Teacher sued for telling the truth

James “Jesus Glasses” Corbett: Update 25 Jun ‘10
[Via The Sensuous Curmudgeon]

THIS is about Dr. James Corbett, a teacher at Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo, California, whose classroom remarks that creationism is “superstitious nonsense” were ruled to have violated the Constitution’s establishment clause. He was sued by Chad Farnan, one of his students — presumably a creationist.

We don’t follow too many other blogs, but we seem to be the only one that’s paying much attention to this case. We don’t know why, because the wrong outcome will have a deleterious effect on science education and the freedom of teachers everywhere. Bear with us, you’ll understand.

Chad had also sued the school board — which was found not liable by the trial court. Both Corbett and Chad are appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Corbett wants to be found not liable, and Chad wants the court to impose even more liability.

Our last post on this topic was six months ago: James “Jesus Glasses” Corbett: Update 15 Dec ‘09. Appeals can take a long time, so there’s been nothing to report since then. Today, however, we do have some news:

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This is what makes America so special – I don’t think there is another place on Earth where a student could successfully sue a teacher for calling creationism “religious, superstitious nonsense.”

Where is this false? It is religious. It is superstitious – a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary. And it is nonsense – words or language having no meaning or conveying no intelligible ideas.

A student can sue, and win, because his feelings were hurt by a teacher’s expression of the truth. Ain’t America great!

I would add that I find it ridiculous. [You can read an earlier post by the Curmudgeon that demonstrates some of the ridiculousness of creationism]

Is a biology teacher supposed to allow a Young Earth Creationist to ignore the facts? If your religion is disparaged by facts, perhaps you should find another religion.

[Listening to: Nothing from Something from the album "Ignition" by The Offspring]

Knowing we know is almost as important as knowing

by jurvetson

Feelings of Knowing
[Via The Frontal Cortex]

Clive Thompson has a wonderful article in the NY Times Magazine on Watson, the supercomputer programmed to excel at Jeopardy. Thompson delves into the clever heuristics used to generate singular answers to ambiguous questions. (Watson relies on massive amounts of parallel processing, so that “he” is running thousands of Google searches simultaneously.) While Watson’s performance is certainly impressive, I thought the most interesting part of the story involved the failings of the machine. It’s easy to rhapsodize about the ever escalating speed of microchips, but it turns out that Watson is often too slow at ringing the buzzer:

In more than 20 games I witnessed between Watson and former “Jeopardy!” players, humans frequently beat Watson to the buzzer. Their advantage lay in the way the game is set up. On “Jeopardy!” when a new clue is given, it pops up on screen visible to all. (Watson gets the text electronically at the same moment.) But contestants are not allowed to hit the buzzer until the host is finished reading the question aloud; on average, it takes the host about six or seven seconds to read the clue.

Players use this precious interval to figure out whether or not they have enough confidence in their answers to hazard hitting the buzzer. After all, buzzing carries a risk: someone who wins the buzz on a $1,000 question but answers it incorrectly loses $1,000.

Often those six or seven seconds weren’t enough time for Watson. The humans reacted more quickly. For example, in one game an $800 clue was “In Poland, pick up some kalafjor if you crave this broccoli relative.” A human contestant jumped on the buzzer as soon as he could. Watson, meanwhile, was still processing. Its top five answers hadn’t appeared on the screen yet. When these finally came up, I could see why it took so long. Something about the question had confused the computer, and its answers came with mere slivers of confidence. The top two were “vegetable” and “cabbage”; the correct answer — “cauliflower” — was the third guess.

To avoid losing money — Watson doesn’t care about the money, obviously; winnings are simply a way for I.B.M. to see how fast and accurately its system is performing — Ferrucci’s team has programmed Watson generally not to buzz until it arrives at an answer with a high confidence level. In this regard, Watson is actually at a disadvantage, because the best “Jeopardy!” players regularly hit the buzzer as soon as it’s possible to do so, even if it’s before they’ve figured out the clue. “Jeopardy!” rules give them five seconds to answer after winning the buzz. So long as they have a good feeling in their gut, they’ll pounce on the buzzer, trusting that in those few extra seconds the answer will pop into their heads. Ferrucci told me that the best human contestants he had brought in to play against Watson were amazingly fast. “They can buzz in 10 milliseconds,” he said, sounding astonished. “Zero milliseconds!”

This anecdote highlights one of the most impressive talents of the human mind. We don’t just know things – we know we know them, which leads to feelings of knowing. I’ve written about this before, but one of my favorite examples of such feelings is when a word is on the tip of the tongue. Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can’t remember, although you know that it begins with the letter “J.” Or perhaps you struggle to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail.

