Yesterday, one of Skeptophilia's chief investigative reporters, whom I will refer to only by her code name of Cria Havoc so as not to compromise her activities in the field, brought to my attention a breaking news story about a University of Hartford archaeologist who is claiming to have discovered Atlantis.
Atlantis, you will recall, is the fabled island mentioned in two dialogues by Plato. Plato states that the island was the land that was bequeathed to Poseidon, and lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, thus pointing out its location using not just one, but two, fictional deities. It's a little as if I gave directions to my house by saying, "Take a left at Thor's castle - we're the white Cape Cod just past the cave where Cerberus guards the Gates of Hell."
Of course, this hasn't stopped people from arguing incessantly about its location. I suppose if you need a hobby, debating the exact GPS coordinates of a place that (1) no one has seen, (2) no one has any evidence for, and (3) probably doesn't exist, is as entertaining as any. Prior to these recent discoveries, the two leading hypotheses were that Atlantis was somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of present-day Ireland, or near the Greek island of Thera, which was destroyed by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in around 1500 BCE.
This sounds a little spurious right from the get-go. I mean, Thera and Ireland aren't exactly next-door neighbors. If I came to you and said, "I know exactly where Blackbeard's treasure is! It's either in Pensacola, Florida or Penobscot, Maine! Or possibly Nebraska!" you would be right to feel a degree of skepticism. So I think we're to be excused if we're doubtful about Atlantis' existence, given that even the diehard believers have no idea where it supposedly is. Or was. Or whatever.
On the other hand, there have been times when a story that was thought to be myth has proven to be factually accurate. Okay, there was that one time, at least. I'm thinking, of course, of Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy using the clues from Homer's Iliad. There's a difference, though, between Homer, who described epic battles involving cities that are known to have existed, and a couple of mentions of a mythical island paradise in Plato's dialogues. Right?
Enter Richard Freund. My informant Ms. Havoc sent me a link to a story (here) describing how Freund and his team, using satellite images, have located what they think is the ruins of an ancient city, submerged in the wetlands that are now Doñana National Park in southern Spain. The alleged ruins do lie reasonably close to Gibraltar, which most people think are the Pillars of Hercules that Plato mentioned, so the theory has at least that much going for it. Some of the ruins seem to be offshore, and Atlantis, of course, met its doom when one of the gods smote it and it "sank beneath the waves in a single day."
It's the downfall of Atlantis that captures the imagination, and even I have to admit that it's a pretty dramatic story. If you've read any Greek mythology, however, you will discover that this sort of thing was quite commonplace. The ancient Greeks were constantly having the crap smitten out of them by some god or another, which is probably why you see so few ancient Greeks around any more.
In any case, I have no serious doubt that Freund has found some cool ruins of an ancient city. Even so, this doesn't vindicate the whole Atlantis legend, because Plato didn't say that Atlantis was a city along the coast of Spain -- he said that it was an island, "larger than Libya and Asia together," with mountains that "soared to the sky," which is hardly the same thing. That the city Freund discovered might have given rise to the legend, I can perhaps believe; that it proves the whole legend to be true is a bit of an overstatement. And given that Freund is now being featured in a new National Geographic documentary called Finding Atlantis, the whole thing has the hallmarks of a publicity stunt.
So, the bottom line is, Atlantis as described by Plato probably didn't exist. In fact, his mention of the alleged continent would likely have escaped the notice of all but a few philosophy majors, had it not been for two people. One was Ignatius Donnelly, a huckster and politician of the late 19th century, who wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, the single volume that has become the bible for Atlanteans worldwide. The second, much as I hate to admit it, was J. R. R. Tolkien, whose tales of the land of Númenor have been considered widely (by people who don't understand the definition of the word "fiction") to be an account of the real history of the Lost Island.
So, all of this leads us right back to where we started. Ruins of the ancient world are pretty common. So are myths. Sometimes myths have a grain of truth to them, and sometimes they don't, which is a good thing, because although Homer got the location of Troy basically right, he completely missed the mark in claiming that there is a horrible six-headed monster guarding the Straits of Messina, which if it had been true would have been a serious inconvenience for cruise ships. So I'm still casting a jaundiced eye at the whole "we've discovered Atlantis!" thing. It'll be interesting to see what turns up when they start poking around at Doñana, but I'm doubting that they'll find anything that I would consider hard evidence.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
The-Puppy-Is-Cuter Syndrome
Our friends Alex and Nancy just got a new puppy. This puppy, whose name is Georgia Rose, is a labradoodle, a breed that simply oozes cuteness. This is a puppy whose cuteness level is such that, had Joseph Stalin seen her, he would have taken a break from enslaving Eastern Europe to sit on the kitchen floor and tickle her under the chin, saying "Awwww... widdums widdums widdums."
All of this has had the effect of making me look a little askance at my own two dogs. Our border collie, Doolin, is far too smart for her own good, or anyone else's, and thinks she is in charge of the entire household. She worries constantly, can't sit still, and is generally a walking encyclopedia of doggy neuroses. Our other dog, Grendel, looks like a genetics experiment gone horribly wrong. He has the muzzle of a boxer, the eyes of a pug, the build of a pitbull, the coloration of a German shepherd, and the tail of a husky. If Mary Shelley had written about dogs, she would have come up with something like Grendel.
So, to summarize: Alex and Nancy have a dog who looks like the main character in a children's story called "Precious the Puppy Finds a New Home;" we have Dr. Caninestein and Her Monster.
I know this is unfair, and I must state for the record that I don't love our dogs any less because of it. And I can reassure myself in the knowledge that I am hardly the only person who has felt this way when looking at the lives other people lead. It's so common that psychologists have a name for it. They call it the "Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome" -- and it applies to way more than just dogs.
