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Lawrence Hrubes

How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ails-doctors-and-teachers.html

human sciences SocialScience education medicine measurement quantification tests

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • TWO of our most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far. We’re hitting the targets, but missing the point.
  • We also need more research on quality measurement and comparing different patient populations. The only way to understand whether a high mortality rate, or dropout rate, represents poor performance is to adequately appreciate all of the factors that contribute to these outcomes — physical and mental, social and environmental — and adjust for them.
  • He developed what is known as Donabedian’s triad, which states that quality can be measured by looking at outcomes (how the subjects fared), processes (what was done) and structures (how the work was organized).
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “The secret of quality is love,” he said.
markfrankel18

How Much Consciousness Does an iPhone Have? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...sness-does-an-iphone-have.html

ToK Science technology psychology consciousness

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • What has more consciousness: a puppy or a baby? An iPhone 5 or an octopus? For a long time, the question seemed impossible to address. But recently, Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, argued that consciousness can be measured—captured in a single value that he calls Φ, the Greek letter phi. The intuition behind Tononi’s idea, known as the Integrated Information Theory, is that we experience consciousness when we integrate different sensory inputs. According to Tononi, when you eat ice cream, you cannot separate the taste of the sugar on your tongue from the sensation of the melting liquid coating the inside your mouth. Phi is a measure of the extent to which a given system—for example, a brain circuit—is capable of fusing these distinctive bits of information. The more distinctive the information, and the more specialized and integrated a system is, the higher its phi. To Tononi, phi directly measures consciousness; the higher your phi, the more conscious you are.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Caesium: A brief history of timekeeping - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-29476893

TOK science time relativity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The answer is that whenever you have a network operating over distance, accurate timekeeping is essential for synchronisation. And the faster the speed of travel, the more accurate the timekeeping must be. Hence in the modern world, where information travels at almost the speed of light down wires or through the air, accuracy is more important than ever. What caesium has done is to raise the standards for the measurement of time exponentially.
  • As the electron moves out into the wider orbit it absorbs energy, and as it jumps back in it releases it in the form of light, fluorescing very slightly. That means you can tell when you've hit the sweet spot of 9,192,631,770 Hz. It's because this transition frequency is so much higher than the resonant frequency of quartz that a caesium clock is so much more accurate. The caesium fountain at NPL, Szymaniec tells me proudly, is accurate to one second in every 158 million years. That means it would only be a second out if it had started keeping time back in the peak of the Jurassic Period when diplodocus were lumbering around and pterodactyls wheeling in the sky.
  • Now, if such insane levels of accuracy seem pointless, then think again. Without the caesium clock, for example, satellite navigation would be impossible. GPS satellites carry synchronised caesium clocks that enable them collectively to triangulate your position and work out where on earth you are. And the practical applications do not end there. Just ask Leon Lobo - he's in charge of time "dissemination" at NPL. His job is to tell the time to the UK. For a fee. NPL has just begun offering businesses standardised timekeeping accurate to the nearest microsecond - a millionth of a second. Mr Lobo is targeting a wide range of clients that all have one thing in common - they need to synchronise a network that operates at speeds far faster than any trains.
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  • Mr Lobo's biggest target is the financial markets, which these days are dominated by computers programmed to place thousands of trades per second, transmitted down wires at almost the speed of light. In this world, the equivalent of a train crash would be ill-timed bets that rack up millions of dollars in losses, and might even briefly sink the market in the process. Unsurprisingly, financial regulators increasingly require a super-accurate timestamp on every transaction.
  • The switch to atomic time was for good reason. The rotation of the earth, it turned out, was not such a reliable measure of time. No day or year is exactly the same length.
  • Due to the earth's elliptical orbit, the sun can be as much as 16 minutes out of line with mean solar time. Add the distortion of time zones, which average time across huge regions, and the difference is far greater. China, which is almost 5,000km wide, has a single time zone spanning 1h40 of solar time. The decision of some countries to adjust the clocks twice a year as a "daylight saving" measure exaggerates the issue yet further.
Lawrence Hrubes

Angela Duckworth on Passion, Grit and Success - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...passion-grit-success.html

education success character human sciences SocialScience psychology children

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • So why is grit so important?My lab has found that this measure beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores, physical fitness and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations.
  • How can parents foster grit in their children?The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive. By this I don’t mean material things; I mean emotional support.
markfrankel18

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

TOK bias reason intuition

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.
  • Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

rationalism reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are.
  • If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
Lawrence Hrubes

Brain Games are Bogus | GarethCook - 0 views

garethcook.net/brain-games-are-bogus

TOK brain neuroscience memory intelligence psychology science badscience games training IQ education

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13
     
    " A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research-twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world-and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence."
Lawrence Hrubes

Student Course Evaluations Get An 'F' : NPR Ed : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...nt-course-evaluations-get-an-f

