The second TED Talk I watched was by Sir Ken Robinson. Actually, I watched two by him. He is a wonderfully entertaining speaker, and I recommend watching both talks. His first talk ties in very well with my post yesterday. He believes that we stifle creativity when we teach kids to always be correct. When we are very young, we are not afraid of being wrong. We say the darndest things. As we get older, we learn in school that different is often wrong, and that there is a single correct answer for all important questions. And, as wrong becomes more stigmatized, we become more afraid of being wrong, and less creative. The talk on creativity and the more recent TED Talk, Bring on the learning revolution! also criticize our current educational system for essentially educating for just a single sort of vocation, and a single sort of learning, and a single sort of individual. His idea is to have a less linear system, but I wish he had spoken a bit more about what that would look like. It did made me think about how I would like to change how progression in school works. I don't believe it is useful to have grades which are sorted by age. I would be very interested to see a school where children move to a new grade when they want to, and feel they are ready, and the teacher agrees. I wonder what that would look like? I would love to see a school try that. Anyone know of a school that has tried that? To facilitate that, I would make school more of a continuum, with a shorter break in the summer, so that there wasn't a specific time that was set aside for changing grades. In yet a different TED talk, Seth Priebatsch explains the power of games, and discusses how this might be used in education. Instead of having a traditional grading system, students could level up when they master a concept. Brilliant.

UPDATE: Check out the animated version of Sir Ken Robinson's Changing Education Paradigms. So well done.

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. ~Sir Ken Robinson

Okay, one more. This talk by Salman Kahn has a couple of innovations for education that are pretty brilliant. It combines the ideas of self-pace learning, kids learning together, and using technology to make education more human and personal to present a beautiful idea of what a classroom can look like. His great insite is to give kids videos of lectures so they can follow the lecture at their own pace, and then doing the homework in the classroom, so they can get personal help from the teacher, or another student who is already proficient in that area. I remember thinking how brilliant it was to have lectures on line when one of my math class professors started doing it. Not only could I then sleep in and miss the lecture, but I could pause and rewind my professor as I tried to parse what he was telling me. One thing that was very interesting about this talk, was some data he presented on how kids learn. Sometimes kids get stuck on a concept, and seem to be stagnating. If you let the kids continue to work on it, get help from other kids and/or the teacher, they will eventually figure it out. And once they do figure it out, they will then jump through more concepts at an much higher pace, giving a progression that looks like someone who is slow or a troubled learner at first, but then suddenly is performing like a gifted child, until they get stuck again. So in a traditional school, depending on what teacher they had what time, they may get labeled as brilliant or slow, and we all know what happens when kids receive labels...

A few weeks back I bought a drink called Sparkling Ice. It looked to be one of those flavored carbonated water drinks, and it said "Naturally Flavored" on the bottle. I took that to meant that it didn't have any artificial sweeteners in it. Silly me. I took one swig of the drink, and knew I had been fooled. Apparently sweet is not a flavor? I was irritated enough to find an email address for the company and complain. Someone from the company, let's call her Jess, emailed me back, and told me she would tell upper level management, and offered to send me "a sample of an all natural (organic) beverage we make that might be in keeping with what you prefer to drink". I thought that sounded nice, so I gave her my address and thanked her for listening to me.

About a week and a half later, I received a box of about six bottles of the Sparkling Ice product that I had complained about. With a note on the top from Jess, the customer relations person who had sent me the email.

I sent a thank you note to Jess and mentioned that she had sent me the same product I had been complaining about. She said, "I'm so sorry, I had a temp helping me and I didn't check her work. I'll personally resend product without sucralose." Which struck me as a little lame. Like my friend said, blaming the temp is pretty low. Own your mistakes. She did send me better drinks the second time. I am a fan of Talking Rain Sparkling Water, which doesn't have any sweeteners in it. She sent me that and some Twist, which is pretty good. So, I'd say mixed bag when it comes to Talking Rain Customer Service and Marketing Depts. Clearly making an effort, and I really appreciate my free drinks, but it was kind of like pulling teeth, more uncomfortable than you really want it to be. I still think one shouldn't be able to put "Naturally Flavored" on a beverage that has artificial sweeteners in it. She claimed that my "comments weigh very heavy into the decision making process", but I'm thinking probably not heavy enough to change their "Naturally Flavored" claim.

• experiential learning
• student voice
• embracing failure

I think she is on to something.