A couple of psychologists, David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman, studied this phenomenon, and found out just how universal this perception is. They asked students at colleges in the Midwest to assess their own happiness, and the imagined happiness of students at colleges in California. Across the board, the Midwestern students thought the Californian students would be happier -- the greater natural beauty, better climate, and greater (perceived) cultural opportunities were all cited as reasons. In fact, in actual assessments of satisfaction, the students in the Midwest and in California averaged the same scores.
Other studies have confirmed this -- one by Gilbert et al. showed that college faculty members, when asked to predict their happiness levels if they got tenure, were strikingly inaccurate at doing so -- the ones who were happy pre-tenure were, relatively speaking, still pretty happy folks whether or not they received tenure, and the unhappy ones stayed unhappy even if they received full professorships.
In my own case, I go through this kind of thing every winter. Being a southerner, borne of ancestry from the temperate climes of the Mediterranean, I begin to dread the oncoming upstate New York cold starting some time in mid-August. I whine to my poor, long-suffering wife incessantly, usually ending with, "... if we only lived somewhere warm. *heavy sigh*" What the aforementioned studies show is that basically, I would still be a grouchy curmudgeon even if I lived in the Florida Keys, which I suppose will trigger a different kind of Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome in my wife.
Honestly, I know that switching things up isn't the answer. A woman I have known for years seems to think that's the answer -- and as a result, has moved more times than I can keep track of, and has had about twelve different jobs. Each time, the next place, the next job, is going to be "the right one." And I don't believe she's a bit happier now than she was twenty years ago. While I do my share of complaining, her answer to the problem is not one I'd want to copy.
Truthfully, I'm pretty satisfied with my life. I have a wonderful (and tolerant) spouse, a great job, opportunities to play music with some amazing musicians, a nice house in a beautiful part of the country. If it's colder than I like, well, nowhere is perfect, and the other aspects of being here are pretty cool. Even if my dogs are more suited to a science fiction novel than they would be to a children's picture book.
All of this has had the effect of making me look a little askance at my own two dogs. Our border collie, Doolin, is far too smart for her own good, or anyone else's, and thinks she is in charge of the entire household. She worries constantly, can't sit still, and is generally a walking encyclopedia of doggy neuroses. Our other dog, Grendel, looks like a genetics experiment gone horribly wrong. He has the muzzle of a boxer, the eyes of a pug, the build of a pitbull, the coloration of a German shepherd, and the tail of a husky. If Mary Shelley had written about dogs, she would have come up with something like Grendel.
So, to summarize: Alex and Nancy have a dog who looks like the main character in a children's story called "Precious the Puppy Finds a New Home;" we have Dr. Caninestein and Her Monster.
I know this is unfair, and I must state for the record that I don't love our dogs any less because of it. And I can reassure myself in the knowledge that I am hardly the only person who has felt this way when looking at the lives other people lead. It's so common that psychologists have a name for it. They call it the "Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome" -- and it applies to way more than just dogs.
A couple of psychologists, David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman, studied this phenomenon, and found out just how universal this perception is. They asked students at colleges in the Midwest to assess their own happiness, and the imagined happiness of students at colleges in California. Across the board, the Midwestern students thought the Californian students would be happier -- the greater natural beauty, better climate, and greater (perceived) cultural opportunities were all cited as reasons. In fact, in actual assessments of satisfaction, the students in the Midwest and in California averaged the same scores.
Other studies have confirmed this -- one by Gilbert et al. showed that college faculty members, when asked to predict their happiness levels if they got tenure, were strikingly inaccurate at doing so -- the ones who were happy pre-tenure were, relatively speaking, still pretty happy folks whether or not they received tenure, and the unhappy ones stayed unhappy even if they received full professorships.
In my own case, I go through this kind of thing every winter. Being a southerner, borne of ancestry from the temperate climes of the Mediterranean, I begin to dread the oncoming upstate New York cold starting some time in mid-August. I whine to my poor, long-suffering wife incessantly, usually ending with, "... if we only lived somewhere warm. *heavy sigh*" What the aforementioned studies show is that basically, I would still be a grouchy curmudgeon even if I lived in the Florida Keys, which I suppose will trigger a different kind of Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome in my wife.
Honestly, I know that switching things up isn't the answer. A woman I have known for years seems to think that's the answer -- and as a result, has moved more times than I can keep track of, and has had about twelve different jobs. Each time, the next place, the next job, is going to be "the right one." And I don't believe she's a bit happier now than she was twenty years ago. While I do my share of complaining, her answer to the problem is not one I'd want to copy.
Truthfully, I'm pretty satisfied with my life. I have a wonderful (and tolerant) spouse, a great job, opportunities to play music with some amazing musicians, a nice house in a beautiful part of the country. If it's colder than I like, well, nowhere is perfect, and the other aspects of being here are pretty cool. Even if my dogs are more suited to a science fiction novel than they would be to a children's picture book.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Earthquakes and supermoons
Like many people, during the last 24 hours I have been glued to the images and videos coming out of Japan. The devastation wreaked by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake is surreal -- burning buildings being swept along by the tsunami, roads split right down the center line, a barge spinning in a whirlpool. My heart goes out to the people of Japan who are now facing the overwhelming work of picking up the pieces, healing the injured, rebuilding the homes, burying the dead.
At times like this, people look for answers. Why did the earthquake occur there? Why was it so strong? Was there something scientists could have done to predict it, to warn people? Unfortunately, our knowledge of tectonic geology is just not refined enough to predict accurately where a fault zone will slip. Japan is a highly active place, seismically -- it is an island arc raised by the movement of the Pacific Plate underneath the Eurasian Plate, and this movement causes not only earthquakes, but volcanism. Japan is prone to both, for the same reason that Indonesia, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the Caribbean are.