TOK SocialScience human sciences statistics education measurement

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • In universities around the world, semesters end with students filling out similar surveys about their experience in the class and the quality of the teacher. Student ratings are high-stakes. They come up when faculty are being considered for tenure or promotions. In fact, they're often the only method a university uses to monitor the quality of teaching. Recently, a number of faculty members have been publishing research showing that the comment-card approach may not be the best way to measure the central function of higher education.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Great miscalculations: The French railway error and 10 others - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-27509559

errors measurement assumptions technology science TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • The discovery by the French state-owned railway company SNCF that 2,000 new trains are too wide for many station platforms is embarrassing, but far from the first time a small mis-measurement or miscalculation has had serious repercussions.
markfrankel18

Creativity Creep - The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...creativity-creep

creativity TOK arts language

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Sep 14 - Cached
  • How did we come to care so much about creativity? The language surrounding it, of unleashing, unlocking, awakening, developing, flowing, and so on, makes it sound like an organic and primordial part of ourselves which we must set free—something with which it’s natural to be preoccupied. But it wasn’t always so; people didn’t always care so much about, or even think in terms of, creativity.
  • It was Romanticism, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which took the imagination and elevated it, giving us the “creative imagination.”
  • How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing? The answer, essentially, is that it became a scientific subject, rather than a philosophical one.
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  • All of this measuring and sorting has changed the way we think about creativity. For the Romantics, creativity’s center of gravity was in the mind. But for us, it’s in whatever the mind decides to share—that is, in the product. It’s not enough for a person to be “imaginative” or “creative” in her own consciousness. We want to know that the product she produces is, in some sense, “actually” creative; that the creative process has come to a workable conclusion. To today’s creativity researchers, the “self-styled creative person,” with his inner, unverifiable, possibly unproductive creativity, is a kind of bogeyman; a great deal of time is spent trampling on the scarf of the lone, Romantic genius. Instead, attention is paid to the systems of influence, partnership, power, funding, and reception that surround creativity—the social structures, in other words, that enable managers to reap the fruits of creative labor. Often, this is imagined to be some sort of victory over Romanticism and its fusty, pretentious, élitist ideas about creativity.
  • But this kind of thinking misses the point of the Romantic creative imagination. The Romantics weren’t obsessed with who created what, because they thought you could be creative without “creating” anything other than the liveliness in your own head.
  • It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age
  • Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach.
  • Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity’s stillness. If you’re really creative, really imaginative, you don’t have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel.
Lawrence Hrubes

'Trust Your Gut' Might Actually Be Profitable Advice on Wall Street, Study Says - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-wall-street-study-says.html

intuition economics money

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • What attributes make for a successful trader? Is it comprehensive knowledge of an industry? The ability to read the markets? Luck?Or might it be something subtler and seemingly unrelated — namely, an awareness of one’s own heartbeat?
  • Mr. Coates set out to try to identify whether “gut feelings” were merely the stuff of myth, or something real and measurable.
  • And among the traders, more accurate heartbeat awareness was correlated with profitability. That is, the better a trader was at sensing his own heart rate, the more successful he was at high-frequency trading. Advertisement Continue reading the main story What is more, the longer an employee of the hedge fund had been working as a trader, the more accurate he was at counting his heart rate.
markfrankel18

This is your brain on knockoffs: The science of how we trick ourselves into not believi... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...es-into-not-believing-our-eyes

TOK arts forgery perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • In 2011, Martin Kemp, an Oxford art history professor, ran an experiment referenced in Ragai’s book, in which 14 non-specialists were shown genuine and fake “Rembrandt” paintings while undergoing brain scans. A painting was shown to them and they were told it was by Rembrandt. Another painting was shown to them and they were told it was a fake. By measuring the pleasure centers of the brain, Kemp concluded that “the way we view art is not rational.” Being told a work was authentic (whether or not it actually was) activated pleasure centers when it was shown, which was not the case when the viewer was told it was inauthentic (even if it was actually the real deal). It’s all about anticipation. If you’re poured a glass of wine and told it’s a 1955 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, you’ll enjoy it much more than if you’re told it’s a 2015 Trader Joe’s wine-in-a-box, whichever it truly happens to be. (For more on this, see my eBook single on wine forgery).
  • But while non-experts are led by being told what is authentic and what is not, clever forgers do a more elaborate version of the same thing to snare specialists. Rather than telling them “this is authentic,” which would summon a defensive reaction on the part of the expert (“Oh yeah, I’m the expert here, I’ll tell you what’s authentic and what isn’t”), they lay a trail of traps by scattering subtle clues that lead the expert into following a carefully plotted trail, but to come to their own conclusion about the authenticity of the work in question.
markfrankel18

Poland vs. History by Timothy Snyder | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...oland-vs-history-museum-gdansk