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As this exercise shows, our memory is more than simply a database of facts. We also catalogue that we have the information somewhere. In some sort of ‘meta’ fashion, our brain remembers that we learned a fact, even if it can not remember the fact itself.

This kind of makes sense since in the wild, you do not necessarily have the seconds needed to retrieve complete memories and facts. Simply having a gut feeling that there is a useful climbing tree nearby may be enough to start running and may provide valuable milliseconds to keep one alive.

But it is fascinating to think that for many memories that not only is the data stored somewhere but also there is also another location that remembers that we have that memory. I imagine that is why mnemonics that can be so helpful. They help us actualize the meta-memory, allowing us to recover it faster. Perhaps some of them are useful, not because they produce the memory as much as make it easier to access the meta-memory trail.

This may take IBM quite some time to deal with because it essentially requires a lot of pre-work done on every memory, something that may be difficult for computers.

So, while the computer may be able to be the average person, it has a hard time with real Jeopardy champions, most likely because they have very well-developed meta-memory.

[Listening to: Kick Him When He's Down from the album "Ignition" by The Offspring]

Some simple questions

by DVIDSHUB

Berm Notice: Jindal demagogues sand barrier ’solution’ that probably won’t help, will take many months, use up valuable resources, vanish in the first storm — and many scientists think will make things worse – Coastal geologist: “I have yet to speak to a scientist who thinks the project will be effective.”

[Via Climate Progress]

“In the end, we have a project that is incredibly expensive. There has been little scientific review. It is questionable if the proposed berm will prevent oil from entering the wetlands it is designed to protect. The structure will be very short-lived. And there are many potential negative impacts of this structure on the coastal environment that have not been evaluated. Coastal dredging and filling can cause significant damage to marine organisms and local ecosystems as massive amounts of sand are dug up in one location and then deposited on the sea floor in another spot. In addition, building a 45-mile sand berm could alter tidal currents and lead to the erosion of natural barrier islands that protect the Louisiana coast from hurricanes.”

The magnitude of the BP oil disaster guarantees devastation to the Louisiana shore no matter how effective the response — see 20-year veteran of the Coast Guard: “With a spill of this magnitude and complexity, there is no such thing as an effective response.” And that means cynical politicians are in a perfect position to demagogue dubious solutions, since if they are ignored, they can merely point to the environmental devastation and say, “if only you had listened to those of us who know this area best.”

So we have Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and the berms — low-lying barrier islands that are made of dredged sand (click on figure above to enlarge). A great many articles have been written explaining why this approach is somewhere between an unproductive use of scarce resources and a counterproductive effort that will do more harm than good. I’ll excerpt some at length, including an excellent Yale e360 piece [quoted above] by a top coastal geologist.

Jindal himself would be more credible as a supporter of a science-based approach to protecting Louisiana, if he hadn’t launched an effort to block climate change regulations that are aimed at averting catastrophic climate change, which will submerge and destroy the very part of his state he is supposedly trying to save now. And Jindal has mocked federal efforts to do science-based monitoring of other disasters (see “Eruptions of know-nothingism from conservative savior Bobby Jindal“).

I have scientists emailing me what a bad idea this is. I welcome any expert comments or links from people who actually think this is a good idea.

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While the science indicates berms would be useless and knowing that even one small storm would render them ineffective and knowing that they could have as devastating effects on wildlife as not doing anything and knowing that they might affect the barrier marshes and knowing that the berms would take 9 months to build and knowing that even the berms that have been built violated the very rules that were agreed upon and knowing that the cost is upwards of $500 million, should we really still listen to anyone who is using this to bash political opponents?

Dr. Robert Young, a professor of coastal geology, stated it best:

In the end, we have a project that is incredibly expensive. There has been little scientific review. It is questionable if the proposed berm will prevent oil from entering the wetlands it is designed to protect. The structure will be very short-lived. And there are many potential negative impacts of this structure on the coastal environment that have not been evaluated. Coastal dredging and filling can cause significant damage to marine organisms and local ecosystems as massive amounts of sand are dug up in one location and then deposited on the sea floor in another spot. In addition, building a 45-mile sand berm could alter tidal currents and lead to the erosion of natural barrier islands that protect the Louisiana coast from hurricanes.

Are there better ways to spend $500 million than on a make-work program that will create something that most likely disappears quite rapidly? How about training oil workers who might be displaced by the coming problems of peak oil? Or finding ways to provide better economic realities for the people of LA?

I would certainly hope so.

[Listening to: Learning to Fly from the album "Into the Great Wide Open" by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers]