About the Tide of History September 16, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in Education, Uncategorized.Tags: 9/11, current events, History
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This story starts about 20 years ago, when my manager at the time Shari Zedeck mentioned that her daughter had entered and won a statewide school history competition, where she was required to research and write about a significant event in history.
She chose to write about Watergate, and by all accounts did a really good job of it. My immediate and visceral response was that Watergate wasn’t history, it was current events. After all, while I was a teen, I remember it well. But it made me ponder on just what history means, an idea that I carried forward into my most recent blog post.
The answer is that if you had a front row seat, it wasn’t history.
So what did I have a front row seat to? November 22, 1963, I was in the first grade at Johnson Street Elementary School, and we were abruptly sent home from school about half an hour early, without explanation. I got home to find my mother in crying in front of the TV. “They killed him.” (I hope you know who).
So the mid-late 1960s, and everything beyond, I at least know second-hand through the news (and the news is a separate discussion). None of this seems like history to me, even if I had to read about it in the newspapers (Pittsburgh Press and Beaver County Times).
Yet one news source made the point that the soldiers killed in the suicide bombing at Kabul Airport were at best babies on 9/11. To them, 9/11 was something that they learned about in school. There couldn’t have been any direct memories.
So what is history? It’s actually a moving target, depending on your perspective of the events in question. The distinction may well be an artificial one, except that current events tend to shape your life, and history is more or less academic. Was my outlook and attitudes shaped by the assassinations and race riots of the 1960s, duck and cover in elementary school (look it up), the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, the gas lines later in the 1970s, and so on? I think so.
Current events take on a certain personal point of view. I wanted to fly, soloed the day after my 16th birthday, was in Junior ROTC in high school, ROTC in college, an Air Force officer for six years. My vision prevented me from being a pilot, but I was affiliated with the military for more than a decade. The Vietnam War, Grenada (bet you don’t remember that one), and Beirut gave me qualified respect for those who served, while recognizing that our policy makers were not by any means perfect.
History does not have a personal perspective; even if I’ve visited historical locations, the events surrounding them remain removed from my experience. That doesn’t make them any less real, but it does mean that they don’t have the same impact.
So take advantage of the current events in your lifetime. I have lived in interesting times, which is both a blessing and a curse.
The Relationship Between Education and Warfighting June 29, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in Education.Tags: General Milley, Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson, William Calley
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I confess that it made my blood boil to hear disparaging comments on our military leadership recently (yes, that’s you, Matt Gaetz and Tucker Carlson), especially with regard to educating themselves and their peers on controversial topics.
Our military is among the most highly and broadly educated segments of American society. The military academies are among the most highly rigorous and competitive universities anywhere. Almost all officers graduate from college, many from the top schools in the country. In addition to military tactics and strategy, they study history, literature, current events, international relations, and even art. The enlisted personnel, the airmen, soldiers, and sailors who likely joined right outside of high school take a combination of general education and technical training courses to enable them to function in a highly complex society. Many have some college, and about ten percent get bachelors degrees.
All is not necessarily right with the military. Soldiers and sailors often live in difficult circumstances, away from families for months at a time, and making a pittance to support those families. The security and economic stresses can be enormous. Their responses often reflect this.
Further, the military is a microcosm of larger society. While the military is often in the vanguard of social change, we still have theft, assault, murder, insubordination, and other crimes. That doesn’t make the military an indiscriminate killing machine, but it does make them human.
First Lieutenant William Calley was 25 years old, leading several hundred troops in a rural area of North Vietnam, and under his command the company murdered and raped villagers under the mistaken belief that they were Viet Cong sympathizers. He served three and a half years of house arrest, and certainly deserved much more. Yet, at 25, living a largely sheltered life, would I have done any better? I would like to think I would have, but I hope to never find out.
Yes, I am a veteran. I can’t say that I was a very good airman; I can name a hundred things I could have done better, back in my early 20s. But I groked some life-long, and life-changing lessons from the experience. And to be fair, I was largely disappointed with General Milley until his last appearance before the House. Now I see that I was wrong about him.
There are those, military and ex-military, who shirk at the need to know anything beyond warfighting. But the best soldiers are those who are able to understand the language, culture, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses of their adversaries, and of their society in general.
Simply, we want the best soldiers we can produce. We do a credible job at that, at least as good as other advanced countries. And one of the most important ways we do that is to enable and support education of controversial topics. These are smart people; we can trust them to evaluate the nuance of what they learn for the good of society. But learning, wherever curiosity takes them, is an essential part of that process.