Something else that I have been thinking about is the importance of networking and social interactions in general in the grown up world. Seems like we should be trying to teach kids about the importance of learning how to interact productively with others, especially people that are different from themselves. Some of this is learned by team sports, but short of that, nothing really. Being social is so important at this age, it seems like there should be ways to harness their interest in it to help them become more effective at communication and team work. Social interactions as usually practiced by teenagers if pretty much the opposite of what you want to learn to be effective in the adult world. When you sit down at a table to solve a problem as a group, you just can't tell by looking who at the table may have some key bit of knowledge or insight to share. It is so important to understand and believe that if you want to solve a problem as a group. Giving everyone a voice and listening to what everyone has to say is so key to effective problem solving. And knowing when to shut up. More teenagers need to learn that one. Probably more adults as well. Okay, I'll shut up now. But first, a gratuitous picture of my daughter, since this blog post seems to be lacking a visual.

I'm not sure that we are any more obsessed with beauty now then when I was in high school, but it doesn\'t seem to be getting any better. But, I do have hope that with more people having access to more real people all over the world via the internet, rather than only seeing a window to the rest of the world that was filtered by mass media like when I was a kid, that more people will realize how damaging our limited view of beauty is. One can hope. In the meantime, remember, you are beautiful.

The majority of the time, our unconscious does a stellar job picking out the relevant information, and making decisions based on that, but unsurprisingly, it doesn't always get it correct. It seems likely that the more we are bombarded by media trying to influence our decisions, the less reliable it may become. It is hard to imagine how our unconscious deals with such a large amount of, often conflicting, data, but scientists are starting to figure this out. It appears that there are certain rules that our unconsciousness uses to guide it. One is exemplified by a pantyhose experiment summarized in the 'Introspective Essay', and it points to a bias for the first thing the brain sees. One of the best studied biases is race. I am trying to find a source of various biases that our brains have constructed, because I think this would be useful knowledge for everyone to have when they are making decisions. Because intuition is not always correct, it is sometimes based on rules that we may not consciously agree with, but have internalized. I will close with a quote from cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror,

“Take what you believe is an absolute truth with a grain of salt,” Dror suggested. “Question yourself, and understand that we’re all locked in our own brain, in our own perceptions, with our own experiences that paint the world. We may have a better understanding of the world if we know that what we see is not 100 percent the world itself, it is us interacting with the world around us.” *

* From the article, Experts Live and Die With Mental Shortcuts, from Miller-McCune.

It seems that many people think that most people are not likely to confess to crimes they did not commit. I wonder if this is because most people believe that they themselves would not give in. After all, we are talking about situations where physical torture is not involved. I have always thought of myself as pretty strong, but have recently found myself in a situation where I allowed myself to be psychologically manipulated, and did not even realize it until a few hours later. I'm not trying to say that people offering false confessions do not realize they are giving false confessions, but that our ability to resist may be very dependent on the situation. If there is one thing I have learned about myself during my life, it is that I don't know myself as well as I thought I did. I am capable of surprising myself when I find myself in a novel situation, and being falsely accused of a crime would fall into that category. From the post, "According to one person who (falsely) committed to a crime, 'You’ve never been in a situation so intense, and you’re naïve about your rights,' he said. 'You don’t know what you’ll say to get out of that situation.'”

Changing criminal procedures to take into account the reliability of confessions and their content seems especially important, because according to another article Farnam Street Blog did a post about, jurors don't even discount evidence obtained from rough treatment. It therefor seems really unlikely that they would take into consideration the validity of a confession full of detail and taken when rough treatment isn't involved. The Garrett article recommends "a series of reforms that focus on the insidious problem of contamination, particularly videotaping interrogations in their entirety, but also reframing police procedures, trial practice, and judicial review." I concur.

I have enjoyed using Flash for quite a while. Mostly I use it to make movies for work, but have been playing around with it lately to make more creative animations. So, when I heard the news that Microsoft Agrees With Apple And Google: “The Future Of The Web Is HTML5", I was a bit dismayed. Now I have long believed that flash was wrong for creating websites, but thought it would remain the standard for video and games. And, I believe that will still be true for a while. if you look at the demo page for html5, you will see that most of the demos are using things useful for building interactive websites, but not any of them demonstrate animation created by HTML5. Even the stuff that will eventually be used to create online games is pretty crude yet. Not sure what the Canvas demo does, since I couldn't get it to load with any of the 3 browsers I tried. So, I think we are a ways yet from animation and online games with HTML5. However, given my recent experiences with Adobe, I am thinking about learning HTML5 now anyway, even though I will be much more limited in what I can do, because I am sick of Adobe. Adobe Tech Support sucks! Not to mention their programs are getting to be so bulky and buggy they are painful to use.

