Ethics and Opinion: Please Stop Confusing My Students

Posted: November 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One of the sadly rather expected side benefits of the recent re-election of President Obama has been the predictable outpouring of racist sentiment. Of course, to listen to the people uttering racial slurs and unpleasant requests, they are not actually racists, they are just expressing their opinion. You know?

They’re just sayin’.

A woman is currently being investigated by the Secret Service for Tweeting a heavily charged racial epithet against the President, wrapped up in a paraphrased death threat, and appears puzzled about all of the fuss. After all, it’s just what she thinks and she’s not a racist. Australian former cricketer Greg Ritchie recently uttered some serious racial slurs that are highly inflammatory towards South Africans and can’t see what the big deal is either. He also managed to get in a joke about Muslims. When asked, however, Ritchie had this to say:

“If they take offence that’s their choice.”

His joke, involving Muslims, is in his own words “just a little humourous joke to indicate that they’re not my favourite people of my choice.” Hey, Greg, guess what, when you’re trying to defend yourself against charges of discrimination, perhaps it’s best to do so in a way that is not actually discriminatory? Of course, we’ve been tolerating Ritchie’s antics for years, so it’s not surprising that he is now confused that we don’t find him funny. He, in blackface as pseudo-Indian Mahatma Coate, was a regular on the Australian Rules Football sports variety show “The Footy Show” for years. And, thus we crawl, inexorably, towards my point.

If you’re opinion is actually racism, then it’s a racist opinion. I can completely understand why people don’t want to be labelled as racists because we all know that’s bad but, and here’s the tricky thing, racists are people who believe and say racist things or act in a manner than discriminates against people based on their race. Calling someone a racial epithet because of the race that they belong to counts here and, before we get all ‘classification theory’ about this, there is a world of difference between any classifications of ethnicity that are scientific in nature and slurs. There is also a great deal of difference in how we use this information. The moment that you start saying things like “they’re not my favourite people of choice”, you are saying that you don’t like an entire group that is defined by a given characteristic and, wow, it’s not hard to see where that leads. (Now, no doubt, there is someone who is itching to leap and tell me that ‘aha – Muslims are not a race’. Spare me the sophistry, especially where the Muslims that appear to catch the most problems here are (surprise!) not Caucasian.)

Whenever anyone leaps in and says “statement – I’m just sayin'” or “statement that challenges movements that are egalitarian – playing devil’s advocate” then I really must wonder ‘why?’ I have heard a number of people trying to sneak in sexist comments based on poor evidence or by playing the “Devil’s Advocate” card. “Wow, but what if women aren’t as good at X as men, playing Devil’s advocate/just sayin’/just askin’.” You know, that’s a good question. But it’s not the one that you’re asking. The question that I’m hearing (and I apologise because I have weird ears) is “How can I make a sexist statement with plausible deniability because I am not yet convinced that women are equal?”

This is about fundamental human rights, not an opinion on whether Picard or Kirk would win in a jello-wrestling competition. The questions that we ask, however they are framed, reveal what it is that we believe to be true. And right. And, by extension, what we consider false or wrong.

My real problem with all of this is that my students are like big mobile sponges. They hear a whole heap of stuff before they come to me and, if most of it is opinionated nonsense that magically escapes classification, they will learn that this is how the world works and come to me with a head full of garbage. They’ll recite rubbish at me that they’ve picked up from the world, politics, media, television and their own families that has no place in a University environment. I don’t give a hoot how entitled you feel to have a racist, sexist or discriminatory opinion, it’s going to get called as one and you can argue until you’re blue in the face that saying discriminatory things doesn’t make you discriminatory but, important point, you are almost never as ironically funny as you think you are. (And, yes, we all have to be aware of that. To my shame, I have occasionally gone too far in trying to mock discrimination and I apologetically confess that I have on occasion been less than funny and just plain dumb.) The important thing to ask is why are you trying to set up the situation in the first place?

My students have to think about these things all the time. They cannot guess how people will react to their dumb jokes and supposed ‘irony’. Worse, as people who have had the benefits of more education, other people will look to them (explicitly or not) as thought leaders and the best of my students will have a very wide-ranging impact. I can’t stop people saying silly and hurtful things, but let’s stop the pretence that there are special “get out of jail free” textual containers that allow people to utter the phrasings of discrimination and, yet, mysteriously escape being labelled as such.

(And, for the record, the Internet indicates that Picard would most likely take the match, given that he has mud wrestling experience.)

A brief contemplation on a captured moment.

Posted: November 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

You will all have seen the picture of the man standing in front of the tanks near Tiananmen Square. (Those of you who haven’t are probably also not seeing this post. What a coincidence!) What you may not have seen is one of the shots prior to this moment, captured by Terril Jones, which shows the Unknown Rebel (Tank Man) standing patiently, well before the tanks reached him. If you look at the picture, you’ll see him on the vertical midline, just left of centre, with his trousers hitched awkwardly and holding two shopping bags. As far as we know, from this point on, he stops the column, walks in front of the tanks to stop them, climbs on, chats to some of the people on the tank, gets down, blocks them again and is then seized by two men and propelled into the crowd.

