Big data strikes again

The New York Times is reliably fun to read on the subject of technology:

SAN FRANCISCO — Although certain kinds of engineers are in short supply in the United States, plenty of potential candidates exist for thousands of positions for which companies want to import guest workers, according to an analysis of three million résumés of job seekers in the United States.

[snip]

[T]he technology industry argues there are not enough qualified Americans [to fill tech positions]. Its critics, including labor groups, say bringing in guest workers is a way to depress wages in the industry.

Many economists take issue with the industry’s argument, too. One side points out that wages have not gone up across the board for engineers, suggesting that there is no stark labor shortage.

[snip]

“I didn’t expect this result,” said Steve Goodman, Bright’s chief executive.

[snip]

“We’re Silicon Valley people, we just assumed the shortage was true,” Mr. Goodman said. “It turns out there is a little Silicon Valley groupthink going on about this, though it’s not comfortable to say that.”

[snip]

The Senate immigration bill, passed last month, nearly doubles the number of H-1B visas that companies can seek every year. Industry lobbied heavily for it, bulldozing efforts to add language that would force companies to try to hire an equally qualified American first.

[snip]

The age of workers, which the study did not look at, may also play a role....[A]mong 32 technology companies surveyed, only six had a work force with a median age over 35. At Monster, the job search portal, the median age was 30; at Google, 29; and at Facebook, 28. The median age of American workers over all is 42.3 years old, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As if to underline the study’s findings, Mr. Goodman spoke from a conference room that looked out on decorated ping-pong tables, a liquor bar and tiki-themed snacks. Later that day, Bright was having a party, partly to attract new talent, he said, including foreign programmers here on H-1B visas.

Big Data Analysis Adds to Guest Worker Woes
By QUENTIN HARDY and SOMINI SENGUPTA
JULY 23, 2013, 10:23 AM

Groupthink in Silicon Valley, groupthink amongst the punditry, groupthink in the White House....

[pause]

This part was interesting:

For a few job categories, like computer systems analysts, there are relatively few “good fits” among American applicants, Bright found. Computer systems analyst jobs, considered relatively low-skilled in the tech world, had four openings for every American candidate. For others, like high-skilled computer programmers, there were more than enough potential candidates in the United States, the company found.

As I recall, there's a section in the Steve Jobs book where Jobs explains to President Obama that the workers they really can't find are skilled workers with Associate degrees.

I'll have to find that and post.

For the record, I had absolutely no idea there wasn't a shortage of engineers until Kitchen Table Math readers explained the world to me. I never questioned the narrative; I just took all the Silicon lamentations at face value.

Workflowy for packing

Workflowy cuts my packing time in half, or close to. It's amazing.

With my usual travel list(s), I get into an obsessive-compulsive scanning doom loop.

I put something in my bag and cross it off my list.

Then I put something else in my bag and cross that off my list.

Unfortunately, crossed-off does not mean invisible, so every time I check my list to see what to pack next, I end up rereading the whole thing, or at least re-scanning the whole thing; plus I start to experience doubt.

Did I really pack the long cord for the iPad? Sure I crossed it off the list, but did I put it in my bag?

Better check.

(Same problem with recipes, btw.)

With Workflowy, when you cross something off the list it disappears (if you want it to).

So the list gets smaller and smaller, and there's never anything to scan other than items you have definitely not packed. There's no re-scanning, and there's (almost) no checking or re-checking. Out of sight, out of mind.

When you want to restore the list, you just Un-cross all the crossed-off items et voilà! List restored.

Gone fishing, part 2

Ed has been invited to give a seminar on France at Fort Hood, and I'm going!

The army invited specialists on various European countries, and I'd love to hear the whole thing, but I'm coming back Wednesday.

Gone fishing

We're in Garrison, NY today & tomorrow.

Our host says this is robber baron territory. When he & his wife bought the place in 1998, it was 16,000 square feet of ruin, sounds like. Took a year & 3 months of work before they could even stay overnight.

