Filed under Computer science, Education, Falsified? by pde on February 21 | 3 comments
I hesitated before posting this piece. Is computer science education really a subject in which any result could be of tremendous sociopolitical importance? But, upon consideration, the answer has to be “yes”.
The ability to understand how computer programs work is arguably a central part of a well-rounded modern education, in the same way that people once needed to know a bit about horses. Logically, as a friend of mine once argued, programming should probably be taught sooner than calculus, because it develops the same kinds of analytic reasoning skills but is useful to more people. Perhaps one of the reasons that programming isn’t more widely taught is that (apparently) many students have terrible trouble learning it. Others find it utterly straightforward.
A remarkable little working paper by Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat provides intriguing data which illuminates the underlying cognitive step that is taken by those who can learn to program and missed by those who cannot. It turns out that while this mode of thinking is loosely correlated with general educational achievement, the link is not determinate. Some high achievers cannot program, and some low achievers can. Most remarkably, there are other kinds of abstract analytical tasks where performance is very well predicted by educational achievement. Programming just isn’t one of them.
The article is tentatively titled The Camel Has Two Humps. Be sure to get to the last set of graphs.
It appears that these results should open up an entire new field of research on testing the authors’ proposed explanation, polishing the tests that predict ability to learn programming, and — most importantly — figuring out ways to teach programmatic rule structures to those who do not understand them intuitively.
Filed under Economics, United States by pde on February 1 | 0 comments
A fascinating survey was conducted by Time magazine for the 2000 U.S. election cycle (disected later in an op-ed piece by David Brooks in the New York Times). It’s rare that a few numbers say so much about a nation’s misunderstanding of itself.
When Americans were asked if they are in the wealtheist one percent of the population, 19% of them said “yes”. A further 20% of them said “no, but I will be at some point in my life”.
America’s foundational story is that anyone, however lowly, can get rich. This is the land of opportunity. But, according to the data, a poor child’s odds of striking it rich are better in Europe.
Filed under Drugs by aaronsw on February 1 | 23 comments
Thousands of studies have been done claiming that addiction is a disease, mostly by putting rats in a cage with some drugs and noting that they’ll repeatedly take the drugs, even if it means starving to death.
Bruce Alexander was skeptical about these results. He noticed that the rats in the experiments were stuffed alone in a boring cage with little else to do. “If I was strapped down alone in a cage,” he thought, “I’d probably want to get high too.”
So he built a rat park — a large, intricate, brightly-painted and heavily-padded structure to make the rats actually happy. He put half the rats in the normal cages and half in the park and gave both equal access to drugs.
The rats in the cage got addicted, while the rats in the park stayed away.
Then, even more strikingly, he took rats who’d had 57 days to get addicted to the drugs and took half of them out of the cages and put them in the park. The rats, even though they’d been addicted in the cage, suddenly stayed away from the drugs. They even voluntarily detoxed — trembling and shaking, but still staying off the drugs.
The top-shelf journals like Science and Nature rejected the study. It did end up getting published in a peer reviewed journal (Pharamacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, impact factor 1.5), but received little public attention. His university pulled the funding for the project.
Filed under Violence by aaronsw on February 1 | 0 comments
A study by Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts found using extremely sound statistical methods that by July 2006, the Iraq war was responsible for somewhere between 390,000 and 940,000 excess deaths.
Filed under Administrivia by aaronsw on February 1 | 0 comments
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