Friday, November 23, 2012

Confirmation Bias as a form of Lying

Dear KC,

We lie to each other all the time. I do not mean conscious untruths, which I am sure happens more than we would care to admit, or white lies that we say to make others feel comfortable. I am not sure anyone else would define it as lying, but it bears the same relationship to lying as involuntary manslaughter does to murder. It is not the intent, but the ability to know better that's the problem.

It's interesting watching or participating in those idea exercises that all seem to come from the same manual in business school. You know what I mean. A facilitator or teacher asks some questions or has some prompts presented on flip charts or poster board. Everyone is then asked to write down their thoughts on sticky notes or posters, and then group and analyze the results. Which is fine, and is often useful enough in class to generate ideas. It's not something I've managed to use yet to teach stoichiometry, for example, but perhaps it's just a sign of my own lack of creativity.

What I am not sure of is how useful the process is in identifying problems or giving non-obvious feedback. I've seen the process now a few times, and each time it generates a list of ideas or solutions, and it clearly identifies which ideas are in the majority. I'm not sure how different it is from a poll, which is a lot quicker, or how identifying what everyone already knows is useful when everybody already knows it. I presume it's useful if you have management or administration that's completely out of touch with its employees, which likely means you have bigger problems with regards to communication. It is kind of a problem in the same vein as XKCD's heat map; determining the obvious and making it seem like new information.

At some point confirmation bias and cherry picking have to take over. In any data gathering exercise the majority of people are going to state the obvious. The obvious will then confirm what everyone expected; there will be great rejoicing. Any new datum, something unusual that might be important, or runs counter to everyone's expectations, stands a chance of being drowned in the sea of familiar or comfortable ideas.

The attitude previous to the Great Recession seems a clear example of this. In The Signal and the Noise Nate Silver suggests that the signs of the coming recession were not hidden or inaccessible - what was missing was the desire and will to evaluate the evidence without a bias for what we wish to be true. The failure was not failing to see the recession coming. The failure was in only paying attention to data that confirmed that everything was fine and would continue to be fine. I wonder if a group of financial professionals had gotten together before 2008 and did the 'poster/stickynote' exercise if they would have managed to see the evidence without bias, or if it would reinforce their already held biases. I suspect reinforcement. (And if you haven't read Nate Silver's book - do so if you have any interest in the topic. It's a well-written explanation of a complex issue that at least seems like it didn't dumb down any of the important concepts.)

More prosaic examples would be protective parents that only pay attention to anti-vaccination information, or the creationist who can read a hundred articles on evolutionary theory and only see contradictions. To see beyond what you want to see requires that we remind ourselves that our bias is larger than we believe, and that the bias in others is probably smaller than we think.

This not a critique of the process, or a damning of flip-chart idea generation. Predicting developing problems or opportunities is difficult. It may be this is the best method and all methods have their problems. Where the lying comes in is in how often we seem to deliberately pretend that confirmation bias happens to other people. In today's world, with its ubiquitous access to information, ignorance can no longer be an excuse. If a group is generating ideas, then not mentioning such pitfalls amounts to tacitly allowing it to occur.

I'm not sure this type of lying has a word, but it needs one. We have white lies and (presumably) black lies, lies of omission, and bluffing. Lying by allowing our natural human tendency to engage in self-delusion needs its own label. Accusing someone of lying sounds far to strong for what this is. In our culture accusing someone of lying can derail a discussion on the nature of truth rather forcefully as egos and insulted feelings take over, but calling it something would allow us to highlight it when it occurs.

Sadly, I will not be the one to name it. Like Leonard of Quirm, if I was to name something it would be "the-lie-that-results-from-inadequately-accounting-for-psychological-processes-common-to-all-humans-in-a-world-where-such-processes-are-easily-knownable". Not very catchy. Psych-lie? Probably not.

It did get me thinking though. What do I currently hold to be true, that is clearly false? What confirmation bias' have been at play in my own teaching career, what scientific 'facts' have I never questioned? I'm most happy criticizing anti-vaxxers or holocaust deniers - areas where we know that the other side is wrong through ample evidence. In what must be a fairly obvious beam in my own eye, I have never really looked at teaching in the same way.

So I started investigating.