(C) Terril Jones. Low quality image used for reference.

This photograph is important. This clearly shows that this action was not spur of the moment – Tank Man didn’t rush out of the crowd – but it also shows the mundanity of the whole scene. Tanks are rolling in the street but, from what it looks like, this man is on his way back from the shops. The bags were never used against the tanks and they’re not exactly military issue. The most likely explanation is that this is someone who, walking back from the shops around lunchtime, possibly with lunch for his colleagues or food for his family, saw the people fleeing Tiananmen square, heard the tanks and suddenly realised that he was going to have to stand in front of them and stop them advancing.

I have had two moments in my life where I have realised that I am about to try and disarm someone with a knife. Both of them were terrifying as hell but both of them required action. Fortunately for me, both people had little idea what they were doing and I managed to avoid getting hurt, which means that (a) I was profoundly lucky and (b) do not recommend this course to anyone. However, sometimes, you just realise that something has to happen and that you are going to be the person who does it. But actions on this scale (taking on a stream of Type 59 Chinese tanks) defy standard human reaction and are almost completely incomprehensible.

Many theories have been advanced about Tank Man’s actions. Was he mentally unstable? Well, this is hardly the action we’d expect of a sane man, certainly. But he seems so unprepared and so determined at the same time. He hasn’t even put the bags down to adjust his trousers! My belief is that this man is completely sane, except that he is about to do something that, by any definition, is crazy. We can’t ask Tank Man because he has never shown up again. Anywhere.

Any number of us, when faced with a much less challenging situation, would have looked at the shopping bags and thought “well, I can’t stop, the food will get cold/ice cream will melt/meat will spoil” and conveniently decamped in the direction that the two foreground sprinters are indicating. And that is completely reasonable! I have said before that I can admire the actions of people and yet not even begin to comprehend how they can set themselves with such resolve in the face of terrible things.

We talk about ethics, we teach ethics and, all too often, we discover that while our students can write down the differences between Kantian Maxims and Benthamite Utilitarianism, they still cheat on tests or copy work because they haven’t actually learned how to act ethically. The Tank Man, for me, is an example of the resolute commitment to one’s beliefs that we are really hoping for in all of this ethical teaching. This picture confirms the premeditation that was required – can you imagine how much resolve it took to stand there as tens of tanks rumbled towards you? I’ve been in the Armoured Corps and tanks are big, scary and loud. If I wasn’t in one, I wouldn’t want to be near them because they could crush you like a bug and not even notice. What we see in the picture above is resolve, despite having bags in your hand and slightly baggy trousers. The mundane transformed into something far less ordinary.

The shot itself is also far from ordinary both by intention and by accident. Accidentally, I believe, the photographer has captured true opposites in the shot and given it a spectacular level of contrast. On the left hand side, you have a man who is prepared to stand in front of tanks and not move. On the right is a sign bearing the Chinese character for ‘Yield’.

Not something that the Unknown Rebel was planning to do that day.

The Hips Don’t Lie – Assuming That By Hips You Mean Numbers

Posted: November 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

For those who missed it, the United States went to the polls to elect a new President. Some people were surprised by the outcome.

Even Benedict Cumberbatch, seen here between takes on Sherlock Series 3.

Some people were not, including the new King of Quants, Nate Silver. Silver studied economics at the University of Chicago but really came to prominence in his predictions of baseball outcomes, based on his analysis of the associated statistics and sabermetrics. He correctly predicted, back in 2008, what would happen between Obama and Clinton, and he predicted, to the state, what the outcome would be in this year’s election, even in the notoriously fickle swing states. Silver’s approach isn’t secret. He looks at all of the polls and then generates a weighted average of them (very, very simplified) in order to value certain polls over others. You rerun some of the models, change some parameters, look at it all again and work out what the most likely scenario is. Nate’s been publishing this regularly on his FiveThirtyEight blog (that’s the number of electors in the electoral college, by the way, and I had to look that up because I am not an American) which is now a feature of the New York Times.

So, throughout the entire election, as journalists and the official voices have been ranting and railing, predicting victory for this candidate or that candidate, Nate’s been looking at the polls, adjusting his model and publishing his predictions. Understandably, when someone is predicting a Democratic victory, the opposing party is going to jump up and down a bit and accusing Nate of some pretty serious bias and poll fixing. However, unless young Mr Silver has powers beyond those of mortal men, fixing all 538 electors in order to ensure an exact match to his predictions does seem to be taking fixing to a new level – and, of course, we’re joking because Nate Silver was right. Why was he right? Because he worked out a correct mathematical model and  method that took into account how accurate each poll was likely to be in predicting the final voter behaviour and that reliable, scientific and analytic approach allowed him to make a pretty conclusive set of predictions.