All I can say is I'm glad somebody has the attention span to restore 16,000 square feet.

Those robber barons. Great taste, apparently. Beautiful place.

Doug Lemov has a new book out

Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

For several years now, when I think of the public schools, the first issue that springs to mind is the stark absence of any mention or consideration of the need for practice. In the 14 years we've had kids in our local schools, I don't believe I've ever heard an administrator use the word 'practice' in any context other than 'football practice' or 'basketball practice,' etc.

When the subject is academics, the word is always 'understand.' Students will 'understand.' Not practice.

That's a problem because although class time is all about understanding, the tests are about remembering: students are tested on what they know. Which means students have to practice the content taught in the classes, but the school doesn't worry about providing effective practice. Teachers give homework, but no one collects or corrects the homework, and no one asks whether the homework actually works. Does the assigned homework increase knowledge? Nobody knows, and nobody asks. Practice is not a topic of conversation. At least not within my hearing.

Naturally under this system (Teach, test, and hope for the best), parents end up hiring a lot of tutors --- but tutors can't really provide effective practice regimens, either. (Even if a tutor would like to provide a practice regimen, parents don't need a whole new set of homework-from-thetutor to deal with.)

So the core requirement of all learning -- practice -- is left to the kids.

Let's just hope they're following the literature.

Can you spell hegemony? part 2

Leveraging discovery?

B-school talk and ed-school talk in the same sentence?

Ewwwwww.

Globe Education Shakespeare: Macbeth

"SEXEY" paragraphs

I bought a terrific book on college essay writing from iTunes: Essay Writing for Students. Just $4.99. The authors seem like a lot of fun.

I like their paragraph acronym, which they characterize as "one way to structure a paragraph:

SEXEY is a mnemonic (neh-MON-ick - a memory device) to help you create well-structured paragraphs which fully answer your essay questions.

S – STATEMENT
Make a statement linking to the question that you have chosen to answer.

E – EXPLAIN
Explain what your statement means in relation to your text.

X – EXAMPLE
Add in an example and quote from your text to back up your statement and explanation.

E – EXPLANATION
What your quote and example show the reader.

Y – WHY
Why is this all important? How does it all link to the question? What does it show us? How does it link to the novel as a whole or to a social and/or historical/political context?

As far as I can tell, all of the examples in the book -- and there are many -- are academic.

No personal writing, no journalism, no op eds.

It is very difficult to find an American textbook that teaches (or excerpts) academic prose.

Remembering math forever

An analysis of life span memory identifies those variables that affect losses in recall and recognition of the content of high school algebra and geometry courses. Even in the absence of further rehearsal activities, individuals who take college-level mathematics courses at or above the level of calculus have minimal losses of high school algebra for half a century. Individuals who performed equally well in the high school course but took no college mathematics courses reduce performance to near chance levels during the same period. In contrast, the best predictors of test perform ance (e.g., Scholastic A ptitude T est scores and grades) have trivial effects on the rate of performance decline. Pedagogical implications for life span maintenance of knowledge are derived and discussed.

Lifetime M aintenance of High School M athem atics Content
Harry P. Bahrick and Lynda K. Hall
Journal of Experimental Psychology
1991, Vol. 120, No. 1, 20-33

Bahrick, Hall, and Baker have a brand-new book out on long-term retention.

From The College Board: Reconciling AP Exams With Common Core

I'm very concerned about the information College Board is giving to AASA, the school superintendents association, regarding calculus. "Despite these measures, there are still difficulties in reconciling many AP courses with the Common Core. In particular, AP Calculus is in conflict with the Common Core, Packer said, and it lies outside the sequence of the Common Core because of the fear that it may unnecessarily rush students into advanced math classes for which they are not prepared. The College Board suggests a solution to the problem. of AP Calculus “If you’re worried about AP Calculus and fidelity to the Common Core, we recommend AP Statistics and AP Computer Science,” he told conference attendees. Moreover, the College Board may offer an AP Algebra course (although no plans are definite), which may supplant AP Calculus, particularly in schools rigidly adhering to the Common Core standards." I'm an apcalc and alg2 teacher with a b.s. in classical applied math. The statistics course that I took in college years ago was a calc-based course. Lisa Jones @proudmomom