But that's not enough for some people. There are people who don't just need reasons, they need Reasons. They need, somehow, to connect tragedies like this one to Great Doings in the Cosmos, to give the impression that it's all part of some meaningful pattern.
Enter Richard Nolle, an astrologer, who has publicized the claim that the earthquake was due to an "extreme supermoon."
A "supermoon" occurs because the moon's orbit is slightly elliptical, and so it is sometimes closer to the Earth, and sometimes further away. The point at which it reaches its nearest approach (the lunar perigee) is independent of the phases of the moon, which have to do with the angle made by the sun/earth/moon system.
Occasionally, of course, the moon will be full when it's at its perigee. This happens regularly, if infrequently. This is a "supermoon." And Richard Nolle says that it's bad news -- he predicted a few weeks ago that when the next supermoon occurs, on March 19, we'll have earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and storms, your washing machine will go off balance, your mortgage check will bounce, and your cat will puke up a hairball on the rug.
Okay, I made the last part up. But what Nolle proposes is about as ridiculous. There is no connection between the lunar perigee and geologic events -- the increase in the moon's gravitational pull at perigee is negligible. A connection between earthquakes and the lunar phases has been proposed -- since most fault systems are under water, a tenuous connection might be made between fault slippage and tides, but research has shown that any increase in geological activity because of the movement of the oceans during the tides is 1% or less.
What bothers me is that Nolle is now pointing to the Japanese earthquake as vindication of his claim. Never mind that it occurred on March 11, and the moon is still nine days away from full, and about a quarter of a revolution away from perigee. If you believe in pseudoscience, you have no need to let paltry trivia such as the facts get in the way.
All of this, however, is a small matter as compared with the actual reality of what the Japanese people are going through. It is tempting, at times like this, to try and see a deeper meaning in it all, to try to connect what happened with the universe as a whole, to try to make it make sense. The scary truth is that it doesn't make sense -- things like this happen, and it remains for us not to waste time trying to explain them, but to open our hearts and help the survivors put their lives back together.
At times like this, people look for answers. Why did the earthquake occur there? Why was it so strong? Was there something scientists could have done to predict it, to warn people? Unfortunately, our knowledge of tectonic geology is just not refined enough to predict accurately where a fault zone will slip. Japan is a highly active place, seismically -- it is an island arc raised by the movement of the Pacific Plate underneath the Eurasian Plate, and this movement causes not only earthquakes, but volcanism. Japan is prone to both, for the same reason that Indonesia, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the Caribbean are.
But that's not enough for some people. There are people who don't just need reasons, they need Reasons. They need, somehow, to connect tragedies like this one to Great Doings in the Cosmos, to give the impression that it's all part of some meaningful pattern.
Enter Richard Nolle, an astrologer, who has publicized the claim that the earthquake was due to an "extreme supermoon."
A "supermoon" occurs because the moon's orbit is slightly elliptical, and so it is sometimes closer to the Earth, and sometimes further away. The point at which it reaches its nearest approach (the lunar perigee) is independent of the phases of the moon, which have to do with the angle made by the sun/earth/moon system.
Occasionally, of course, the moon will be full when it's at its perigee. This happens regularly, if infrequently. This is a "supermoon." And Richard Nolle says that it's bad news -- he predicted a few weeks ago that when the next supermoon occurs, on March 19, we'll have earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and storms, your washing machine will go off balance, your mortgage check will bounce, and your cat will puke up a hairball on the rug.
Okay, I made the last part up. But what Nolle proposes is about as ridiculous. There is no connection between the lunar perigee and geologic events -- the increase in the moon's gravitational pull at perigee is negligible. A connection between earthquakes and the lunar phases has been proposed -- since most fault systems are under water, a tenuous connection might be made between fault slippage and tides, but research has shown that any increase in geological activity because of the movement of the oceans during the tides is 1% or less.
What bothers me is that Nolle is now pointing to the Japanese earthquake as vindication of his claim. Never mind that it occurred on March 11, and the moon is still nine days away from full, and about a quarter of a revolution away from perigee. If you believe in pseudoscience, you have no need to let paltry trivia such as the facts get in the way.
All of this, however, is a small matter as compared with the actual reality of what the Japanese people are going through. It is tempting, at times like this, to try and see a deeper meaning in it all, to try to connect what happened with the universe as a whole, to try to make it make sense. The scary truth is that it doesn't make sense -- things like this happen, and it remains for us not to waste time trying to explain them, but to open our hearts and help the survivors put their lives back together.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Another modest proposal
Yesterday, I posted about my reaction to the passage of the Wisconsin bill that would strip public workers of their collective bargaining rights, and I explained why I thought this would have devastating results, especially on schools.
Well. You'd have thought I'd proposed solving the world's overpopulation and famine problems simultaneously by having poor people eat their children. Admittedly, I had a good many positive responses, but also some violently negative ones, including one which said, and I quote, "Teachers' unions and the tenure system are destroying public education in America. It's creating a workforce of teachers who don't give a damn about quality teaching, and are just putting in their time until early retirement with full benefits."
I won't even address the factual inaccuracies of that statement, which are, I hope, abundantly clear. However, this has spurred me to answer the anti-union crowd's rhetoric with a modest proposal of my own, to wit:
If you want to hold me accountable for the academic success of my students, and tie my job retention or my salary, or both, to student test scores, then allow me to fire underperforming students.
