evidence and how strong is that evidence!
Scientists are not experts on everything! Please don’t come up to me to ask me a question and say “You’re a scientist so you must know the answer!” Do feel free to ask your question and I’ll do my best to find evidence to support one answer or another, because that’s what scientists do. Or I’ll try to figure out what needs to be done to answer it, because that’s also what scientists do. And if I don’t know the answer, I will say that I don’t know, because that’s also what scientists do. Or at least should do (I’m talking to you, NPR physicist!).
From sea to shining sea
I’ve been really quiet with the posts lately – it’s been really crazily busy with all these workshops to prepare for and teach. I just got back from Williams College. It’s a really beautiful campus, just what you might expect from an old New England college campus. There are also mountains – the famed mountains of “purple mountain majesties” – surrounding the campus.
And the people are all lovely. I ate the most delicious and pure fruit pies baked by someone who lives in Vermont. Great crust. The filling of the peach pie was perfect. My guess is she added little or no sugar and just let the peaches be peaches. There was also a mixed berry pie. The rumor is that she picked her own berries. There was an almond flavor in the berry filling that was really nice. The baker’s name is Kathy or Cathy. The pie boxes said “Brick Oven Bakery.” But I was unable to find anything on the web. You have to be in the know!
And we had an impromptu performance by a wonderful trio – violin/fiddle, keyboard, bass/guitar – Trio Cafe Budapest. The fiddler was the brother-in-law of one of the workshop attendees and when the originally scheduled outdoor performance was rained out (by a huge, magnificent thunderstorm!), they came to the lounge of our dorm and gave us a private performance. Very eclectic music – Irish, Turkish, spirituals, waltzes, jazz. All of the music was full of emotion and spirit. I was smiling during the whole performance, and at times, I felt the urge to run outside and start dancing in the pouring rain. No one danced outside, but several people got up to waltz, and at the end, the whole group got up to dance. It was all awesome! We shared some of our extra pies with them to thank them. It’s such a small world in southern Vermont and Northwestern Massachussetts – it turns out that the band members are friends with the baker! Here’s another neat tidbit. The keyboard player teaches at Williams and he studies quantum information theory. Quantum information theory – that just blows my mind.
Perfect and intimate setting for the Trio Cafe Budapest
The workshop attendees were all great. I learned a ton from them and it was great to start meeting people who are interested in education and teaching in the NY area (that’s where I’ll be heading soon!). I learned about hunting morels. And a bunch of other people all got up to do yoga together every morning. I would have liked to join them, but it was way too early and I was way too jetlagged. The focus of this workshop was on how to teach bioinformatics and genomics to undergrads. There’s still a long way to go, but we’re definitely making progress. Hearing about the modules that were being developed by the other workshop participants made me want to go back to college!
Why don’t airlines and airports convert the arriving flight info screens to be departing flight info screens? Since they started preventing people from meeting arriving passengers at the gates, why do they need the arriving info screens anymore? And if there were more departing info screens, the ones that they do have wouldn’t be so crowded!
This recipe for Tomato-Bread Salad looks really amazing! I’m going to gather ingredients this weekend at the farmers market and put this together.
“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
