Scott's Blarney

Letter to Senator Orrin Hatch on the Finance Reform Bill

Find your own senator here.

Mr. Hatch,

I am worried that Senator Dodd’s new finance bill (AYO10306.xml)[4] will harm small business investing by angel investors by requiring all investors to have a minimum amount of capital, requiring startups to undergo an SEC review, and subjecting angels to burdensome regulation.

I’m not an angel investor, but as a small business owner I’ve used them over the years to give necessary liquidity to my fledgling businesses. Small businesses represent a sizable piece of the US economy, as I’m sure you’re aware. Yes, many of them fail, but that risk is already borne by the investors who knew what they were getting into, and the economy at large is largely insulated from their failures.

Federal oversight will add no additional protection (unless the SEC has a magic crystal ball that will indicate whether a business will succeed or fail), and will hamper creative startups who had to really “shop” their idea until they found an investor who “got it” (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Apple all represent risky startups of this kind).

Please see:

Mashable

and:

USA Today

For the US economy to become strong again, we need the kind of innovation and jobs that come from small businesses. Please leave small business regulation alone—it’s worked remarkably well, even in these tough times.

I hope you’ll work with Senator Dodd in repairing this bill in these areas.

Scott Wiersdorf

Happy things

Here are my two happy things from yesterday:

I have new windshield wipers on my car. If you haven’t replaced your windshield wipers in the past year, do so now.
As I was driving down a rain-soaked backroad, I drove through a deep puddle, making a fantastic spray. An oncoming car hit the same puddle from the other side just after I drove through it. I watched in my rear-view mirror as the other car made a U-turn to have another go at it from my lane. I now resolve to swerve—without jeopardizing my or others’ safety—and hit every puddle I possibly can.

The Why of Education

[an address given to Odyssey Charter School on Feburary 25, 2010 to inaugurate a new school director]

We often talk about the hows of education: How should we teach writing? How should we teach mathematics? How should we teach science? And so forth. Curricula and pedagogies address the how of education. Hows are important, for without effective hows, we won’t be doing our job as educators.

But more important than the how of education is the why of education. The why of education has been largely forgotten, assumed, or has been appropriated by businesses and other special interests. And this is the real tragedy of our time, for without a compelling why, no matter how good the how is, we will not be sharing with our children their full human potential.

So I want to consider for a moment the question, “Why do we educate our children?” This may be an uncomfortable question if you’ve never done so.

I think there are many valid reasons we educate children, some of them obviously practical: so they can get a good job someday, so they can manage a household someday, so they don’t get ripped off when they do business with other people.

Other reasons may not be so obviously practical. Why take calculus if you’re not going into science or engineering? Why read Shakespeare if you only want to be an accountant? Why learn what Plato’s notion of the Good and the True were if you’re not going into philosophy? Why learn a Bach fugue when you have no musical inclinations? And why in the Dickens would you read Dickens if all you want to do in life is get a decent paying job and raise a family?

Aristotle showed us that all knowledge can be divided and categorized, and our educational system is still feeling the effects of this division and specialization. But real education comes when you understand that knowledge has far more power when you don’t cut it up, but instead follow all of its connections and secret passages, and see the beautiful patterns of the whole.

This is why the founders of Odyssey believe a classical education is special. Good things rub off on us when we spend time with the great thinkers and writers of history. You may not always agree with a great thinker, but once you sincerely attempt to address the great thinker’s arguments, you put yourself on a path to a higher plane of humanity. And by learning broadly—all things from chemistry to physics, Latin to philosophy, art to mathematics—you begin to acquire a taste for learning in general, and a sense of a higher purpose in life.

Odyssey Charter School was founded on the belief that a broad and classically-based education is the best way to form a young mind into something that will be able to know what to do with anything that is thrown at it in the future.

A man or woman with a mind able to analyze new information critically and fairly, along with whatever other gifts they may have, will not only be able to better discern truth from error, but will be a powerful and creative force for good in the world.

How many of today’s problems exist because as a society we never learned to write well and so we communicate poorly, causing deep misunderstandings? How many of us never learned to look outside of our own culture, making us self-centered and small-minded, and so we hastily judge and listen poorly to people who are different from us? Or how many of us are stymied when faced with challenging or complex problems and so throw up our hands in despair because we never learned to think well.

These are the ills and trends of our culture and our world that Odyssey Charter School exists to counter. By teaching our students the best that humanity has to offer, they will be far better equipped to reject error as they strive to create a higher, nobler and more virtuous world, starting with themselves.

But Odyssey cannot do it alone; we need parents who also believe in education and who understand that school is not day-care, and who know that real education is what happens in the home.

The purpose of the Board of Trustees of Odyssey Charter School is to ensure that the school is accomplishing its mission and goals, that each student become a life-long learner through a classically-based curriculum. The board does this by hiring a competent CEO and holding him or her accountable for the achievement of the school.

When Odyssey’s board began interviewing director candidates, the most important thing we were looking for was someone who understood what a classical education looked like and knew how to convey that kind of education to young minds. We were delighted when Mr. Lockhart interviewed for the position. It didn’t take long for us to realize that we had a candidate who not only knew how to run a school from a logistical standpoint, but also someone who has been schooled in the classics and himself a model of a continuous-learner.

Odyssey Charter School was founded on the belief that the great, ongoing conversation of thoughts, ideas, music, science, mathematics, and art is worth studying, preserving and passing on; that our students can understand, converse about, and become significant threads in this great tapestry we call human history. And we believe in Mr. Keith Lockhart’s ability to execute this mission passionately and competently. Welcome Mr. Lockhart.

Why we have skeptics

Yet another climate post, but like my previous ones, this isn’t really about climate, it’s about science and it’s current state. Everyone by now has read about the leaked emails and source code (source followup here) last week. It’s a big deal.