That's the "business model" that so many of these folks tout, isn't it? Chock full of personal responsibility and the Get-Ahead Motive That Made America Great? If an employee can't be bothered to get up off his lazy ass and do his job, fire him -- there are plenty other qualified candidates who'd love to have his job. Same should be true of quality education, right?
Note that I am not talking about students with legitimate academic difficulties, nor even about the earnest but hapless types who honestly want to be in class, and are interested in the subjects being taught, but sometimes can't get out of their own way long enough to turn in assignments. Heaven knows my own children fell into both of those groups at times. No, I'm talking about the small minority of students -- in my experience, under ten percent -- who don't give a damn about school, do the bare minimum (if that), and cause as much trouble for teachers and other students along the way as they can manage to do.
A few examples. Names have obviously been withheld, and details occasionally modified, to obscure the identities of these individuals.
1) The young man who had a 14% in my class, and whose father said he wasn't successful because I wasn't "challenging him enough."
2) The girl who, as far as I could tell, copied every single assignment she turned in, and in fact copied the answers on the first quiz from her neighbor, not realizing that I create two versions of every quiz, with scrambled answers. She got a zero on the quiz, and then had the temerity to demand to know why she'd gotten a zero and her neighbor had gotten an 85% "when our answers are exactly the same."
3) The young lady who is so savvy about our school's attendance policy, which will only drop you for non-attendance if you miss twenty consecutive days of school, that she has been known to skip nineteen days in a row and show up on the twentieth so she won't be expelled. She is the current record-holder for the lowest overall grade in a class in my 24 year career -- a 3%.
4) The boy who showed up stoned to class every single day, and whose mother said, at a parent conference, "Well, I know my son is having academic difficulties, but at least I'm happy to say that he's never used drugs." This statement was met with stunned silence, followed by the counselor saying to the parents, "We need to talk privately." Mom, when confronted with the facts, wouldn't hear of it, and refused to have her son drug-tested. Three weeks later he was caught with marijuana on a school-sponsored field trip.
And so on.
Again, it must be said that this kind of kid constitutes a very small minority, but it's that small minority that causes the vast majority of the discipline problems schools deal with. They also skew the standardized test scores, dropout rates, and every other metric applied to schools. How is it fair that I'm somehow responsible for the 3% average of the student who can't be bothered to show up?
You want to tie my wages and job security to success rate -- allow me to tell the kids who don't give a damn to go out and get a dose of reality, maybe come back when they've discovered that you can't get anywhere in life if you're an uneducated dolt. Let me change the attitude of students and parents to what it is in many other parts of the world -- that education is a privilege, not a right, that it is something to be cherished, not hurled back into the faces of the people who are working tirelessly to make learning exciting and relevant.
And until such time as that happens, don't come to me with nonsense about how the public education system in America is failing to educate students, and blather on about how "teaching is the only profession where you get paid the same thing regardless of whether you succeed or fail at your job." Don't make the absurd claim that school funding should be based on student success on a single standardized test.
And dammit, don't try to strip me of my right to have a say in my own working conditions.
Well. You'd have thought I'd proposed solving the world's overpopulation and famine problems simultaneously by having poor people eat their children. Admittedly, I had a good many positive responses, but also some violently negative ones, including one which said, and I quote, "Teachers' unions and the tenure system are destroying public education in America. It's creating a workforce of teachers who don't give a damn about quality teaching, and are just putting in their time until early retirement with full benefits."
I won't even address the factual inaccuracies of that statement, which are, I hope, abundantly clear. However, this has spurred me to answer the anti-union crowd's rhetoric with a modest proposal of my own, to wit:
If you want to hold me accountable for the academic success of my students, and tie my job retention or my salary, or both, to student test scores, then allow me to fire underperforming students.
That's the "business model" that so many of these folks tout, isn't it? Chock full of personal responsibility and the Get-Ahead Motive That Made America Great? If an employee can't be bothered to get up off his lazy ass and do his job, fire him -- there are plenty other qualified candidates who'd love to have his job. Same should be true of quality education, right?
Note that I am not talking about students with legitimate academic difficulties, nor even about the earnest but hapless types who honestly want to be in class, and are interested in the subjects being taught, but sometimes can't get out of their own way long enough to turn in assignments. Heaven knows my own children fell into both of those groups at times. No, I'm talking about the small minority of students -- in my experience, under ten percent -- who don't give a damn about school, do the bare minimum (if that), and cause as much trouble for teachers and other students along the way as they can manage to do.
A few examples. Names have obviously been withheld, and details occasionally modified, to obscure the identities of these individuals.
1) The young man who had a 14% in my class, and whose father said he wasn't successful because I wasn't "challenging him enough."
2) The girl who, as far as I could tell, copied every single assignment she turned in, and in fact copied the answers on the first quiz from her neighbor, not realizing that I create two versions of every quiz, with scrambled answers. She got a zero on the quiz, and then had the temerity to demand to know why she'd gotten a zero and her neighbor had gotten an 85% "when our answers are exactly the same."
3) The young lady who is so savvy about our school's attendance policy, which will only drop you for non-attendance if you miss twenty consecutive days of school, that she has been known to skip nineteen days in a row and show up on the twentieth so she won't be expelled. She is the current record-holder for the lowest overall grade in a class in my 24 year career -- a 3%.
4) The boy who showed up stoned to class every single day, and whose mother said, at a parent conference, "Well, I know my son is having academic difficulties, but at least I'm happy to say that he's never used drugs." This statement was met with stunned silence, followed by the counselor saying to the parents, "We need to talk privately." Mom, when confronted with the facts, wouldn't hear of it, and refused to have her son drug-tested. Three weeks later he was caught with marijuana on a school-sponsored field trip.
And so on.