Nonconscious arithmetic

The modal view in the cognitive and neural sciences holds that consciousness is necessary for abstract, symbolic, and rule-following computations. Hence, semantic processing of multiple-word expressions, and performing of abstract mathematical computations, are widely believed to require consciousness. We report a series of experiments in which we show that multiple-word verbal expressions can be processed outside conscious awareness and that multistep, effortful arithmetic equations can be solved unconsciously. All experiments used Continuous Flash Suppression to render stimuli invisible for relatively long durations (up to 2,000 ms). Where appropriate, unawareness was verified using both objective and subjective measures. The results show that novel word combinations, in the form of expressions that contain semantic violations, become conscious before expressions that do not contain semantic violations, that the more negative a verbal expression is, the more quickly it becomes conscious, and that subliminal arithmetic equations prime their results. These findings call for a significant update of our view of conscious and unconscious processes.

Reading and doing arithmetic nonconsciously Asael Y. Sklara, Nir Levya,1, Ariel Goldsteinb,1, Roi Mandela, Anat Marila,b, and Ran R. Hassina
19614–19619 | PNAS | November 27, 2012 | vol. 109 | no. 48

I'm sure our friend friends the basal ganglia have something to do with this....

Here's the press release.

Yale Open Courses

Yale Open Courses 

Course list

I've started the American Revolution course, which I like tremendously so far.

For some reason, the Yale Open Courses are the first MOOCs I've felt drawn to. I don't know why.

Just noticed they offer for-credit summer courses, too.

Report from the front

The other day I was introduced to a dean at a progressive private school. We chatted, and at some point I asked how the school assesses student learning.

The dean was vague. He mentioned teachers "reflecting" a couple of times, and then said the school is moving more and more to students assessing themselves, which also involves reflecting.

Funny thing: just last week I talked to a friend of mine whose son attends the school. She says the school has rampant grade inflation, and her son has learned nothing but his grades are good. He learns so little at school that he had two full-time tutors all last school year. (This is a very smart kid, by the way. No learning problems, no behavior problems.) When she took him to the SAT tutor she used with an older child in the family, the tutor told her there's no way he can prepare her son to take the SAT Math Subject test.

I told my friend about "Teach Like a Champion" classes: rapid-fire, high-energy events, with cold-calling and choral response, and said we need charter schools for rich kids. Parents should at least have the option of putting their kids in classrooms where kids spend a a lot of time practicing, not just discussing.

My friend is athletic, and she sparked to the idea it instantly. She said her son would love it, and he would remember what's been taught because he would be practicing in class.

Grade inflation and no practice during class-time: that is a recipe for total disengagement in a lot of kids.

Portlander and Anonymous 1 & 2 on Looking it up

Portlander said...

Sheesh. A cynical person would point out that Google is notorious for putting a thumb on their search results. If one has to rely on Google to get facts every time facts are needed, well that's giving Google an enormous amount of power to bias perceptions.

It's not a whole lot different than the mainstream media running pictures of a 12 y.o. Trayvon Martin in a football uniform instead of a 17 y.o. Trayvon Martin smoking a joint and sticking out his middle fingers on Facebook.

So yes, all the facts you need to know Walter Duranty, er... Walter Cronkite, er... The Googleplex will deliver.

Anonymous said...

Not only that; but a person who has a good knowledge base in a field or topic will get much better information out of Google (or any search engine) than an uninformed person will.

Anonymous said...

So if I can look up the translation of an English word into Spanish, that's as a good as being able to speak Spanish?

I think not.

I'm laughing!

Of course, to be fair, Marissa Mayer does not say that looking things up on Google is the path to success.

But the point still stands: how does one become good at looking things up?