On Inattentional Blindness and Popular Culture June 6, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in Education, Technology and Culture.Tags: Inattentional blindness, the invisible gorilla
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I recently saw a cartoon that updated a Mary Tyler Moore meme into 2021 (thanks, @sjvn), in which she threw a mask into the air, rather than her hat. This caused me to go back and review several of the MTM intro songs, including the lengthier one that was never part of the TV show. As I listened (and especially watched) these, I came to the realization that MTM could well have been my older sister, forty-some years ago. I especially felt Mary’s pensive look as she’s driving down the highway in her Mustang (the models change, but the Mustang is forever). How will you make it on your own? must have defined a generation of women coming of age in the 1970s. The details with my sister differ, but the theme, I think, is correct.
I broached this topic to my sister this evening, and she readily agreed. “I really enjoyed watching the show in the early 1970s.”
My sister would have been somewhat younger than the real life MTM (to be fair, perhaps 15 years), but still in the age range where women first started graduating college in numbers, and trying to find their place in life. It was especially challenging in our own culture, where women largely married at 18 and took care of the household for the steelworker. She was the first of our extended family to go to college.
But she had more to say. “I really disliked it when Mary kept getting screwed over (figuratively) by all the men in the newsroom and her life.”
I, several years younger and male, never picked up on that dynamic that was so readily apparent to her that she recalled it decades later. In addition to trailblazing among the first generations of professional women (she was trained as a teacher, ultimately for the last 15 years of her career an accomplished data analyst), her eyes were wide open to the inequities that many of us never saw.
And this brings me to inattentional blindness. The best example of this is The Invisible Gorilla, a book published in 2010, co-authored by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. They designed an experiment where subjects had to keep track of passing around a basketball, only to have a person dressed in a gorilla costume walk across the court. A full 50 percent of the subjects did not see the gorilla.
So there is plenty that we don’t see in life. And often the only way we see it is to talk to other people, candidly, about their own experiences. Give it a try.
Education Should Make Us Uncomfortable May 3, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in Education, travel.Tags: 1619 Project, critical race theory
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I value education more than almost anything else in life. It is the mechanism by which we grow as individuals, and become better people and citizens. There are few higher purposes in life.
In the seventh grade, I was required to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I did so, but I didn’t know what it meant. It was only subsequent education that I understood just what every single word in the speech said. Today, 50 years later, I can still recite it verbatim, and tell you a powerful story of the meaning behind it.
I am reading stuff today referring to critical race theory, and the 1619 Project, and about how various states are passing laws against teaching such controversial topics.
I don’t quite get what critical race theory and the 1619 Project are all about, but I can tell you one thing. If they make you uncomfortable, you should learn about them.
I was made comfortable in my education, of history, civics, social studies, and current events in my public school years. In retrospect, some of the approaches to learning these topics then are laughable to me today. I became uncomfortable when I learned that we sent Japanese immigrants to concentration camps, and that we more or less massacred most native Americans through the early 1900s, and much more. And worse, that we vilified and murdered workers who were seeking a decent pay and work hours in the 1900s.
So my understanding of my country became more nuanced. I still think the United States has the best system and greatest democracy ever, while recognizing that there is substantial room for improvement. That’s what ongoing education buys you – an appreciation of what you have, coupled by a desire to make it better.
Most people don’t go that route. Instead, they like narratives that make Americans the unabashed good guys. Well, guess what? We weren’t, and we aren’t.
That doesn’t make us evil; it makes us human. Like people everywhere, we do the best we can. I have had the opportunity to meet and talk to people in many different countries, on their home turf. In many cases (Spain with Franco, Ukraine over the past decade, Serbs in the late 1990s, Swedes in World War II), their national histories contain ugly periods. Yet the people I talk to strive to make the future better. Mykola, in Ukraine, was a Chernobyl baby, born within the restricted zone, and told me that he snuck out to participate in the massive government protests of 2012. “I supported my extended family and couldn’t get into trouble,” he told me. “But I needed to be there.”
That’s what good, ordinary people do when confronted with their national history – they work to make things better. If we know and appreciate our history, we can too.