There are notorious examples of what happens when you listen to the wrong set of polls, or poll in the wrong areas, or carry out a phone poll at a time when (a) only rich people have phones or (b) only older people have landlines. Any information you get from such biased polls has to be taken with a grain of salt and weighted to reduce a skewing impact, but you have to be smart in how you weight things. Plain averaging most definitely does not work because this assumes equal sized populations or that (mysteriously) each poll should be treated as having equal weight. Here’s the other thing, though, ignoring the numbers is not going to help you if those same numbers are going to count against you.

Example: You’re a student and you do a mock exam. You get 30% because you didn’t study. You assume that the main exam will be really different. You go along. It’s not. In fact, it’s the same exam. You get 35%. You ignored the feedback that you should have used to predict what your final numbers were going to be. The big difference here is that a student can change their destiny through their own efforts. Changing the mind of the American people from June to November (Nate published his first predictions in June) is going to be nearly impossible so you’re left with one option, apparently, and that’s to pretend that it’s not happening.

I can pretend that my car isn’t running out of gas but, if the gauge is even vaguely accurate, somewhere along the way the car is going to stop. Ignoring Nate’s indications of what the final result would be was only ever going to work if his model was absolutely terrible but, of course, it was based on the polling data and the people being polled were voters. Assuming that there was any accuracy to the polls, then it’s the combination of the polls that was very clever and that’s all down to careful thought and good modelling. There is no doubt that a vast amount of work has gone into producing such a good model because you have to carefully work out how much each vote is worth in which context. Someone in a blue-skewed poll votes blue? Not as important as an increasing number of blue voters in a red-skewed polling area. One hundred people polled in a group to be weighted differently from three thousand people in another – and the absence of certain outliers possibly just down to having too small a sample population. Then, just to make it more difficult, you have to work out how these voting patterns are going to turn into electoral college votes. Now you have one vote that doesn’t mean the difference between having Idaho and not having Idaho, you have a vote that means the difference between “Hail to the Chief” and “Former Presidential Candidate and Your Host Tonight”.

Nate Silver’s work has brought a very important issue to light. The numbers, when you are thorough, don’t lie. He didn’t create the President’s re-election, he merely told everyone that, according to the American people, this was what was going to happen. What is astounding to me, and really shouldn’t be, is how many commentators and politicians seemed to take Silver’s predictions personally, as if he was trying to change reality by lying about the numbers. Well, someone was trying to change public perception of reality by talking about numbers, but I don’t think it was Nate Silver.

This is, fundamentally, a victory for science, thinking and solid statistics. Nate put up his predictions in a public space and said “Well, let’s see” and, with a small margin for error in terms of the final percentages, he got it right. That’s how science is supposed to work. Look at stuff, work out what’s going on, make predictions, see if you’re right, modify model as required and repeat until you have worked out how it really works. There is no shortage of Monday morning quarterbacks who can tell you in great detail why something happened a certain way when the game is over. Thanks, Nate, for giving me something to show my students to say “This is what it looks like when you get data science right.”

Remind me, however, never to bet against you at a sporting event!

Seriously? Victimising Other Students is Not Letting Your Hair Down

Posted: November 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The Sun-Herald newspaper has a column called “The Loaded Dog” that allows readers to explore the controversial (‘explosive’) issues of the week. Given that scandal that is still ongoing involving St John’s college, this is their question:

Does the university college system need a complete overhaul or should young people be allowed to be let their hair down in peace?

For the love of all that is good and educational, could there be a more disingenuous framing of a serious incident that has had and continues to have a major impact on young people? This is an ugly and false dichotomy that is yet more of the nonsensical victim blaming that is often used by bullies and their supporters. “Can’t you take a joke?” “I didn’t mean anything by it.” “You’ve got no sense of humour (,love)” “They’re just letting off steam.” and, my favourite piece of rank and festering non-contribution to any discussion that involves the male gender acting atrociously:

“Boys will be boys.”

No, rapists will be rapists. Thugs will be thugs. Bullies need victims but, of course, many people who are bullies don’t like to be called bullies and, especially when their own glittering futures may be at stake, they most certainly don’t want it recorded anywhere that their actions may be down to anything other than “they were asking for it” or, perhaps, “we’ve always done it this way.” Don’t say “Boys will be boys” to excuse the bad behaviour of yourself, your friends or your relatives. It’s a lie that we need to leave behind.

There is nothing about what happened at St John’s College that was even vaguely on the scale of “letting one’s hair down”. If an individual student drank too much and threw up on a tram – eh. It’s not attractive but that’s a dumb thing people do. If two students are caught having consensual sex on the statue of the (insert statue’s name here), well I hope that they practised safe sex, but that’s pretty much their business when they’re of age.

When over 30 students stand around kneeling people and coerce them into drinking something that is deliberately disgusting, to punish them, we are seeing abuse. When furniture is burned on campus, it is a message of defiant and repellant strength – tyranny signalled by flaming Ikea. This is about the victimisation of the weak. People do not “let their hair down” by organising gang rape or the Jonestown massacre. “Letting your hair down” is about you, not how you abuse other people.