Again, it must be said that this kind of kid constitutes a very small minority, but it's that small minority that causes the vast majority of the discipline problems schools deal with. They also skew the standardized test scores, dropout rates, and every other metric applied to schools. How is it fair that I'm somehow responsible for the 3% average of the student who can't be bothered to show up?
You want to tie my wages and job security to success rate -- allow me to tell the kids who don't give a damn to go out and get a dose of reality, maybe come back when they've discovered that you can't get anywhere in life if you're an uneducated dolt. Let me change the attitude of students and parents to what it is in many other parts of the world -- that education is a privilege, not a right, that it is something to be cherished, not hurled back into the faces of the people who are working tirelessly to make learning exciting and relevant.
And until such time as that happens, don't come to me with nonsense about how the public education system in America is failing to educate students, and blather on about how "teaching is the only profession where you get paid the same thing regardless of whether you succeed or fail at your job." Don't make the absurd claim that school funding should be based on student success on a single standardized test.
And dammit, don't try to strip me of my right to have a say in my own working conditions.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Schools, unions, and Scott Walker
The bill, proposed by Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, to strip government employees of their collective bargaining rights is now on a smooth road to passage. Similar, but less well-publicized, bills are on the table in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Idaho, and other states.
The whole thing has been spun as a blow in favor of fiscal responsibility, to break the power of corrupt labor union bosses, and to allow administrators to fire inept workers without having to consider seniority. I'd like to cast the whole thing in a different light -- that these laws are bringing about a dangerous shift in the balance of power, and the results, especially for public schools, will be devastating.
First of all, let me state one thing up front; I have no lack of awareness of the fiscal situation. Between the recession, and years of poor management, many states are in dire situations. There's no doubt that some level of economic austerity is a necessity.
Stripping workers of their rights, however, isn't the way to accomplish this.
In my own school district, we've seen state revenue decline every year I've been here. We've had layoffs four years in a row, and are facing more this year. In New York State we are required to use a LIFO system -- last in, first out -- it can even come down to where your name fell on the school board agenda the day your hiring was approved. Fine, qualified teachers have lost their jobs because of this; but what other system would be fair?
"Merit, of course," is the usual response; but there the waters get deeper. Merit by whose standards? How do you quantify good teaching? Does the fact that currently in one of my elective classes, 30% of the students are failing, mean I'm a bad teacher? Does the fact that in the class immediately following that one, 100% of the students have a grade above 85%, mean that in the three-minute passing time between the two classes, I suddenly figured out how to teach well?
Standardized test scores clearly aren't the answer; any political correctness aside, you just can't expect equal scores, or even equal improvement in scores, in a poor, overcrowded, inner city school and a well-funded suburban school whose students come from wealthy, well-educated families. To put it bluntly: if you want to run schools like a factory, and would like a guarantee of equal quality in the product, you have to have equal quality in the raw materials.
So, the situation is as follows: 1) States are strapped for money, and property taxes are about as high as they can reasonably go. 2) Collective bargaining rights, and LIFO as a standard system for fair layoffs, are out the window, drastically shifting the balance of power away from teachers and into the hands of administrators. 3) Merit is difficult to establish, much less quantify, given the inherent inequities built into the system.
What happens now? I'd like to make a few predictions. I'm not, as a rule, given to prognosticating, but I think I can make a few guesses.
1) Schools, trapped between declining revenues and unfunded state mandates, will cut the budget in the only possible way; they'll cut staff. Without LIFO, they'll start laying off the most senior, and therefore most expensive, teachers first. This will benefit the budget in two ways -- it will give states the immediate result of a reduction in the money needed to pay salaries, and the lasting result of a reduction in the money those teachers are eligible for in retirement.
2) Class sizes will rise, and any non-"core" subjects -- music, the arts, and electives -- will be eliminated.
3) There will be a drastic reduction in the number of talented college students who choose to go into education.
Some people are predicting a backlash -- that the rise in pro-union sentiment because of Walker and his ilk will assure that they are one-term politicians. I don't know that that's necessarily true -- the anti-union rhetoric I'm hearing seems equally strong. But one thing I'm fairly certain of is that even if the pendulum eventually begins to swing the other way, it will be too late to prevent devastating consequences for public schools.
The whole thing has been spun as a blow in favor of fiscal responsibility, to break the power of corrupt labor union bosses, and to allow administrators to fire inept workers without having to consider seniority. I'd like to cast the whole thing in a different light -- that these laws are bringing about a dangerous shift in the balance of power, and the results, especially for public schools, will be devastating.
First of all, let me state one thing up front; I have no lack of awareness of the fiscal situation. Between the recession, and years of poor management, many states are in dire situations. There's no doubt that some level of economic austerity is a necessity.
Stripping workers of their rights, however, isn't the way to accomplish this.
In my own school district, we've seen state revenue decline every year I've been here. We've had layoffs four years in a row, and are facing more this year. In New York State we are required to use a LIFO system -- last in, first out -- it can even come down to where your name fell on the school board agenda the day your hiring was approved. Fine, qualified teachers have lost their jobs because of this; but what other system would be fair?
"Merit, of course," is the usual response; but there the waters get deeper. Merit by whose standards? How do you quantify good teaching? Does the fact that currently in one of my elective classes, 30% of the students are failing, mean I'm a bad teacher? Does the fact that in the class immediately following that one, 100% of the students have a grade above 85%, mean that in the three-minute passing time between the two classes, I suddenly figured out how to teach well?
Standardized test scores clearly aren't the answer; any political correctness aside, you just can't expect equal scores, or even equal improvement in scores, in a poor, overcrowded, inner city school and a well-funded suburban school whose students come from wealthy, well-educated families. To put it bluntly: if you want to run schools like a factory, and would like a guarantee of equal quality in the product, you have to have equal quality in the raw materials.