My Adobe saga:

Part 1:

Saving a pdf without comments.

I thought this was pretty straightforward, but I had to repeat what I was trying to do 4 times before they gave me a solution. All I was trying to do was to hide/get rid of the comments in a pdf that was being sent in an email. They gave me solutions for how to use comments for an email review, told me how to hide comments from my current view, etc. They even wanted me to send a pdf with comments in it, because that was somehow going to help them understand what I wanted. Hello, you are Adobe, surely you have a pdf with comments in it laying around on your desktop?!? Finally, after 6 emails from Adobe, they gave me the solution. For those curious, here is the highly intuitive solution:

Go To Advanced-> PDF Optomizer->Discard User Data->Check the Tab Discard All Comments , forms and multimedia.-> Click Ok.

Now save this pdf with a different name, and you can send your pdf itinerary to your boss, without your comments about meeting your colleagues after the meeting for drinks. Are we really the only people who find this useful?

Part 2:

Upgrading the Organizer in Acrobat

My boss upgraded from Acrobat 8 to Acrobat 9. When he tried to open the organizer in Acrobat 9, the window was missing, and it was apparent from the menu that nothing from Acrobat 8 had been moved over. I sent in an email request for help, but was told this was not an installation issue, and I needed to have bronze support. I tried calling them, spent eons on hold, just to have them tell me, once again, that this was not an installation issue so I needed to pay for support. Not an installation issue? I installed the software, and it didn't work, and didn't import stuff from the last version. How can this be anything except an installation issue?!? So, I went off in search of paid support. Buying support from Adobe is convoluted, especially if you have a volume license. Supposedly there are support packages, where you get so many support calls per year, or maybe some number of support calls, but I never did figure this out. Nor did I figure out what bronze support is. Since there is a new version of Adobe products coming out, I decided it was probably best to just buy one support instance, especially since given the cost of my time doing research trying to figure this shit out, it would probably be cheaper to pay by the instance anyway. So, I spent another 2 hours on the phone, mostly on hold, during which I solved the missing Organizer window problem without any help from Adobe. When they told me the import problem wasn't an installation issue, I said fine, I'll pay. They ended up not charging me, although they lectured me on how this was an Acrobat 8 issue (since I was trying to export from Acrobat 8), so next time they would charge me. Like what, I didn't buy Acrobat 8 from them, and the reason I was trying to export was to have a WORKING INSTALLATION of Acrobat 9? WTF? But then, in the end, they told me it was impossible. You cannot get your Organizer settings from Acrobat 8 to Acrobat 9. I filed a bug report. I had already sent a letter to the CEO complaining about their tech support, but maybe I should send him an addendum?

Just read a very good article Convincing the Public to Accept New Medical Guidelines. It has me thinking about how to convince people to change their beliefs. It has long been obvious to me that people often discount or don't believe scientific studies if they conflict with their pre-conceived notions. Now we have research to back up that claim, not that it would matter to people who don't believe me. Plus, apparently people are more likely to believe what everyone else believes, regardless, or apparently in spite of, scientific evidence to the contrary, according to this article. Ugh. Not sure where this puts us. A very uphill battle, but says a lot about why people still believe that there is a connection between immunizations and autism. So, how can we take current scientific understanding and translate it into something that is popular? How can we use our understanding of why/how people believe things to get them to believe in scientific evidence, and to be willing to change those beliefs when new evidence surfaces? Tough questions.

Herring (Kippered)

I very much enjoyed the TED talk by Michael Specter on the danger of science denial. His main point is that we will continue to do real damage to our planet and our communities, if we continue to ignore what science tells us. His two main examples are the trend to not immunize because of the supposed link between autism and immunizations, and frankofoods, iow, genetically modified foods. I think both of these cases demonstrate the publics tendency to take a scary finding, latch onto the first thing that comes along to blame, and then ignoring science and facts and beat the hell out of the red herring. In the case of the autism and immunizations, study after study has shown there is no link. But the original study, however misguided, did demonstrate that we need to continue to put pressure on manufacturers and the government to ensure that vaccines are safe to use, as some things were brought up that were questionable. We need to learn to accept science and facts when they become undoubtable, stop beating a dead horse, and look to new places for answers. That second point is very important. There is much money and time now being spent trying to convince parents that autism is caused by immunizations, money that should be spent on coming up with the actual causes and cures to autism. Not to mention this misguidedness is causing a crisis in immunization that could cause many diseases that we have not seen in decades to return to the United States. If you are unconvinced that immunizations do not cause autism, check out this pdf from immunize.org.