Let’s not forget that the victims, like most abused, are more likely to inflict the same thing on the people that they gain control over. For the rest of their lives. This is never what we want for our children, our students or our citizens. Let’s be honest about violence, intimidation and thuggery. Let’s stop blaming the victims. ‘Let their hair down in peace?’ – for shame, Kate Cox, to put your name to such weasel words. Let me rewrite the sentence for you:

“Does the university college system need a complete overhaul or are the actions allegedly carried out at St John’s College an acceptable and expected part of University Life?”

I cannot quite believe how much writing I’ve managed to do on something that should have been a complete no-brainer. Students were identified as taking part in a heinous act, part of a series, that nearly killed someone. Why are we still talking about this in terms other than “the matter has been addressed, the victims are safe and we have changed the situation so that this cannot happen again.” I’ve got to the stage where I’ve realised that claiming that you can’t make punishments stick because you can’t identify the ringleader is very, very weak beer as an argument.

You lead when you step up and take control of a situation. If you hang back when something bad is happening and you could have acted to stop it, or withdrawn your participation, then you are complicit. If you were bullied or coerced into doing something then I have sympathy for you (obviously, or my anti-bullying stance makes no sense) but the students who have continued the acts of vandalism and anti-social behaviour at St John’s, and are proudly wearing t-shirts celebrating their acts,  are either some of the most effectively brainwashed people on the planet or they are active participants.

The Vice Chancellor the University associated with St John’s has already taken the slightly unprecedented step of contacting all of the students to reassure them and ask if any of them need help. Well, that’s nice and obviously well worth while but how could a College so closely associated with the University have been allowed to get to the point of this year’s activities in the first place? If I genuinely thought a student was at risk, you’d have a difficult time shutting me up. My academic freedom comes with a cost, that it must be exercised in the interests of my students, my colleagues and the truth. Let’s hope that this is the last that I have to write on this except for solid positive developments in the near future.

The Limits of Time

Posted: November 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m writing this on Monday (and Thursday night), after being on the road for teaching, and I’ve been picking up the pieces of a hard drive replacement (under warranty) compounded by the subsequent discovery that at least one of my backups is corrupted. This has taken what should have been a catch-up day and turned it into a “juggle recovery/repair disk/work on secondary machine” day but, hey, I’m not complaining too much – at least I have two machines and took the trouble to keep them synchronised with each other. The worst outcome of today’s little backup issue is that I have a relatively long reinstallation process ahead of me, because I haven’t actually lost anything yet except the convenient arrangement of all of my stuff.

It does, however, reinforce one of the lessons that it took me years to learn. If you have an hour, you can do an hour’s worth of work. I know, that sounds a little ‘aw shucks’ but some things just take time to do and you have to have the time to do them. My machine recovery was scheduled to take about four hours. When it had gone for five, I clicked on it to discover that it had stopped on detecting the bad backup. I couldn’t have done that at the 30 minute mark. Maybe I could have tried to wake it up at the 2 hour mark, and maybe I would have hit the error earlier, but, in reality that wasn’t going to happen because I was doing other work.

Why is this important? Because I am going to get 1, maybe 2, attempts per day to restore this machine until it finally works. It takes hours to do it and there’s nothing I can do to make it faster. (You’ll see down the bottom that this particular prediction came true because the backup restoration has now turned out to have some fundamental problems).

When students first learn about computers, they don’t really have an idea about how long things take and how important it is to make their programs work quickly. Computational complexity describes how we expect programs to behave when we change the amount of data that they’re working on, either in terms of how much space they take up or how long they take to compute. The choice of approach can lead to massive differences in performance. Something that takes 60 seconds on one approach can take an hour on another. Scale up the size of data you’re looking at and the difference is between ‘will complete this week’ and ‘I am not going to live that long’.

When you look at a computing problem, and the resources that you have, a back of an envelope calculation will very rapidly tell you how long it will take (with a bit of testing and trial and error in some cases). If you don’t allow this much time for the solution, you probably won’t get it. Worse case is that you start something running and then you stop it, thinking it’s not going to finish, but you actually stopped it just before it was going to finish. Time estimation is important. A lot of students won’t really learn this, however, until it comes back and bites them when they overshoot. With any luck, and let’s devote some effort so it’s not just luck, they learn what to look for when they’re estimating how long things actually take.

I wasn’t expecting to have my main machine back up in time to do any work on it today, because I’ve done this dance before, but I was hoping to have it ready for tomorrow. Now, I have to plan around not having it for tomorrow either (and, as it turns out, it won’t be back before the weekend). Worst case is that I will have to put enough time aside to do a complete rebuild. However, to rebuild it will take some serious time. There’s no point setting aside the rebuild as something that I devote my time or weekend to, because it doesn’t require that much attention and I can happily work around the major copies in hour-long blocks to get useful work done.