Regards,

Ron

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Online Safety Primers

Hi,

A reminder as we practice fire alarms, coach safe practices and (in my case) use the blast shield that a variety of resources exist to teach and learn about online safety for children. Google has begun its "Family Safety Centre" (http://www.google.com/familysafety/), and Microsoft has both its Windows Live Family Safety (http://explore.live.com/windows-live-family-safety) and its Virus, Spyware & Malware Protection (http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/). Whether or not you use any of the services, reading and learning about online safety is another facet of keeping our kids safe. Many of the educational videos do focus and use examples of younger children, but the ideas and concept discussed are appropriate to any age.

I probably should get back to work.

Regards,


Sunday, August 8, 2010

Nagasaki, iMovie, and others

Hi,

More stuff. You'll notice that I often link to www.freetech4teachers.com - I read a fair number of blogs, but that particular one gives a number of practical useful tools. I recommend following it.

First off, the Nagasaki Archive, which uses the Google Earth plugin to preserve the history and stories of the survivors of August 9th, 1945. Only a few of the stories are in English (even in the English preview), but I found that using Google Translate I could copy and paste the text and get a passable translation into English anyway.

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/08/nagasaki-archive-preserving-history-of.html

Next is an iMovie quickstart guide for those with a Mac...or merely students with one!

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/08/imovie-quickstart-guide-from-story.html

The next is a beta site called "Text the Mob". It's a polling service that would allow posing a question and allowing students to use their cell phones to text in their answer, essentially acting like the 'clicker' systems. There is a free version (with ads and limited in the questions). I don't exactly see students being allowed to pull out their cell phones in the near future, and I think a clicker system would end up being simpler and more useful (especially if embedded within the Smart board lecture itself). Cell phones are quickly becoming the mobile computer of choice, and I see this more of a harbinger of even more tools to come. You can get a TI-83 emulator for the iPhone (although the reviews aren't great), soon I expect you'll be able to add...everything.

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/08/text-mob-poll-your-audience.html

Have students who do a double take, or feel like teaching is the blind leading the blind? The "Idiom Dictionary" may be just the ticket. In SciTech I will use contemporary examples of issues and reactions. More than once an ESL student has questioned the meaning of a common idiom - the Idiom Dictionary means they can at least check for the meaning while working on their homework during prep.

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/08/idiom-dictionary-5000-idioms-explained.html

The next one is from "Bad Astronomy", an excellent science blog. This particular article summarized the 'State of the Climate' report, with some key diagrams to make it obvious why and how we know that the Earth is warming. It's directly applicable to Science 10, but in general I find it useful to have such resources on hand, whether it's global warming, 911 conspiracy, moon landing, vaccines, creationism,etc - it's often an opportunity to talk about the nature of logic, evidence, and critical evaluation of sources.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/03/new-study-clinches-it-the-earth-is-warming-up/

This is just an 'oohhh, cool...' series of pictures taken using computational re-photography. Using a program to adjust a camera position to take a picture exactly where a historical picture was taken, some amazing amalgams of historical and modern scenes. I assumed it would be of interest to history teachers, but I thought they just looked amazingly cool. There is some indication that the future idea is that this program would be released as an iPhone app, allowing anyone to create such photos.

Computational re-photography - http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/the-ghosts-of-world-war-iis & http://sergey-larenkov.livejournal.com/

Lastly, science in progress. It's a dinosaur dig in progress (you can use google translate to have it appear in English).
http://www.forskning.no/svalbard/

Regards,


Monday, August 2, 2010

Pirates, Textbooks, and Drugs

Hi,

Bloom's Taxonomy according to Pirates of the Caribbean : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjhKmhKjzsQ .

I've been told that, in order to progress in learning a new programming language, I have to memorize an exact sequence of commands even though I don't understand it. My brain hurts, so it started to wander around on its own and found some more stuff. Now I know what my students in Chem12 must feel like.

This series has a bit of a theme going. First is a New York Times article :
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/technology/01ping.html?_r=1&th&emc=th. The article is on textbooks, and comparing purchasing textbooks, or using readily available Internet resources and essentially make your own free textbooks. The 'Curriki' (free website) is here: http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome. The article makes the point that "2+2=4" for quite awhile, and writing and re-writing textbooks for the sake of purchasing new ones doesn't make much sense. In Chemistry (11 & 12) we have two textbooks - one's essentially a workbook, and another for background material in case the lecture doesn't quite cut it for explanations. I could easily see online materials taking up the roles of the latter - reaction kinetics is unlikely to change, and if it does I rather suspect online resources will change faster than the textbooks. The workbook on the other hand isn't possible to duplicate, but only as it's full of practice problems + answers that just isn't available anywhere else. Someday that might change, or perhaps I just haven't found it.