To a very large degree, you become good at looking things up by acquiring knowledge of the field you're looking things up in. I go back to my struggles with the basal ganglia. Today I'm better able to 'look things up' productively because I've developed a sense of the field, of who the major researchers are, and, to a lesser degree, what the differences of opinion are amongst them.

When Marissa Mayer says "It's not what you know, it's what you can find out," she is misformulating reality. You have to know something to find things out.

Beyond that, how often is it actually true that you have to acquire new knowledge/information in order to do your job?

I don't know the answer to that question, but as far as I can tell a great deal of work depends upon doing what you know how to do: applying the knowledge you possess to the situation at hand.

Marissa Mayer is misinformed

2010: HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

Marissa Mayer: It's not what you know, it's what you can find out. The Internet has put at the forefront resourcefulness and critical-thinking and relegated memorization of rote facts to mental exercise or enjoyment. Because of the abundance of information and this new emphasis on resourcefulness, the Internet creates a sense that anything is knowable or findable — as long as you can construct the right search, find the right tool, or connect to the right people. The Internet empowers better decision-making and a more efficient use of time.

---

Thoughts:

1. There was an "abundance of information" available before the internet, too, yet somehow nobody thought that the presence of a World Book Encyclopedia in your house meant you didn't have to know anything.
   
2. Interesting that Mayer sees "memorization of rote facts" as something you might do as a form of "mental exercise" or for "enjoyment." She's right! Learning stuff is fun! Thinking, on the other hand, is not fun. Not for the most part. 
3. Better decision-making and more efficient use of time...I have no way of guessing whether either of those things is true (I'm skeptical of the first claim), but the internet is beyond fantastic for writers. Ed is writing his textbook now, and he can't believe how easy it is to find the sources and information he needs. As a historian working with primary documents, he hadn't really joined the JSTOR revolution. Now he has, and he's amazed.
4. Speaking of JSTOR, the general public needs access, too. 

Former Reddit co-owner founder arrested for excessive JSTOR downloads

Prior knowledge gets around working memory limits

[I]t’s well known that extensive background knowledge allows one to circumvent the limitation of working memory. To take an obvious example, if I ask you to hold six letters in mind for one minute, it will be much easier to do with B-R-A-K-E-S than with X-P-W-M-Q-R. Although both are a string of six letters, the first forms a word, so you can treat it like a single unit. It’s like holding one thing in working memory, not six. Naturally, this saving of space in working memory only works if you know the word “brakes.” The same phenomenon is observed in many other domains. The chess expert looking at a board does not see 16 white pieces—she sees several clusters of pieces, each cluster defined by the relationship of the pieces to one another and to opposing pieces. Whether it’s chess pieces or letters in a word, the compacting of many things into one thing in working memory is based on prior knowledge.
Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn? by Daniel T. Willingham

Jeopardy

I hope some of you are watching Jeopardy.

Ben, the contestant who has won at least 5 days in a row, I think, looks very familiar.

Here he is.

This is funny:

With great intentions, he bought two “very thick books filled with lists of facts, and promised myself I’d read through them every night,” he says. “That lasted exactly one night. I can’t memorize facts very well. I spent a lot of time adding and subtracting large numbers with pen and paper, because I didn’t want to mess up the final wager, especially being a math major.”

VB6

C. has lost 10 pounds on Mark Bittman's VB6 diet!

VB6 ("Vegan before 6") is an amazingly user friendly diet: it's the first diet I've ever tried that uses eating things you like to positively-reinforce not eating things you like without causing the whole diet to crash and burn. I've spent years trying to make the Premack principle work for weight loss, and I think Bittman has actually done it.

The funny thing is, back when I briefly became a hard-core vegan (I've been a 'part-time' vegan since then), I started out by doing exactly what Bittman did: I stuck to a vegan diet during the day, then ate a regular dinner with the family.

But I saw my own 'VB6' as a way station to full-time veganism; it never occurred to me that you could actually lose weight on that regimen.

Turns out I was wrong.

Here's an excerpt:

Six years ago, the man I most trusted with my health said to me, “You should probably become a vegan.”