When you know how long something takes and you plan around that, even those long boring blocks of time become something that can be done in parallel, around the work that also must happen. I see a lot of students who sit around doing something that’s not actually work while they wait for computation or big software builds to finish. Hey, if you’ve got nothing else to do then feel free to do nothing or surf the web. The only problem is that very few of us ever have nothing else to do but, by realising that something that takes a long time will take a long time, we can use filler tasks to drag down the number of things that we still have left to do.

This is being challenged at the moment because the restoration is resolutely failing and, regrettably, I am now having to get actively involved because the ‘fix the backup’ regime requires me to try things, and then try other things, in order to get it working. The good news is I still have large blocks of time – the bad news is that I’m doing all of this on a secondary machine that doesn’t have the same screen real estate. (What a first world problem!)

What a fantastic opportunity to eat my own dog food. 🙂 Tonight, I’m sitting down to plan out how I can recover from this and be back up to date on Monday, with at least one fully working system and access to all of my files. I still need to allow for the occasional ‘try this on the backup’ and then wait several hours, but I need to make sure that this becomes a low priority tasks that I schedule, rather than one that interrupts me and becomes a primary focus. We’ll see how well that goes.

The St John’s Incident: The Shaking of the Stones

Posted: November 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I recently wrote of a New South Wales University-affliated college where hazing had reached dangerous and thuglike levels. It now appears that the publicity that these events have been granted in some parts of the media (I say some because the ‘Australian’ main news site, news.com.au, is carrying very little on this, and almost all of this is coming via the Sydney Morning Herald) is now having a desirable effect upon those who can change the College’s direction. Both the Archbishop of Sydney and the Premier (State government leader) of New South Wales have come out swinging. Cardinal Pell has requested that all of the Catholic priests associated with the College council resign their positions, leaving the council unable to function, and the Premier has made some (what must be very ominous) statements to the effect that the government may consider changing the acts that define and control the College.

Remember that incident I mentioned where the teenage girl had to be hospitalised? The 33 students who were directly involved were originally assigned community service, suspension and were barred from holding committee positions or offices for the rest of the term. After a rather interesting appeals process, most of these requirements were quashed, including the “no office” requirement. Of course, now this means that seven of the nine members of the student house committee will come from the 33 students who nearly killed a girl by intimidating her into drinking a rather unpleasant cocktail of things designed to make someone sick. I should mention, however, that this drinking incident was seen as ‘justice’ for the terrible crime that this girl, and four others, had committed.

Her crime? She had walked forwards at a time when she should have been walking backwards. That is, of course, worth public degradation and a night in the hospital!

One of the other Council members, Roslyn Arnold, resigned her position earlier this year, in disgust at the actions she was seeing and the way that the council was not acting to address the issue. In this article, she says, quite sensibly, that the current toxicity of the student environment at the College is nothing that a sane parent would wish on their children. But it’s also about stretngth of leadership and having the guts to say when something is wrong. As she says in the article:

“In whatever sphere of influence you function, part of the price of being a truly good leader is speaking out.”

One of the less pleasant things that has emerged from all of this is that the culture of initiation and inappropriate behaviour at St John’s has apparently been going on for many years. The Honourable Joe Hockey, MP, a federally elected politician and the Shadow Treasurer, is a Johnsman (a previous college attendee) and he had this to say, in this article, after confirming that rituals had been in place when he was at St John’s:

”Let’s not gild the lily on this sort of stuff,” he said.

”I think if you open the lid on colleges and campuses and frat houses right around the world … by the general standard of behaviour, it would be deemed to be pretty lewd and inappropriate.”

Hang on – everyone’s doing it so it’s ok? No wonder there’s a discipline problem at St John’s, if the likely outcome of involving previous alumni is that they are so convinced that ritual abuse if just something that happens around the world. I should note that another article, found here, registers Mr Hockey’s support for the clean-up, although he ducks the issue as to whether he was ever directly involved in initiation. As he coyly puts it, “I’ve been initiated in the school of life”. Funny, but a simple “No” would have cleared that question up, wouldn’t it? Is this the real power of St John’s? You can no longer answer a simple yes/no question because you would either be complicit in vile and questionable acts, or you might just possibly offend your old school chums by saying “no” as if you disapproved of something? Excuse me for putting words in the Minister’s mouth but he seems to have left the answer hanging.

No wonder the Premier is looking at this because, right now, it appears that anyone who has been through St John’s may just not have the right level of objectivity to deal with it. Before you accuse me of overreacting on the basis of a single comment from Joe Hockey, I am looking at this in the light of the actions of those alumni who have already reduced the penalties against the 33 students from earlier and who continue to erode the “pro reform” approach that the new Rector is taking. I read an interesting comment from a former Johnsman who claimed that he left the college before third year so that he wouldn’t have to take part in inflicting the bastardisation.

Are we in any doubt the victimisation and intimidation are bad? That producing hierarchies out of fear form the imagination crippling extrinsic cages that we all know just don’t work for cognitive activities? That people who are abused tend to become abusers?