So, the situation is as follows: 1) States are strapped for money, and property taxes are about as high as they can reasonably go. 2) Collective bargaining rights, and LIFO as a standard system for fair layoffs, are out the window, drastically shifting the balance of power away from teachers and into the hands of administrators. 3) Merit is difficult to establish, much less quantify, given the inherent inequities built into the system.
What happens now? I'd like to make a few predictions. I'm not, as a rule, given to prognosticating, but I think I can make a few guesses.
1) Schools, trapped between declining revenues and unfunded state mandates, will cut the budget in the only possible way; they'll cut staff. Without LIFO, they'll start laying off the most senior, and therefore most expensive, teachers first. This will benefit the budget in two ways -- it will give states the immediate result of a reduction in the money needed to pay salaries, and the lasting result of a reduction in the money those teachers are eligible for in retirement.
2) Class sizes will rise, and any non-"core" subjects -- music, the arts, and electives -- will be eliminated.
3) There will be a drastic reduction in the number of talented college students who choose to go into education.
Some people are predicting a backlash -- that the rise in pro-union sentiment because of Walker and his ilk will assure that they are one-term politicians. I don't know that that's necessarily true -- the anti-union rhetoric I'm hearing seems equally strong. But one thing I'm fairly certain of is that even if the pendulum eventually begins to swing the other way, it will be too late to prevent devastating consequences for public schools.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
The valley of the shadow of uncanniness
Today in the news is a story about the creation of a robot named "Kaspar" at the University of Hertfordshire, whose purpose is to help autistic children relate to people better.
Kaspar is programmed not only to respond to speech, but to react when hugged or hurt. He is capable of demonstrating a number of facial expressions, helping autistic individuals learn to connect expressions with emotions in others. The program has tremendous potential, says Dr. Abigael San, a London clinical psychologist and spokesperson for the British Psychological Society. "Autistic children like things that are made up of different parts, like a robot," she said, "so they may process what the robot does more easily than a real person."
I think this is awesome -- autism is a tremendously difficult disorder to deal with, much less to treat, and conventional therapies can take years and result in highly varied outcomes. Anything that is developed to help streamline the treatment process is all to the good.
I am equally intrigued, however, by my reaction to photographs of Kaspar. (You can see a photograph here.)
On looking at the picture, I had to suppress a shudder. Kaspar, to me, looks creepy, and I don't think it's just associations with dolls like Chucky that made me react that way. To me, Kaspar lies squarely in the Uncanny Valley.
The concept of the Uncanny Valley was first formalized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and it has to do with our reaction to non-human faces. A toy, doll, or robot with a very inhuman face is considered somewhere in the middle on the creepiness scale (think of the Transformers, the Iron Giant, or Sonny in I, Robot). As its features become more human, it generally becomes less creepy looking -- think of a stuffed toy, or a well-made doll. Then, at some point, there's a spike on the creepiness axis -- it's just too close to being like a human for comfort, but not close enough to be actually human -- and we tend to rank those faces as scarier than the purely non-human ones. This is the "Uncanny Valley."
This concept has been used to explain why a lot of people had visceral negative reactions to the protagonists in the movies The Polar Express and Beowulf. There was something a little too still, a little too unnatural, a little too much like something nonhuman pretending to be human, about the CGI faces of the characters. The character Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, however, seems to be on the uphill side of the Uncanny Valley; since he was played by a human actor, he had enough human-like characteristics that his android features were intriguing rather than disturbing.
It is an open question as to why the Uncanny Valley exists. It's been explained through mechanisms of mate selection (we are programmed to find attractive faces that respond in a thoroughly normal, human way, and to be repelled by human-like faces which do not, because normal responses are a sign of genetic soundness), fear of death or disease (the face of a corpse resides somewhere in the Uncanny Valley, as do the faces of individuals with some mental and physical disorders), or a simple violation of what it means to be human. A robot that is too close but not close enough to mimicking human behavior gets caught both ways -- it seems not to be a machine trying to appear human, but a human with abnormal appearance and reactions.
Don't get me wrong; I'm thrilled that Kaspar has been created. And given that a hallmark of autism is the inability to make judgments about body and facial language, I doubt an Uncanny Valley exists for autistic kids (or, perhaps, it is configured differently -- I don't think the question has been researched). But in most people, facial recognition is a very fundamental thing. It's hard-wired into our brains, at a very young age -- one of the first things a newborn baby does is fix onto its mother's face. We're extraordinarily good at recognizing faces, and face-like patterns (thus the phenomenon of pareidolia, or the detection of faces in wood grain, clouds, and grilled cheese sandwiches, about which I have blogged before).
It's just that the faces need to be either very much like human faces, or sufficiently far away, or they result in a strong aversive reaction. All of which makes me wonder who first came up with the concept of "clown."
Kaspar is programmed not only to respond to speech, but to react when hugged or hurt. He is capable of demonstrating a number of facial expressions, helping autistic individuals learn to connect expressions with emotions in others. The program has tremendous potential, says Dr. Abigael San, a London clinical psychologist and spokesperson for the British Psychological Society. "Autistic children like things that are made up of different parts, like a robot," she said, "so they may process what the robot does more easily than a real person."
I think this is awesome -- autism is a tremendously difficult disorder to deal with, much less to treat, and conventional therapies can take years and result in highly varied outcomes. Anything that is developed to help streamline the treatment process is all to the good.
I am equally intrigued, however, by my reaction to photographs of Kaspar. (You can see a photograph here.)
On looking at the picture, I had to suppress a shudder. Kaspar, to me, looks creepy, and I don't think it's just associations with dolls like Chucky that made me react that way. To me, Kaspar lies squarely in the Uncanny Valley.