The second issue, genetically modified foods, is very interesting. In this case, the red herring is GMO's themselves. Although more research is needed, so far, it appears that the insertion of new genes does not, by itself, change the plant in a negative way. In Specter's talk he mentioned the noble ideas about adding vitamin A in rice and adding protein and vitamins in cassava, using genetic modification. He did not mention anything about adding resistance to pesticides or insecticides. These are the truly scary things, the things we should be up in arms about. The movie Monsanto's World is extremely interesting, and brings to mind the things we need to be extremely concerned about. First and foremost, are the ties between government and corporations. Monsanto has become a scary monopoly because the US government let it happen, and, in fact, encouraged it to happen. And, it can, and probably has, happened in other industries as well. It is the ties between industry and government that has caused the scientific data to not be scrutinized as it should be. Check out the wikipedia article about Monsanto, under Public officials formerly employed by Monsanto. Which brings up and interesting question. Who should be in charge of government agencies that oversee industries? In many cases, it seems the government decides that people from industry are the best choice, since they would presumably know the most about that particular industry. But, they also have the hardest time separating themselves from the corporations they use to be a part of, and present a real conflict of interest. Time after time, in many different industries, government has failed to enforce or enact the regulations it should in the interest of public safety, because of the ties with corporations. The other thing that we should be up in arms about is the abuse of patent law by Monsanto. Monsanto has used patent law to bully farmers, so that it now controls most of the U.S. corn and soy seed market, according to the non-profit Center for Food Safety. And there is no doubt that Monsanto and its connections in government have worked hard to suppress scientific evidence that its products are not as harmless as it claims. But, you shouldn't take my word on this, do your research. So, while I agree with Specter about there being good that can come from genetic modification, and while at its root, it is not much different from the modifications we have been making to animals and plants for hundreds of thousands of years by breeding, there is still some very scary stuff going on in the genetic modification industry, and most of it has to do with the corporation that controls a very large portion of the seed market, Monsanto, and allows farmers to completely douse their fields with herbicides and/or insecticides. And regardless of whether the food that has been modified to survive such dowsing is harmful, we already know that dowsing fields with herbicides and/or pesticides is terrible for the soil and the nature/people surrounding the fields. For the most common of these herbicides, Roundup, check out the wikipedia article.

Which brings me to another interesting article I have read recently. In the article Is it okay to ignore results from people you don’t trust? by Ben Goldacre on badscience.net. He gives a nice example of industry scientists getting the results you would expect them to want, which was different from what non-industry scientists found. Repeated experiences like this makes it is easy for us to ignore results from people we don't trust. We have come to expect scientists from industry to get results more favorable to their industry (which is why the government should have been more critical of the data from Monsanto), but then he goes on to give an example of researchers you may not normally trust, publishing a study with a result that was both accurate and earlier then any other researchers. So, it appears that it is not enough that the public pay attention to scientific data, the public must learn to think critically about the data that they are given. Consider the source, but also consider the data itself. Ask questions. Be skeptical, but do not reject science simply because you want to believe in voodoo. And above all, do not look for studies to validate your opinion, because you will find them no matter how crazy your opinion is. Instead, look at everything you can find that examines the question with an open mind, consider the sources, the methods, the number of studies, and ask questions until you are satisfied. But when some new piece of evidence comes up, be willing to look anew at the question, and to reconsider your position. Yup, it is a lot of work, but it is so very important to our health and the health of our planet.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day once again, and I thought today I would spotlight a modern day techie entrepreneur. Cathy Malmrose started her own business selling hardware running linux in 2007. She impresses me not only because I am awed by people willing to start their own business, but also because she was discouraged from anything technical or scientific as a child. It took her a long time to overcome this discouragement, but she has in a big way, and now is an inspiration to girls and women interested in science and technology. I just love her journal entry about her girls learning how to install linux on a computer.

Nelson Mandela is an inspiration to her, and the name of her company, ZaReason comes in part from Za, the country code for South Africa, and Reason, "which translates well in many languages, and has many meanings". I love that she decided to include a screwdriver with all ZaReason computers to "communicate that we respect people's ownership of their new laptop or desktop and we respect their intelligence to be able to modify it."

Cathy is also involved with charitable projects through a non-profit, http://www.Partimus.org.

LInks about Cathy:

• Linux.com article
• SCALE interview with Cathy
• All About Ubuntu interview with Cathy