To be honest, it’s a little late for people to discover how bad this is, as Roslyn Arnold quickly realised when she left a poisonous culture and was told that she was overreacting. (Good to see that gaslighting is still going strong!) But a strong statement from the associated Church and Government are the first part of what is required to restore confidence that children and students are safe from harm when in our schools, Universities and associated institutions. The second part is real, lasting change to stamp out these activities and send the message that the people who do these things are not guardians of tradition or, in any way, to be respected.

Thugs are thugs. The sooner that the defenders of ritual humiliation and intimidation realise this, grow up and let it go, the sooner we can get back to education and building something better. I would apologise for lecturing on this subject except that, as Professor Arnold reminds us, part of being a good leader of any kind is speaking out, supporting those who oppose stupidity such as this, and taking a stand for something better. Be in no doubt, we need something better than this!

Being a Hypnoweasel and Why That’s a Bad Idea.

Posted: November 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I greatly enjoy the television shows and, as it turns out, the writing of Derren Brown. Mr Brown is a successful conjurer, hypnotist and showman who performs stage magic and a range of deceits and experiments, including trying to turn a random member of the public into an assassin or convincing people that they committed a murder.

This is Derren hypnotising you into believing that this is the best post ever.

His combination of trickery, showmanship, claimed psychology/neurolinguistic programming and hypnotism makes for an interesting show – he has been guilty of over claiming in earlier shows and, these days, focusses on the art of misdirection, with a healthy dose of human influence to tell interesting stories. I am reading his book “Tricks of the Mind” at the moment and the simple tricks he discusses are well informed by the anecdotes that accompany them. However, some of his Experiments and discussions of the human aspects of wilful ignorance of probability and statistics are very interesting indeed and I use these as part of my teaching.

In “The System”, Derren shares his “100% successful horse race prediction system” with a member of the public. He also shows how, by force of will alone, he can flip a coin 10 times and have it come up heads – with no camera trickery. I first saw this on a rather dull plane flight and watched with interest as he did a number of things that, characteristically, showed you exactly what he was doing but cleverly indicated that he was doing something else – or let you believe that he was doing something else. “The System” is a great thing to show students because they have to consider what is and what isn’t possible at each stage and then decide how he did it, or how he could have done it. By combining his own skill at sleight of hand, his rather detailed knowledge of how people work and his excellent preparation, “The System” will leave a number of people wondering about the detail, like all good magic should.

The real reason that I am reading Derren at the moment, as well as watching him carefully, is that I am well aware how easy it is to influence people and, in teaching, I would rather not be using influence and stagecraft to manipulate my students’ memories of a teaching experience, even if I’m doing it unconsciously. Derren is, like all good magicians, very, very good at forcing cards onto people or creating situations where they think that they have carried out an act of their own free will, when really it is nothing of the kind. Derren’s production and writings on creating false memory, where a combination of preparation, language and technique leads to outcomes where participants will swear blind that a certain event occurred when it most certainly did not. This is the flashy cousin of the respectable work on cognition and load thresholds, monkey business illusion anyone?, but I find it a great way to step back critically and ask myself if I have been using any of these techniques in the showman-like manipulation of my students to make them think that knowledge has been transferred when, really, what they have is the memory of a good lecture experience?

This may seem both overly self-critical and not overly humble but I am quite a good showman and I am aware that my presentation can sometimes overcome the content. There is, after all, a great deal of difference between genuinely being able to manipulate time and space to move cards in a deck, and merely giving the illusion that one can. One of these is a miracle and the other is practise. Looking through the good work on cognitive load and transfer between memory systems, I can shape my learning and teaching design so that the content is covered thoroughly, linked properly and staged well. Reading and watching Derren, however, reminds me how much I could undo all of the good work by not thinking about how easy it is for humans to accept a strange personally skewed perspective of what has really happened. I could convince my students that they are learning, when in reality they are confused and need more clarification. The good news is that, looking back, I’m pretty sure that I do prepare and construct in a way that I can build upon something good, which is what I want to do, rather than provide an empty but convincing facade over the top of something that is not all that solid. Watching Derren, however, lets me think about the core difference between an enjoyable and valuable learning experience and misdirection.

There are many ways to fool people and these make for good television but I want my students to be the kind of people who see through such enjoyable games and can quickly apply their properly developed knowledge and understanding of how things really work to determine what is actually happening. There’s an old saying “Set a thief to catch a thief” and, in this case, it takes a convincing showman/hypnotist to clarify the pitfalls possible when you get a little too convincing in your delivery.

Deception is not the basis for good learning and teaching, no matter how noble an educator’s intent.

Traditions, Bad Behaviour and A Reasonable Expectation.

Posted: November 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

(Note: this is an evoking situation and I am heavily dependent upon the press for information. This story may evolve rapidly and I will update my posts as matters change.)

A subtly phrased headline from the Sun-Herald.