Education in the Coronavirus Era March 7, 2021
Posted by Peter Varhol in Education, Technology and Culture.Tags: coronavirus, education, home schooling
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I am a huge proponent of education. Neither of my parents graduated high school, but my ability to go to college and beyond has contributed significantly to my secure, upper middle class life. But public education has largely fallen apart as schools are closed and states and communities are grappling with how to provide the education needed to build functional adults.
There is the obvious, certainly. Those without reliable Internet access have not been able to easily participate in the efforts that schools have made in continuing the progression through the grades.
But there are less obvious things going on. There are parents who are unable or unwilling to properly support their children in home education opportunities, and are also not advancing as they should be. Some of this is cultural, but a lot is geographical; as we are largely privately Internet funded, we don’t have any way to make education equally accessible online.
I have two grandnephews, 14 and 12. They both seem smart and motivated. The elder seems to be doing well in a hybrid (in person and at home) school environment. The younger was infinitely bored with the at home option, and my sister and her daughter were able to place him in a private in-person school, where he also seems to be doing well. My family is not poor, but I will contribute to higher education when the time comes.
I grew up in an era where it was not necessary to graduate high school to have a middle class living; the steel mill took care of that, until it didn’t any more. My elder grandnephew wants to start at a community college, and I applaud that approach to continuing education.
An educated society is a stable and contributing society. And, I’m going to say it, a progressive society, in the sense that it becomes more civilized over time, because we understand more. As much as we seem to have regressed in that regard over the last few years, I worry that we are losing still more.
Yet I wonder what we are losing in these two years (more or less) of traditional education. I know parents who have home educated very successfully, but that requires a tremendous commitment that most are not able to make. Now that public education (which we are still fully funding, yet can’t quite figure out how to deliver it) is seriously limping, I am very concerned for the future of our society.
Return on Investment is Not the Way to View Education March 14, 2020
Posted by Peter Varhol in Education, Technology and Culture.Tags: community college, higher education, MOOC
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Circa 1995, my CS/Math department chair told me in no uncertain terms that we had perfected higher education, through small classes taught in person once or twice a week. There was no need to change education at all.
He was serious. It was laughable then, and it’s even more laughable today. Yet, especially in our youth (I am well beyond that, of course) we still look at education as a four (or more) year residential process on a bucolic campus.
Today Quartz is asking the question of what is the better return on investment, getting a college degree or buying a house. The real problem with that question is assuming four or more residential years on a bucolic campus. And while that works for some, young adults today have many more options than I had. In my experience, community colleges are fantastic, rigorous education for two years taught by dedicated professionals. And they are no longer places to learn auto body; they teach computer programming, nursing and affiliated health care, engineering, and others that were once the exclusive preserve of four-year colleges and beyond.
MOOCs are an outstanding way of learning. Courses from Coursera, Udacity, and others offer no-cost (for non-degree programs) or very low cost (for degree programs) courses, taught by world class instructors from world class universities.
Several residential colleges in my state have closed over the last two decades. I’m sure they considered their circumstances unique, but the fact of the matter is that they priced themselves out of their markets. And higher education is still raising its prices at double or triple the rate of inflation, blindly convinced that someone will pay for it for these students.
Over the last two decades education has become much more egalitarian and accessible to even those of modest means. Yet young adults still seek that residential experience. I think I know why; they are driven to it by their parents, who are convinced that only their own experience matters to their children. Guess what? You don’t need to be in residence away from home to learn. And I don’t think parents realize that, or accept it.
But the world has changed, and for the better. I sincerely wish that both parents and their children will look at the alternatives, because today they are good ones.
A decade ago, I was at the Supercomputing Conference, where the keynote speaker was the recently passed Clayton Christensen. He talked about higher education, and how lower-end alternatives were chewing away at the bottom of the education hierarchy. Except that today it’s no longer at the lower end. Alternatives are not yet Harvard, but they are most certainly at least flagship state universities.
Higher education doesn’t have to be a tradeoff any more, but we as a society think that’s still the case. Get over it, folks.
Statistical Significance and Real Life December 23, 2019
Posted by Peter Varhol in Algorithms, Education, Technology and Culture.Tags: significance, statistics, Type I error
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I have a degree in applied math, and have taught statistics for a number of years. I like to think that I have an intuitive feel for numbers and how they are best interpreted (of course, I also like to think that I am handsome and witty).