TOK history bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 May 16 - No Cached
  • Most seriously of all, the effects of suppressing national memory could be of critical importance to Poles in coming decades, and to a global audience that has yet to fully absorb the complicated lessons of World War II. In some measure at least, how rising generations of Poles see themselves, democracy, and Europe will depend on whether they can have ready access to their country’s complicated experience in World War II. The collapse of democracy, the museum’s first theme, could hardly be more salient than it is right now. And the presentation of the conflict as a global tragedy could hardly be more instructive. The preemptive liquidation of the museum is nothing less than a violent blow to the world’s cultural heritage.
Lawrence Hrubes

Same but Different - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...breakthroughs-in-epigenetics

science biology genetics nature DNA ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Why are identical twins alike? In the late nineteen-seventies, a team of scientists in Minnesota set out to determine how much these similarities arose from genes, rather than environments—from “nature,” rather than “nurture.” Scouring thousands of adoption records and news clips, the researchers gleaned a rare cohort of fifty-six identical twins who had been separated at birth. Reared in different families and different cities, often in vastly dissimilar circumstances, these twins shared only their genomes. Yet on tests designed to measure personality, attitudes, temperaments, and anxieties, they converged astonishingly. Social and political attitudes were powerfully correlated: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. The same went for religiosity (or its absence), even for the ability to be transported by an aesthetic experience. Two brothers, separated by geographic and economic continents, might be brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne, as if responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes.
  • It’s one thing to study epigenetic changes across the life of a single organism, or down a line of cells. The more tantalizing question is whether epigenetic messages can, like genes, cross from parents to their offspring.
  • The most suggestive evidence for such transgenerational transmission may come from a macabre human experiment. In September, 1944, amid the most vengeful phase of the Second World War, German troops occupying the Netherlands banned the export of food and coal to its northern parts. Acute famine followed, called the Hongerwinter—the hunger winter. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children died of malnourishment; millions suffered it and survived. Not surprisingly, the children who endured the Hongerwinter experienced chronic health issues. In the nineteen-eighties, however, a curious pattern emerged: when the children born to women who were pregnant during the famine grew up, they had higher rates of morbidity as well—including obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. (Malnourishment in utero can cause the body to sequester higher amounts of fat in order to protect itself from caloric loss.) Methylation alterations were also seen in regions of their DNA associated with growth and development. But the oddest result didn’t emerge for another generation. A decade ago, when the grandchildren of men and women exposed to the famine were studied, they, too, were reported to have had higher rates of illness. (These findings have been challenged, and research into this cohort continues.) “Genes cannot change in an entire population in just two generations,” Allis said. “But some memory of metabolic stress could have become heritable.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Science & Environment - What is one degree? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...17-what-exactly-is-temperature

TOK science heat temperature measurement

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Dec 13
     
    "Temperature matters, but what is it? And what is one degree? These may seem like simple questions, but the reality is anything but clear-cut."
markfrankel18

English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281601

TOK language because

shared by markfrankel18 on 05 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Linguists are recognizing the delightful evolution of the word "because." 
  • he word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, "because" has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because [I saw it on the web]) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because [of the web]). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which "because" lends itself. I mention all that ... because language. Because evolution. Because there is another way to use "because." Linguists are calling it the "prepositional-because." Or the "because-noun." You probably know it better, however, as explanation by way of Internet—explanation that maximizes efficiency and irony in equal measure. I'm late because YouTube. You're reading this because procrastination. As the language writer Stan Carey delightfully sums it up: "'Because' has become a preposition, because grammar." 
Lawrence Hrubes

What Makes an Alien Intelligent? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...akes-an-alien-intelligent.html

intelligence models science reason induction TOK life biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Herzing’s paper proposes five indicators of intelligence that any given species or machine (she includes artificial intelligence in her assessment) might combine in its own way: first, the size of the subject’s brain (if it has one) relative to the rest of the body; second, the extent to which an entity sends and receives information; third, the degree to which individual members of a species are distinct from one another; fourth, the complexity of the being’s social life; and, fifth, the amount of interaction it has with members of other species. One way to be intelligent is to score high on all five measures, as dolphins do, for instance.
markfrankel18

How Our Minds Mislead Us: The Marvels and Flaws of Our Intuition | Brain Pickings - 1 views

www.brainpickings.org/...daniel-kahneman-intuition

TOK intuition perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • One of the most fascinating examples of heuristics and biases is what we call intuition — a complex cluster of cognitive processes, sometimes helpful but often misleading. Kahneman notes that thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: Either by “orderly computation,” which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we’re perceiving.
  • There is no sharp line between intuition and perception.
  • Coherence means that you’re going to adopt one interpretation in general. Ambiguity tends to be suppressed. This is part of the mechanism that you have here that ideas activate other ideas and the more coherent they are, the more likely they are to activate each other. Other things that don’t fit fall away by the wayside. We’re enforcing coherent interpretations. We see the world as much more coherent than it is.
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  • The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence [but] of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
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