There is a lot of discussion in the New South Wales press regarding the behaviour of some students at St John’s College, a residential College within the University of Sydney. A tradition for ‘hazing’ now appears to have deteriorated to a culture of bastardisation that has led to some unpleasant incidents, including the hospitalisation of a young woman who was coerced into drinking a concoction of materials that were either not for human consumption or beyond the point of consumption. When disciplinary actions were applied by the new Rector, the actions of a group of old scholars and the parents of the students rapidly overturned the majority of punishments and the ‘guilty’ students reacted as one might expect. Freed of the outcomes of their actions, matters have deteriorated to the point that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell (who holds an official role to the College as its Visitor), has stated that the loutish behaviour must stop or he may involve the police. That word beloved of the more excitable print media, ‘anarchy’, is being thrown around in a non-complimentary manner.

Do I have the guaranteed and final truth of all of this? No. All of this should be read in the context of an ongoing investigation where the final statements on what did and did not happen will take some time to uncover. Regrettably, comment from old Johnsmen who control parts of the College does not really inspire much confidence, with statements along the lines of ”Some of the fellows feel that certain traditions are to be protected and that protection means the rector must go.”

When the traditions involve 30+ people from higher years standing around a kneeling young woman, ‘encouraging’ her to drink, I think that we see a tradition that makes a great deal of sense to those who stand in control – but very little to anyone who would prefer it that our students not be viciously and systematically intimidated into carrying out potentially dangerous actions. Of course, now would be the time for a true voice of the students who are, supposedly, being victimised to come forward and tell us that it is all media beat-up. And Georgie did just that on a television interview. Georgie’s statements included quotes such as:

“I’m a fresher there and, like, I’ve never been intimidated or forced into drinking anything as they say. Like, all the rituals have been ruled out and all that kind of stuff. Like, the leaders of this college, like, they always sit us down, they’re like ‘you’re never forced into anything and all that kinda stuff.’’ (via SMH.com.au, link below)

Which would be great, if Georgie were not a third year student who is part of the house committee that looks after day-to-day matters in the college. So, to add to the excreting in public spaces, setting fire to furniture outside the Rector’s office and forcing young students to consume (under great peer pressure) stomach turning concoctions, we have the committee that is charged with dealing with these matters presenting a false public presence (at least according to the Sydney Morning Herald). The truth is unpalatable or has been brought into the open? Lie about it! What a splendid lesson for some of the future leaders of the 21st Century. (The current leader of the Federal Opposition and his finance spokesman are both former men of the College. It is not hyperbole to place the current students at the scalable foot of the ladder to the top.)

Things are, fairly obviously, pretty dire and the Vice-Chancellor for the University of Sydney had this to say:

“If I was reading these newspaper reports I would have serious questions about sending my children to a college at the University of Sydney at the moment.”

Well, yes. A culture of thuggery and bastardisation such as this is, of course, completely at odds with the notion of how we should generally treat our students. With everything that is currently coming out of this scandal, it requires only a fraction of it to be true to make St John’s College a massive liability to USyd.

Dealing with students is pretty straight forward. Don’t lie to them. Don’t bully them. Don’t have sex with them. Try to educate them. Finally, protect them from any elements in your own system that can’t follow these simple rules. I don’t want broken students in my classes, press-ganged into hierarchical conformance. I don’t want bullies and people who think that rules basically apply to everyone except them. This way sociopathy lies. While the actions of Georgie are the action of an individual, if this is indicative of the way that thought runs in the College, then it will be hard to see any remorse (if that is ever shown) as anything other than a cynical exercise in presenting a new version of the truth for a suddenly observant public.

Not all traditions are good traditions, and bad behaviour of many sorts is often excused with statements along the lines of “but we’ve always done it this way”. Students should have a reasonable expectation that an organisation with any connection at all to a University should adhere to similar standards of behaviour. The College is an independent college but it is still at the University of Sydney. I do not envy the University this situation, as it does raise questions of pastoral care and ongoing support and affiliation.

Any student deserves to live and work in an environment that neither allows this to happen to the victims, nor encourages or in any way rewards students in becoming the kind of people who would take such an unpleasant approach to fellow humans. When you send your son or daughter to one of a nation’s most prestigious University-aligned or affiliated institutions, you would expect them to be safe, valued and to be in a community designed to foster their successful advancement in terms of their own merits, rather than anything approaching what is currently coming out in the media regarding this college. It is, quite simply, a reasonable expectation.

369 (+2)

Posted: November 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

( +2 )

The post before my previous post was my 369th post. I only saw because I’m in manual posting mode at the moment and it’s funny how my brain immediately started to pull the number apart. It’s the first three powers of 3, of course, 3, 6, 9, but it’s also 123 x 3 (and I almost always notice 1,2,3). It’s divisible by 9 (because the digits add up to 9), which means it’s also divisible by 3 (which give us 123 as I said earlier). So it’s non-prime (no surprises there). Some people will trigger on the 36x part because of the 365/366 number of days in the year.

