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I ran across a great post at Technocrat titled If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics.

"Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists -- you never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably hate the subject."

This is a great point, and the post goes on to talk about why it's not just a lack of "real world" examples that makes math and science such boring, intimidating subjects.  Here's the perfect example of how a real world example definitely did not help one student with physics: [youtube]cIIwwCi2zwk[/youtube] So if memorizing facts and formulas is no use, and contrived, often bizarre examples are no help, how should we teach math and science? I'm not sure I have any great insights, but I can give you three examples of what has worked for me. First, I think it helps to have (or to project to your students) an attitude that allows for the real value and usefulness of science and math.  This does not mean that great teachers and students have to be died-in-the-wool atheists or materialists.  But I do think there are some basic ideas without which science and math will never be meaningful or interesting: 1.  The world is more complicated than it might seem; 2.  We can figure out the way it works; 3.  We can put the knowledge to use. As Richard Feynman explained:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Doing some googling to uncover the source of the quote leads me to a post on Edward Tufte's homepage, Grand truths about human behavior.  There you'll find a collection of quotes that express this notion better than I can. Second, you cannot study physics, geometry, biology, or any similar subject in isolation.  When I was in high school a lot of the stuff we went over in math class junior year didn't make sense until I took physics senior year.  In college I took calculus I and II as a computer science student and did fairly well, but I forgot everything I had read the day after each final exam.  When I took discrete math, though, the class was so much more interesting because I could see how it applied to CS. Finally, one great way to teach science is through storytelling.  This is a case where extensive Bible study might be perfect preparation for giving a science lecture - Jesus knew 2000 years ago that parables were much more effective teaching tools than lists of facts and figures (or commandments). The facts of the story are not nearly as important as the lesson and the exercise in creative thinking.  One great example of this is The Physics of Superheros by James Kakalios.  This is a great book - the author talks about the origin stories and powers of various super heroes and uses these very fictional examples to illustrate real physics.  He does not do so by brutally criticizing Stan Lee and insulting Superman.  Instead he uses the "miracle exception" to the laws of physics represented by each super power to tell a story about how the world really works. Thanks to The Adventures of the Accordion Guy for pointing out the post on teaching math like English.

Earlier one of our writers stumbled on a report that claimed gas-guzzling Hummers were better for the environment than hybrids like the Toyota Prius. This is one of those great stories that everyone loves - where the conventional wisdom is wrong, and we can all have a good laugh knocking someone or something off it's high horse. This story has been passed furiously around the Internet for a week or so, by email and blog, featured on Digg and Slashdot. It's a good anecdote about unintended consequences and a little boost to Hummer owners who are sometimes criticized for their very conspicuous consumption. It's also pretty much a load of crap. But how can that be? The writer did a bunch of research, and came up with numbers and formulas. Lots of people saw it and voted with a thumbs-up in Reddit or StumbleUpon. Welcome, dear readers, to the world of white papers and press releases. Let's say you had a conclusion you wanted to support, or clients you wanted to flatter. You do a bunch of research, finding information that backs your conclusions. Now what to do with it? You can try presenting it at a conference or submitting it to an academic journal, but then you run a risk. The risk is that peer review will knock it down. The scientific method has a key difference from the method mentioned above - instead of creating a conclusion then finding evidence, you create a hypothesis, gather all the evidence, then form your conclusion. Take this pesky detail and add a dash of scrutiny by experts in the field and you have a pretty good recipe for coming up with useful theories and knowledge. The recipe just won't make the muffins come out exactly the way you want them every time. So what do you do with this research? Put it in a white paper and/or type up and good press release. The term "white paper" used to refer to government policy documents, but now it's often used to mean a report by a company or individual in an industry intended to inform and persuade customers and partners. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, so long as everyone knows that the purpose of the document is often to persuade or sell something, not to impartially report on all the facts. IT workers have become very familiar with the uses of white papers since we are constantly bombarded with them. They are notoriously available to prove nearly any point you want to make. Is Oracle the fastest database system? You can probably find 20 white papers that say so authoritatively and conclusively. Is Oracle bloated and inefficient? Look, there's 20 papers that say so authoritatively and conclusively. They aren't all worthless, because each one might give you some good factual information. It's up to you to find and use what you need without drinking the Kool-Aide. The use of email by lots of people outside the IT realm and recently the hug number of non-IT bloggers has given press releases and white papers some new possibilities. They can be spread around the world in record time and quoted by a 1,000 blog posts as if they were primary sources. Notice that this report on the Prius and Hummer is 450+ pages. How many people, do you think, read all 450 pages? There are a number of problems with this report that make the conclusion that Hummers are green and Priuses are baby- seal-clubbing smog machines hard to swallow. For one thing, it assumes that a Prius will only last 109,000 miles, which is lower than some parts of the warranty in California and similar states, while extending the life of a Hummer H1 to 379,000 miles. Plenty of Priuses have already passed 200,000 miles, often working in taxi fleets. It also mentions the use of Nickel in the batteries and the damage Nickel mining did to Sudbury, Ontario. The batteries are warrantied to 100,000 miles Nickel is recyclable. Sudbury has done a great deal to mitigate past environmental damage and is no longer a wasteland. As the TrueDelta blog points out, the cost of ownership numbers are amazingly high for all the vehicles in the report. If Priuses cost this much to build and operate, we have to assume that Toyota is taking a huge loss on every one sold, and in fact the entire auto industry is grievously undercharging us. There are a number of other problems with the report, but others have already done a pretty good job outlining them. Probably the biggest problem is that the source data is not available for review, since it is considered valuable intellectual property by CNW research. So what's the answer to the question posed in the title? How can a Hummer be better for the environment than a Prius? By using whatever methodology you want, using whatever data you want, and closing your research up from peer review, that's how. And what's the lesson for today? It's certainly not "don't believe everything that you read," because that is glib and cynical without being precise enough to be useful. Here are some thoughts that might be a bit more practical:

• White papers and press releases are fine, but keep in mind they are often intended persuade you or sell you something.
• Starting with a conclusion makes research easier, but doesn't validate your conclusion.
• Digg, email forwards, and 1,000 blogs do not count as peer review.

Right now, you and I have access to more information than anyone else in the history of humanity. The richest man alive in the year 1800 could not get the amount and quality of information that a janitor with a $20/month DSL connection has at his fingertips today. This is all so amazing and wonderful that we mostly take it for granted. But it brings up new problems. No one can argue about the amount of information that's just a Google search away, but the quality of what comes up can be a big question mark. Luckily, we also have in place the most successful model of judging the quality of information in the history of man: the peer-reviewed academic journal. So we have an embarrassment of riches, and a great model to follow that has brought constant improvements in science and technology. So what's the problem? Actually performing academic research is horribly broken, and what's worse, there's no good reason. Read on to find out just how broken the system is. 1. There is absolutely no excuse for why I can't get immediate access to every journal article ever published. I'm serious. If I want to learn all about the misinformation effect, there's no doubt it will take me some time to read all the current research, let alone acquire the background in psychology needed to follow along. But even if I have the time, the motivation, and the background, I can't, not without spending a ton of money or being affiliated with a college or university (which translates to "spending a ton of money"). Unlike the web, with it's search engines, directories, and billions of pages hyperlinked to each other, academic research articles are not all available in one place to anyone who wants them. Why not? "Oh, digitizing those articles is such a huge job." "Oh, it will cost so much money." No it won't. No, it won't. The real problem is the tangled interests of various publishers like Elsevier. They are actively preventing access to information and convoluting the search and linking process. If everyone gave Google rights to digitize this stuff, they would do it in a second. If they gave it to the Internet Archive, or Project Gutenberg, or the Wikimedia Foundation, or created a new open-source project to work on it, it would get done. Virtually everything in the past 20 years was already typed up on a computer for submission or layout in the journal. A huge amount from earlier than that has already be digitized and sits in some database somewhere. And anything that hasn't been digitized yet can be taken care of with scanning, OCR, and a few dozed graduate assistantships (and those poor bastards get very little pay). 2. There is absolutely no excuse for requiring people to search this database for this, that database for that, ask their institution to purchase access to this other database to find some other thing, etc., etc. Twenty years ago, there were reasons for things to be in different databases, and for some things to not show up in any database at all. In fact, twenty or thirty years ago it was a nice bonus for anything to be available via a computer search. This has not been true for years. The web model, where everything is available if the search engine is smart enough to find it, is in every way better than the little-empire, walled-garden approach we have now with various publishers and organizations each having their own excusive, semi-overlapping, databases. Expecting searchers to know enough about a subject to come up with good keywords, evaluate how salient the results of a search are, and understand what they find is good. Expecting them to learn about the quirks and coverage of proprietary databases is dumb. Meta-search engines and multi-database searches are a poor solution. 3. There is no excuse for braking the web with your database interface. If you feel so strongly about your need to protect content, or mirror your ancient telnet interface, or whatever, that you break the back/forward buttons, you should quit your job now and let someone with a clue take over. There is no technical excuse for breaking the back/forward buttons. Don't get me wrong, there are genuine reasons to change behavior of a page depending on how the user gets to it. You don't want people to be able to skip the login screen through a bookmark. But searching for and viewing documents are not those kind of situations. Do me a favor. If the idea of flipping me out of a page because I haven't clicked on something within 15 minutes ever enters your head, I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and smack yourself in the face. You deserve it! If you ever ask your web developers if there's a way to disable right-clicking, you get two smacks. In the face. Also, to all my brothers and sisters out there, the programmers, the web developers, the designers, the database admins -- none of this is aimed at you. I know where you all are at, we've all been there. The fact of the matter is that we spend a lot of our careers implementing things we know are stupid, wrong-headed, or counter-productive. 4. The way that citations are done is archaic and simple-minded. Citations are the hyperlinks of academic research. So why are they so much crappier and more difficult than hyperlinks? Listen, I understand how difficult this must have been to figure out and get organized 100 years ago, when everything was bound in volumes. It is no longer the year 1907, so that is no longer a good excuse. Why are there:

• Lame, arcane rules specifying that this goes here, unless it's one of these, but not one of those, or if there's more than 2 but less than 6 authors, on every other Thursday... Here's a rule of thumb: as soon as you have more than two strict rules for a string of text, it probably shouldn't be a string of text.
• One thousand different citation formats, APA, MLA, CBE, Chicago, blah, blah, blah.
• No automatic way to click from one reference to the next to the next? Some databases implement this, and Google Scholar tries to do this, but why don't we have something crazy... like a URL or ISBN... that makes these things automatically easy?

Why is this important? This is not just a string of complaints from a grad student averse to the hard work of research. I like the hard work of research. I don't like spending time working around horrible interfaces and limitations imposed by copyright holders, who often have nothing to do with the actual production of knowledge. This craziness has come to the point where it is limiting progress, because right now your average know-nothing, head-in-the-sand flat earth creationist is more likely to show up in a Google search than real work by real scientists. Your average citizen is operating under no requirements on what sources they cite when they make decisions and many people, even graduate students, have a hard time evaluating sources. It's hard enough to get most people interested enough in a topic to do any kind of research, even politically hot items like stem cell research and climate change.  People are busy leading their lives.  But when someone does take interest, they have no chance of finding some of the best information out there unless they are already at a university.  This is broken.

In earlier science projects articles about sulfur hexafluoride gas and non-newtonian fluids, we at least had a little bit of theory and explanation to go with the goofy videos. Not so much in this entry. It turns out that filming a video in very high speed, then watching it in slow motion, is just fun. What could be better than watching somebody get hit in the head with a water balloon over the course of a minute? [youtube]tZ8TJ4E_ihY[/youtube] Remember to always wear safety goggles when attempting this next one: [avi width="320" height="240"]http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/highspeed/bulbdrop.avi[/avi] The video above was made by Tom and Mike, see more of their videos here. And of course, the obligatory Mentos / Diet Coke slow-motion explosion: [youtube]GfLBOupDdX8[/youtube]

According to an upcoming National Geographic show, we are getting close to being able to do a human head transplant. And I for one couldn't be more excited. Lately my body and I haven't been getting along and I think it's time we took a break and started seeing other people. I'm sick of it having to poop all the time and it's tired of me masturbating all the time. So being bodiless again I suppose I need to start looking for one. I don't know, I kind of like not having a body. I can get so much done without having to constantly eat, go to the bathroom or jerk off (not necessarily in that order). And my body's happy too, it can just sleep all day which is what it wants to do anyways. It is difficult to find a new body. I mean sure, it may look good at first, but then you get attached to it and realize there are all sorts of things wrong with it that you couldn't see before. And getting separated is such a pain, all that time and money and having to divide your stuff up. Those lawyers always make sure that the bodies get everything too how fair is that? Just because I'm a head doesn't mean I don't need a house. I can still sit on the couch and watch TV. Plus I'm not getting any younger so it's not like I can go out and find a hot young body like I used to. Well I guess I'm stuck with my body for now. I'm sure we can work it out, I mean it hasn't been all that bad we've had some good times. So the next time you and your body are fighting and are thinking about separating, just take a moment and think about what your doing. If not for yourself then at least for the sake of the kids.