The concept of the Uncanny Valley was first formalized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and it has to do with our reaction to non-human faces. A toy, doll, or robot with a very inhuman face is considered somewhere in the middle on the creepiness scale (think of the Transformers, the Iron Giant, or Sonny in I, Robot). As its features become more human, it generally becomes less creepy looking -- think of a stuffed toy, or a well-made doll. Then, at some point, there's a spike on the creepiness axis -- it's just too close to being like a human for comfort, but not close enough to be actually human -- and we tend to rank those faces as scarier than the purely non-human ones. This is the "Uncanny Valley."
This concept has been used to explain why a lot of people had visceral negative reactions to the protagonists in the movies The Polar Express and Beowulf. There was something a little too still, a little too unnatural, a little too much like something nonhuman pretending to be human, about the CGI faces of the characters. The character Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, however, seems to be on the uphill side of the Uncanny Valley; since he was played by a human actor, he had enough human-like characteristics that his android features were intriguing rather than disturbing.
It is an open question as to why the Uncanny Valley exists. It's been explained through mechanisms of mate selection (we are programmed to find attractive faces that respond in a thoroughly normal, human way, and to be repelled by human-like faces which do not, because normal responses are a sign of genetic soundness), fear of death or disease (the face of a corpse resides somewhere in the Uncanny Valley, as do the faces of individuals with some mental and physical disorders), or a simple violation of what it means to be human. A robot that is too close but not close enough to mimicking human behavior gets caught both ways -- it seems not to be a machine trying to appear human, but a human with abnormal appearance and reactions.
Don't get me wrong; I'm thrilled that Kaspar has been created. And given that a hallmark of autism is the inability to make judgments about body and facial language, I doubt an Uncanny Valley exists for autistic kids (or, perhaps, it is configured differently -- I don't think the question has been researched). But in most people, facial recognition is a very fundamental thing. It's hard-wired into our brains, at a very young age -- one of the first things a newborn baby does is fix onto its mother's face. We're extraordinarily good at recognizing faces, and face-like patterns (thus the phenomenon of pareidolia, or the detection of faces in wood grain, clouds, and grilled cheese sandwiches, about which I have blogged before).
It's just that the faces need to be either very much like human faces, or sufficiently far away, or they result in a strong aversive reaction. All of which makes me wonder who first came up with the concept of "clown."
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Weekend wrap-up
It was a busy weekend here for your investigative reporters at Worldwide Wacko Watch. So much so that we checked last night to see if it was a full moon, which it wasn't -- in our clear post-blizzard sky hung the faintest thin crescent. It's just as well, because here at WWW we don't believe in the whole phases-of-the-moon-causing-nutty-behavior thing, anyway.
But whatever the cause, it seems like in the last couple of days the loons have been migrating. A few examples follow.
1) A couple in Malaysia are claiming that a tree in their yard in Penang is giving forth showers of holy water.
Odd-job worker Abdul Ghani Mohammed Hussein, 41, who owns the tree, reports that he first felt the showers one afternoon when he was heading out to feed the chickens.
"My wife, Norhayati Abdul Karim, also felt the showers," Hussein states. "But there was no rain at that time."
Hussein goes on to say, "The clear water sprinkles are heavier at night and we collected about a pail of water over the past week."
Norhayati, 38, a housewife, said that she had no problem with people coming to collect the "holy water," and stated that many considered it a blessing to wipe their faces with it. However, if people didn't want to wait, she'd be happy to sell them some for RM5 (about $1.65) per cup.
Dr. Zaidi Mat Isa, an entomologist from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, has other ideas, however.
"It's cicada urine," Dr. Isa said. Apparently the cicadas, which are present in large numbers, drink the tree's sap in large enough quantities that some of it gets forced out of their nether regions, to fall as a gentle rain upon the upturned faces of the devout.
Alarmed by the fact that some of the enthusiasts were observant Muslims, the Malaysian State Islamic Religious Department has put up a sign warning Muslims against worshiping the tree. The sign threatens a fine of RM3000 (about $1000) and up to two years in jail.
Myself, I think that finding out that I'd just rubbed bug pee all over my face would be penalty enough, don't you?
2) Moving from being pissed on to being pissed off, from Salem, Massachusetts comes the story of a warlock who is angry at Charlie Sheen.
Salem, as I am sure you already know, was the site of the famed 17th century witch trials that resulted in the deaths of nineteen innocent men and women. The children who were responsible for the accusations recanted their testimony one and all within ten years of the executions, essentially stating that they'd made the whole thing up. Having thus demonstrated that witchcraft is nonsense, Salem of course became a mecca for people who claim to be witches and warlocks.
And now this weekend, a Salem warlock who is ironically named Christian Day has said that he is going to cast a spell on Charlie Sheen.
Apparently, the people in Day's coven are pissed because Sheen made a comment in an interview last week that he was a "Vatican assassin warlock." Evidently being the only people in the world who are taking anything Charlie Sheen says seriously, the coven declared Sheen's use of the word "warlock" offensive, and Day now says that his group is going to cast a "binding spell" on Sheen to prevent him from using the word in such a fashion again.
I'm doubtful that the whole operation will be effective, but hey, why not? If there's even a chance that it'll get Charlie Sheen to shut up, I'm all for it.
Day, however, is open to other solutions, and suggests that Sheen come to the coven for a "cleansing" of "him, his home, and his career."
Myself, I think that Sheen needs a little more in the way of detox than a magical cleansing, but I suppose it's a start.
3) In a recent post I commented upon the British Ministry of Defence(MoD)'s recent release of thousands of documents relating to UFO sightings in the UK, and I referred to the case of the bright lights seen over Bromley (Kent) in 2003 as one of the more interesting, and unexplained, cases.