That’s pretty much where I stop on this, and no doubt there will be much more in the comments from more mathematical folk than I, but numbers almost always pop out at me. Like some people (certainly not all) in the fields of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics, numbers and facts fascinate me. However, I know many fine Computer Scientists who do not notice these things at all – and this is one of those great examples where the stereotypes fall down. Our discipline, like all the others, has mathematical people, some of whom are also artists, musicians, poets, jugglers, juggalos, but it also has people who are not as mathematical. This is one of the problems when we try to establish who might be good at what we do or who might enjoy it. We try to come up with a simple identification scheme that we can apply – the risk being, of course, that if we get it wrong we risk excluding more people than we include.

So many students tell me that they can’t do computing/programming because they’re no good at maths. Point 1, you’re probably better at maths than you think, but Point 2, you don’t have to be good at maths to program unless you’re doing some serious formal and proof work, algorithmic efficiencies or mathematical scientific programming. You can get by on a reasonable understanding of the basics, and yes, I do mean algebra here but very, very low level,  and focus as you need to. Yes, certain things will make more sense if your mind is trained in a certain way, but this comes with training and practice.

It’s too easy to put people in a box when they like or remember numbers, and forget that half the population (at one stage) could bellow out 8675309 if they were singing along to the radio. Or recite their own phone number from the house they lived in when they were 10, for that matter. We’re all good for about 7 digit numbers, and a few of these slots, although the introduction of smart phones has reduced the number of numbers we have to remember.

So in this 369(+2)th post, let me speak to everyone out there who ever thought that the door to programming was closed because they couldn’t get through math, or really didn’t enjoy it. Programming is all about solving problems, only some of which are mathematical. Do you like solving problems? Did you successfully dress yourself today?

Did you, at any stage in the past month, run across an unfamiliar door handle and find yourself able to open it, based on applying previous principles, to the extent that you successfully traversed the door? Congratulations, human, you have the requisite skills to solve problems. Programming can give you a set of tools to apply that skill to bigger problems, for your own enjoyment or to the benefit of more people.

A Troubling Reflection: The Fall of Jonah Lehrer

Posted: November 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jonah Lehrer was, until recently, a wildly successful writer, blogger and lecturer, who wrote about many things involving neuroscience. However, as it transpires, a lot of what he published in books and blogs and other locations was shoddy science, insight-driven pattern fitting, unattributed or outright stolen. You can read about it here at the NYMag website.

This made me think about my own blog and whether I’m meeting the standards that I would like to. (Except in terms of ending sentences with prepositions.)  I’m very honest about not presenting anything here as being the double-blind passed rock-solid research reports of an expert, although there’s a big chunk of the empirical and some of my research interests do creep in. I’m also committed to citing the original authors, giving credit where credit is due and quoting correctly. If you want to see what my actual research looks like, you can find my papers on the Internet, having gone through peer review and then public presentation. This is where I think, share my thoughts and work on that elusive animal, community.

But is what I write here actually good science or do I spend too much time going “A-ha!” and then searching for supporters, or is my insight reflecting the amount of reading that I’m doing? I do read a lot of papers and references, I have to as I’m reading into a new area, but I look at Jonah’s critics and I wonder how much of what I write here is adding to the works that I discuss, or clarifying issues in a valid and reproducible way? What is anyone, including me, learning from this?

I’m neither looking for, or wanting, supporting comment or reassurance here, so I’m happy for the comments to stay tumbleweeds. This is a rhetorical question to allow me to link you to a sad tale of a young man overreaching himself, to his great and probably lasting detriment, and then to think about how I can use this to improve what I write here.

It is very easy to look at feedback in terms of “number of students who stayed in lecture” or “positive comments from the 10% of students who bothered to hand in their evaluations”, but the former could be an accident of cold weather, late class and bus timetables, while the latter is most likely a statistical anomaly. Feedback is the thing that you can use to help you improve and it doesn’t really matter where that comes from. The feedback that someone else gets, the places that are identified as where they are lacking, is also something that I can learn from. I don’t have formal teachers anymore. I have mentors, guides, students, peers, friends, partners and … the rest of the world.

I’m not sure how much good science I’ve been putting in here but I am aware that I am falling into what I shall refer to as the Pratchett/Vetinari Newspaper Conundrum a little too often. From my recollection, in “The Truth” by Terry Pratchett, the tyrant of Ankh-Morkpork (Lord Vetinari) notes how convenient it is that the paper always contains enough news to fill the pages. The implication being that the truth is being cut to fit the cloth, not the other way around. I am required to fill one post a day, somewhere between 500-1000 words, and I always seem to find a convenient research issue, story, anecdote or review to hold that space.

What would I do if I actually had nothing to say? Do I write a short piece on the trigger subjects of the gutter press, as they would, or do I publish nothing? I suspect that there have been times when my ‘insight’ posts have been fluff, with little substance, although I would hope that they are still enjoyable to read.

Let me, therefore, commit to maintaining the science/enjoyment separation and making it very clear when and where I am being rigorous and when I am not. And let me also commit to something that may have helped Jonah Lehrer. If I actually find one day that I have nothing to say, then I will try my hardest to say nothing. And I hope that, on that day, you’ll understand why.

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