Continuing that theme is a blog from "Cool Cat Teacher" on comparing textbooks to buggy whips and railroads:  http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2010/07/buggy-whips-railroads-and-paper.html .

Other sources for digital textbooks are http://about.ck12.org/ , an initiative to create "Flexbooks", which are freely available. When I last looked at Flexbooks the offerings were poor, but glancing at the chemistry text available it has improved substantially. Bookboon (http://bookboon.com/int) creates its own free textbooks, although they do put ads in them as well. WikiEducator has a link to these and a lot more ( http://wikieducator.org/Free_textbooks ).

Lastly, and completely unrelated, change.org has an article on the latest study from the U.S. Dept of Education : http://education.change.org/blog/view/why_peeing_in_a_cup_wont_win_the_drug_war. Apparently the last U.S. administration instituted funding for randomized drug testing in schools, and somebody decided to study it to see if it work. Science ruins everything.

Regards,


Saturday, July 31, 2010

Stuff and Things

Hi,

First, a picture that will change your life as you know it:

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/07/chewbacca-on-a-squirrel-fighting-nazis/

That's right - it's Chewbacca, on a squirrel, fighting Nazis. I think the world just ended.

Secondly, if RSS feeds, blogs, and wikis make you want to find an English-TechnoBabble dictionary, may I recommend Common Craft : http://commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english
& http://www.youtube.com/user/commoncraft?blend=1&ob=4#p/u/9/muVUA-sKcc4 . The first link is to an explanation of RSS feeds, the second an introduction to Google Docs. Common Craft uses paper cut-outs and 'plain English'. To use yourself, they're free, although the films are not technically 'free' - if you wished to use them professionally (i.e. in a presentation or a lecture) they're for sale. But as an individual you can watch the whole version online.

A similarly useful site is 'animated explanations' that (naturally enough) uses animations to quickly explain a concept. Here's one on twitter - http://www.animatedexplanations.com/Animation.aspx?animation=391 - and one diagramming how the heart functions - http://www.animatedexplanations.com/Animation.aspx?animation=342 .

I linked above to the YouTube Common Craft video explaining Google Docs. You can not only create regular Word/text/spreadsheet/presentation documents on Google docs, but also 'forms', for creating things like free online surveys. http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2010/07/30/create-a-free-online-survey-with-google-forms/

This is a wonderful video linking math to rock climbing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnoL8hiN65A

My Wonderful World is created by National Geographic to celebrate geography and encourage its study in students. It seems a bit geared towards the younger set, but I thought it may be useful to some : http://www.mywonderfulworld.org/index.html .

And lastly, you can now see weather on Google Earth. In real time! That's amazingly cool. (Lisa: Or you could just look out the window.) Whatever, I'm not leaving my bat-cave just to look at the weather. That's what computers are for : http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/07/rain-or-snow-now-you-can-see-weather-in.html .

Regards,

Ron Neufeld

Canada's Best Boarding School

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Video Converter for Class Video Projects

Hi,

Classroom video projects are useful. Rather then the old 'poster' of "cut&paste", it can demonstrate the students explaining/demo'ing/acting a concept or idea themselves. Actually doing a video project, however, can be especially frustrating - students with multiple different video formats, operating systems, video editors, etc. I'm often confronted with a "this editor won't work with this video" because either they have a Mac file on a windows machine, or a windows file on a Mac machine, and currently they're not speaking to each other. If Mac would just buy Windows it would solve everything, but until then (and just today) I ran across a free video converter:

http://videoconverter.hamstersoft.com/

Unfortunately it only works on Windows (Vista, 7), and not on a Mac. Given that in any project there is always a mix that includes a Windows machine, that shouldn't be a problem.


Regards,


Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Password Security

Dear Colleagues,

A number of people have thanked me for my emails, and made a particular point about how they're saving all of them to a special folder to read 'later'. I know all about 'special folders' where you put things you don't have time to do right now, so I went back to my office and sobbed quietly to myself. The library was full of students, so it was a bit awkward.