Not exactly the words I’d wanted to hear, and certainly not what I was expecting. But I’d asked Sid Baker, my doctor of thirty years, what he recommended, given that he’d just told me that at age 57, I had developed the pre-diabetic, pre-heart-disease symptoms typical of a middle-aged man who’d spent his life eating without discipline.

He’d laid out the depressing facts for me: “Your blood numbers have always been fine but now they’re not. You weigh 40 pounds more than you should. You’re complaining of sleep apnea. You’re talking about knee surgery, which is a direct result of your being overweight. Your cholesterol, which has always been normal up until now, isn’t. Same with your blood sugar; it’s moved into the danger zone.”

A more conventional doc would’ve simply put me on a drug like Lipitor, and maybe a low-fat diet. But Lipitor, one of the statin drugs that lowers cholesterol, is a permanent drug: Once you start taking it, you don’t stop. I didn’t like the idea of that.

Furthermore, its effectiveness in healthy people has never been established, and it’s also been implicated in memory loss and other cognitive complications; I didn’t like the idea of any of that, either. And at this point, low-fat and lowcarbohydrate diets have essentially been discredited: They might help you lose weight, but they’re not effective for maintaining that loss in the long term, and they may even wreak havoc on your system.

But becoming a vegan? A person who eats no animal products at all? Calling that a radical change to my lifestyle was more than a bit of an understatement. Yet it was clear that something had to be done. I asked Sid, “Is a compromise possible? Any other ideas?”

“You’re a smart guy,” he said. “Figure something out.”

The answer, to me, was this: I’d become a part-time vegan. And for me, this part-time veganism would follow these simple rules: From the time I woke up in the morning until 6 in the evening, I’d eat a superstrict vegan diet, with no animal products at all.

In fact, I decided to go even beyond that: Until 6 p.m., I’d also forgo hyper-processed food, like white bread, white rice, white pasta, of course all junk food, and alcohol.

At 6 p.m., I’d become a free man, allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted, usually—but not always—in moderation. Some nights, this meant a steak dinner; some nights, it was a blow-out meal at a good restaurant; other nights, dinner was a tunafish sandwich followed by some cookies. It ran, and runs, the gamut.

Whatever happened at dinner, though, the next morning I turned not to bacon and eggs or a bowl of Trix but to oatmeal or fruit or vegetables. For lunch, rice and beans or a salad—or both. Throughout the day I snacked on nuts and more fruit.

I called the diet “vegan before six,” or VB6. And it worked.

A month later, I weighed myself; I’d lost 15 pounds. A month after that, I went to the lab for blood work: Both my cholesterol and my blood sugar levels were down, well into the normal range (my cholesterol had gone from 240 to 180). My apnea was gone; in fact, for the first time in probably thirty years, I was sleeping through the night, not even snoring. Within four months, I’d lost more than 35 pounds and was below 180—less than I’d weighed in thirty years. And the funny thing was, the way I ate in the daytime began to change the way I ate at night.

An excerpt from Mark Bittman’s “VB6″

AND SEE:
I Answer Frequently Asked Questions about VB6
Help for the afflicted
Application of the Premack principle to the behavioral control of extremely inactive schizrophrenics

Why students have to memorize things - revised

I've been trying to get this post right, and it's getting closer.

I'm sensing an uptick in anti-knowledge sentiment, so I need a rebuttal.

What do children want?

Fabulous post from a substitute teacher in Great Britain

Knowledge and memory posts

6/24/2006: Mastery learning and IQ (warning: broken links; page can't be edited)

10/25/2006: On not teaching to mastery (warning: broken links; page can't be edited)

4/26/2007 How to build a fast learner

4/26/2007: Extremely fast learning

6/10/2007: On Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins)

9/9/2010: The rule of 20

1/23/2012: Why students have to memorize things

3/30/2012: Look it up

8/13/2012: Jeff Hawkins: intelligence is memory, memory is intelligence

6/18/2013: Deeper shmeeper

7/2/2013: Why students need to memorize, Common Core edition