Now Stephany Cohen, a "spiritual healer" in Bromley, has said that she knows why the aliens were there: they were coming to Earth to have sex with her.
The aliens, whom Cohen says are called "the Grays" and are from a planet called "Cirus D," appear only to those who believe. "They are very loving and intelligent, and will only present themselves to those who accept them," she told a reporter for the Kent News-Shopper this weekend. "They are a good race who only likes to help others."
She then goes on to tell how they helped her, in particular.
"Sometimes you get raptures like strong orgasms," she said, "and you don't know where it comes from. It is energies being passed down to their children on Earth."
The whole thing kind of puts a new spin on the phrase "the aliens are coming," doesn't it?
Roy Lake, chairperson of the group London UFO Studies, expressed interest in the Bromley case, but delicately declined to comment on whether it was good for him, too. "I believe they are already here," he said, at least agreeing with Cohen on that point. "All I can say is, keep a vigil, and keep looking up."
So, that's about it for now here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. Like I said, a busy weekend, but we're willing to put in the extra time and effort to keep you informed. "Ever vigilant," that's our motto. That, and "Keeping the world safe from bug pee, Charlie Sheen, and horny aliens." But it's hard to fit all that on a logo, so we'll stick with "Ever vigilant."
But whatever the cause, it seems like in the last couple of days the loons have been migrating. A few examples follow.
1) A couple in Malaysia are claiming that a tree in their yard in Penang is giving forth showers of holy water.
Odd-job worker Abdul Ghani Mohammed Hussein, 41, who owns the tree, reports that he first felt the showers one afternoon when he was heading out to feed the chickens.
"My wife, Norhayati Abdul Karim, also felt the showers," Hussein states. "But there was no rain at that time."
Hussein goes on to say, "The clear water sprinkles are heavier at night and we collected about a pail of water over the past week."
Norhayati, 38, a housewife, said that she had no problem with people coming to collect the "holy water," and stated that many considered it a blessing to wipe their faces with it. However, if people didn't want to wait, she'd be happy to sell them some for RM5 (about $1.65) per cup.
Dr. Zaidi Mat Isa, an entomologist from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, has other ideas, however.
"It's cicada urine," Dr. Isa said. Apparently the cicadas, which are present in large numbers, drink the tree's sap in large enough quantities that some of it gets forced out of their nether regions, to fall as a gentle rain upon the upturned faces of the devout.
Alarmed by the fact that some of the enthusiasts were observant Muslims, the Malaysian State Islamic Religious Department has put up a sign warning Muslims against worshiping the tree. The sign threatens a fine of RM3000 (about $1000) and up to two years in jail.
Myself, I think that finding out that I'd just rubbed bug pee all over my face would be penalty enough, don't you?
2) Moving from being pissed on to being pissed off, from Salem, Massachusetts comes the story of a warlock who is angry at Charlie Sheen.
Salem, as I am sure you already know, was the site of the famed 17th century witch trials that resulted in the deaths of nineteen innocent men and women. The children who were responsible for the accusations recanted their testimony one and all within ten years of the executions, essentially stating that they'd made the whole thing up. Having thus demonstrated that witchcraft is nonsense, Salem of course became a mecca for people who claim to be witches and warlocks.
And now this weekend, a Salem warlock who is ironically named Christian Day has said that he is going to cast a spell on Charlie Sheen.
Apparently, the people in Day's coven are pissed because Sheen made a comment in an interview last week that he was a "Vatican assassin warlock." Evidently being the only people in the world who are taking anything Charlie Sheen says seriously, the coven declared Sheen's use of the word "warlock" offensive, and Day now says that his group is going to cast a "binding spell" on Sheen to prevent him from using the word in such a fashion again.
I'm doubtful that the whole operation will be effective, but hey, why not? If there's even a chance that it'll get Charlie Sheen to shut up, I'm all for it.
Day, however, is open to other solutions, and suggests that Sheen come to the coven for a "cleansing" of "him, his home, and his career."
Myself, I think that Sheen needs a little more in the way of detox than a magical cleansing, but I suppose it's a start.
3) In a recent post I commented upon the British Ministry of Defence(MoD)'s recent release of thousands of documents relating to UFO sightings in the UK, and I referred to the case of the bright lights seen over Bromley (Kent) in 2003 as one of the more interesting, and unexplained, cases.
Now Stephany Cohen, a "spiritual healer" in Bromley, has said that she knows why the aliens were there: they were coming to Earth to have sex with her.
The aliens, whom Cohen says are called "the Grays" and are from a planet called "Cirus D," appear only to those who believe. "They are very loving and intelligent, and will only present themselves to those who accept them," she told a reporter for the Kent News-Shopper this weekend. "They are a good race who only likes to help others."
She then goes on to tell how they helped her, in particular.
"Sometimes you get raptures like strong orgasms," she said, "and you don't know where it comes from. It is energies being passed down to their children on Earth."
The whole thing kind of puts a new spin on the phrase "the aliens are coming," doesn't it?
Roy Lake, chairperson of the group London UFO Studies, expressed interest in the Bromley case, but delicately declined to comment on whether it was good for him, too. "I believe they are already here," he said, at least agreeing with Cohen on that point. "All I can say is, keep a vigil, and keep looking up."
So, that's about it for now here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. Like I said, a busy weekend, but we're willing to put in the extra time and effort to keep you informed. "Ever vigilant," that's our motto. That, and "Keeping the world safe from bug pee, Charlie Sheen, and horny aliens." But it's hard to fit all that on a logo, so we'll stick with "Ever vigilant."
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