Save if you like, but keep in mind that information streams from the inter-tubes much like water gently bubbles from a fire hose. Your email is likely searchable, I keep a slightly altered copy of these emails on a blog (http://teaching24-7.blogspot.com/), so keeping unread items in a folder to not read later isn't necessary - the information will be there (and if it isn't there Google will have 1.3 million hits of equivalent information).

With that in mind, I will endeavor to keep my emails down to only one or at most two items each. Quicker to skim to see if it's useful, and then pressing 'delete' if it isn't.

The first is a method to make keeping secure difficult-to-hack passwords easier to remember. I long ago lost count of the different number of sites I need a different password for. Remembering all this information is a challenge, and many people have come up strategies to meet this challenge. Using the same password on multiple sites, or 'class' of sites is one such method, using easy to remember passwords is another. I've seen passwords written on paper and stuck in drawers, and on the backs of monitors. Easy to remember passwords are also easier to guess (remember that unlike T.V. people don't guess passwords individually, they set up a computer to guess thousands of times per second using dictionaries and other common passwords). The difficulty with one password for all sites is the if one becomes compromised, they all do. It may not matter of someone hacks into your account for leaving comments on a blog, but if they can use that to get into your bank account, Facebook friends, or online email it's quite another. While someone posing as you could be embarrassing, it can also be used to ask your contacts to send you money - claiming to be stuck in a foreign country while traveling. With access to your email, it's trivial for a third party to determine when you might be out of country to make such a ploy possible. This doesn't even touch the severe and ongoing problems true identity theft can create. As a teacher, imagine if someone used your account to email all of your students inappropriate comments - I'd think I'd prefer my bank account being hacked instead.

It often seems, however, that I'm stuck in a catch-22. If I don't write a password down, I need it to be something I can remember, which means someone might be able to crack it. If I do make it complicated enough (i.e. minimum 8 characters of a mixture of letters, numbers, and/or symbols), then I need to write it down somewhere so that I can refer to it often - which opens up the possibility that someone would find my note.

The neatest solution I've seen to this problem in awhile is http://passwordcard.org/ . The website will generate a unique set of random numbers and digits that look like so:


And I know you're saying "Thanks Ron, just what I needed - another set of incomprehensible letters and numbers".

The usefulness of the card is that the card itself allows one to meet the duel purpose of having passwords that are hard to crack by people 'out there', and have something that can be taped to your monitor, put in your wallet, etc, to refer to. As an example how it works, let's say you are going to use an 8-digit combination for your online bank password. Rather than memorizing a complex string, I remember "green happy face". Going down from the happy face symbol at the top, and the green line, my new password is "RVffH3y8" which is more than sufficient to meet security requirements, and difficult to hack.


Even better, I can print out this card, have it laminated, and put it in my wallet in case I forget the password. I can tape it to my computer, keep copies in my desk, etc. It doesn't matter if someone sees the card - there are literally thousands of combinations that are possible, running the combinations forwards, backwards,


up, down or any other easy-to-remember pattern:


I can use it and not even worry if someone is reading it over my shoulder, I lose my wallet, etc. I have the convenience of keeping my password written down when I need it, but without the added worry that it could be found and used by someone else. The website also gives the option to include a few rows of only numbers (for things like PINs) and can include symbols (just to take security up that extra notch).

As well, don't have the same security password for different purposes - the password I use for my blogs should be different from the password I use for my bank. The security of some websites varies in quality. I've even had one website directly email me my password when I successfully convinced them that I didn't remember it - if something is sent in a plain email then that password has been compromised, and was never secure to begin with. Websites with proper security and encryption would either reset your password and email you a random temporary one, or a link to reset your own password. If you can read it in your email, then you can assume anybody else between you and the servers could have read it too.

So I use the card to generate multiple passwords:


In this particular example I just remember "Green Happy face down" for RKbUzQL6, and "Red Umbrella Up" for FbtECqL9. Both are difficult to hack, but I can carry both with me at all times.

If this appeals to you, I'd recommend generating a unique version at http://passwordcard.org/ and then copying that picture and printing off several colour copies. Laminate one for your wallet, put another in your safe or file cabinet as a back up.

Passwords are your first, second, and last line of defense for your personal identity - if you spend a little time creating a secure system, you will have much less to worry about later on.

Regards,

Ron Neufeld

Canada's Best Boarding School