Over the last few years there has been concern among the academic community that most people massively misinterpret what statistical significance is telling them. Most research is done by comparing two separate groups (people, drugs, ages, treatments, and so on), one of which is not changed, while the other of which undergoes a change (most experiments are actually more complex than this, with multiple change groups representing different stimuli, different doses, or different behaviors). The two groups are then compared through a quantitative measurement of the characteristic under test.
Because we are sampling the population, there is some uncertainty in the result. Only if we have complete information (a census) can we make a statement with certainty, and we almost never have that. Statistical significance means that there is a small percentage (usually one or five percent) that a certain result can be found only by chance, thus suggesting that there is a real difference between the control and experimental groups.
Statistical significance is a narrow mathematical term. It refers to interpreting the mathematics, not applying the result to the real world. I try to make the distinction between statistical significance and practical significance. Practical significance is when the experimental conclusion can result in meaningful action in the problem domain. “This drug always cures cancer”, for example, can never be true, for multiple reasons. But we might like to make the statement that we can save twenty thousand lives a year; that might result in action in promoting a cure.
The problem is that many policy makers and the general public conflate the two. If something is statistically significant, how can it also not be practically significant? A large sample size can identify and amplify tiny differences that in many cases don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
And there is such a thing as the Type I error (there is also a Type II error, which I’ll write about later). The Type I error says that we falsely reject the hypothesis that there is no difference between the groups. And what are the odds of that? Pretty good, actually. Chances are that you got those results through random chance, not because there is a real difference.
Many studies analyzed by statistics use multiple statistical tests, sometimes numbered in the hundreds. If you do a hundred statistical tests, and you find five that give you statistically significant results at the 95 percent level, what do you conclude? Many researchers breathe a sigh of relief and exclaim “Publish!” Because in many cases their jobs are dependent on publishable results.
While we can use statistics and mathematics in general to help us understand complex problems, we have to mentally separate the narrow mathematical interpretations from the broader solution and policy ones. But most researchers, either through ignorance or because it behooves their careers to publish, do so. And the lay public and policy makers will bow to the cult of statistical significance, making things worse rather than better.
How Science Works October 11, 2019
Posted by Peter Varhol in Education, Technology and Culture.Tags: asteroid, K-T boundary, Lucifer's Hammer, paleontology, science
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About 65 million years ago, give or take, dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Then, on a single day (more or less), a massive asteroid struck in what is today the southern Gulf of Mexico, just north of the Yucatan Peninsula. A decade or two ago, there was evidence of a massive asteroid strike in the Gulf of Mexico at the K-T boundary. Seemingly, this changed the Earth’s climate so drastically that dinosaurs became extinct (this took likely a million or so years). While this theory was first proposed about two decades ago, it is receiving additional support through further research.
None of this is known in an absolute sense; there were no witnesses, of course. Paleontologists, archeologists, geologists, and more have deduced this from evidence on the ground. You will truly be amazed at the amount of effort scientists have put into discerning the distant past.
It’s important to note that the evidence is not first-hand. Scientists typically start with a theory, then look for clues that support or reject the theory. The clues are not clear-cut. Other scientists pose alternative theories. More research is conducted. Based on the preponderance of research, one theory may win out over time, but other scientific theories may still be valid. We may never know truth in an absolute sense.
I remember, now about 45 years ago, a novel by Larry Niven called Lucifer’s Hammer, which postulated a modern-day (well, the 1970s) asteroid strike on the Earth. For months before the strike, the possibility was dismissed because the margin or error was too large. That margin of error became smaller and smaller, until the day the asteroid, in major pieces, hit various parts of the Earth. But only the “kooks” bought into it before the margin of error equaled certainty.
All science is messy, and that causes many people fits. Theories are proposed, supported, refuted, and supported further. We had Newton’s Three Laws (which are not the same as Asimov’s fictional Three Laws), until Einstein proposed a more accurate theory. But Newton’s laws are still useful for many computations, and in a physical sense, easier to understand. So we continue to use them.
Too many otherwise educated people become frustrated at the ambiguities and contradictions of science, and reject the conclusions because they don’t like the process. Others fail to grasp the nuances, and fall back on undocumented legends and stories.
Does this mean we should reject science because it is a work in progress? Many people say yes, reverting to other beliefs. We think that science is all certainty, and when we become disillusioned, we reject everything. But that’s not how science works. As we are increasingly in a world where it may take decades or longer to discern truth, or even never completely be cognizant of truth, we can’t reject science because we don’t like the process.
Cutting Edge Computing 