There was a NY Times post today about a scientist who addresses skeptics. She listed three approaches a scientist can take when confronted by skeptics:

Retreat into the ivory tower
Circle the wagons/point guns outward: ad hominem/appeal to motive attacks; appeal to authority; isolate the enemny through lack of access to data; peer review process
Take the “high ground:” engage the skeptics on our own terms (conferences, blogosphere); make data/methods available/transparent; clarify the uncertainties; openly declare our values

The Climate Research Unit went for #2, the scientist in the article believes that #3 is the best way (I agree), and this got me thinking about where skeptics come from in the first place, and how to deal with them.

Issue 1: open data will help honest and intelligent skeptics

One of the reasons I become skeptical about a some scientific and medical research is because the authors hide the data and they won’t make their methods known. I’m not a scientist by training, but I have some background in critical thinking and statistics. I’m not a stupid person (deliberately, anyway). If you show me the numbers and tell me how you interpret them, I can better judge your results.

Which leads to point 2:

Issue 2: stop averaging people

“Skeptics are willfully ignorant of the scientific method and religiously cling to unfounded beliefs in the face of contrary data.”

Ok, you see my point? I’ll spell it out for the above mentioned skeptic: not all skeptics are created equally. Smart scientists know this, of course. And smart skeptics know that not all scientists are created equally.

Scientists who follow methods 1 and 2 above are not helping the cause of science. Whenever we use non-scientific tools (such as “consensus,” which is just large scale appeal to authority), we’re not helping the intelligent-but-ignorant skeptic join us, and intelligent people know the difference between a good argument and a bad one.

I understand the frustration when dealing with the hopelessly stupid skeptic—these people are never going to change their minds no matter what evidence you present to them; they should just be ignored.

But please don’t ignore the honest skeptic, the fellow who is simply begging for the straight evidence. A good scientist is also a good communicator, who can take the data and explain it clearly to another intelligent and honest seeker of understanding.

If you have good data, why not share it? If you have iffy data, for the sake of good science, share it too, and we’ll all be wiser.

Flu shots aren’t good science

I’ve been researching the effectiveness of flu vaccines lately, since everybody keeps asking me if I’m going to get one. I sometimes ask, “Are they effective?” and the response is always “Well, I got one last year and I didn’t get the flu.” After reading “How to read articles about health and healthcare”, I began to wonder if this flu vaccination thing smells right.

We hear endless news stories quoting doctors:

State Health Commissioner Dr. Karen Remley, a Virginia pediatrician, recommends the shot as basic prevention. She’s concerned about what it can cause.

“Flu is one of the leading causes of death in our country,” she says. “Over 36,000 people die every year in our country and it’s preventable by getting the flu shot.”

([cbn.com])[1]

We could really save 36,000 people’s lives if they only got the flu shot? That’s remarkable. What worries me when I hear news organizations quoting people who aren’t experts in the research they’re purporting to cover in their “story” is that everybody buys into it without thinking. “Look at me, I’m a trained physician with a white coat and stethoscope around my neck—I went to school and you can trust me!”

I worry in the back of my mind that the bulk of “science” out there has come from bad scientists. Odds are, it has. Odds are that most of the research out there was done by mediocre scientists or scientists who are looking to get published, and so they’ll do research trying to fit the data to existing studies, because that’s an easy way to get published: find existing research, copy it as best you can making sure the results match, submit to journals. “We can confirm that flu vaccination cuts the risk of death to those who received it in half, compared to those who didn’t.”

This reminds me of another recent article that turned the “lactic acid in muscles is bad for you” science upside down. True or false: When you work out, lactic acid builds up in your muscles. If too much builds up, you start getting fatigued.

It used to be true, but now it’s false, it turns out. Lactic acid is fuel your muscles use to create more energy. Who knew? (nytimes.com)

At any rate, the flu thing began to bother me in the same way.

The data

The first thing I did was looked at studies or meta-studies of flu vaccine effectiveness: what is the measured benefit of flu vaccination in the real-world? We all know that polio and other (non-morphing) diseases have been virtually eradicated because of vaccination. This should work for flu, too, right?

Not entirely. The plain language summary for a 2007 metastudy concluded:

There is not enough evidence to decide whether routine vaccination to prevent influenza in healthy adults is effective.

The review of trials found vaccinations against influenza avoided 80% of cases at best (in those confirmed by laboratory tests, and using vaccines directed against circulating strains), but only 50% when the vaccine did not match, and 30% against influenza-like illness, in healthy adults. It did not change the number of people needing to go to hospital or take time off work.

([wiley.com])[2] (emphasis mine)

So, it’s effective against the precisely matching strain. How often does that occur? Here’s the CDC’s answer (read the second section carefully):

How is influenza vaccine effectiveness measured?

Vaccine efficacy and effectiveness studies use various endpoints or outcomes, which influence how we interpret the results. These endpoints may include the prevention of medically attended acute respiratory illness (MAARI), prevention of laboratory-confirmed influenza virus illness or hospitalization, prevention of influenza-like illness (ILI, such as illness with fever and cough or sore throat), or influenza-associated hospitalizations or deaths.

Studies that use outcomes such as an influenza laboratory-confirmed outcome provide the most specific estimates of the impact of the vaccine in preventing influenza. The more non-specific the outcome being measured (e.g., all pneumonia hospitalizations or influenza-like illness that include many illnesses not caused by the influenza virus), the lower the estimates of vaccine effectiveness. For example, a study by Bridges et al. (JAMA 2000) among healthy adults found that the inactivated influenza was 86% effective against laboratory-confirmed influenza, but only 10% effectiveness against all respiratory illnesses in the same population and year.

In other words, while 86% of the time you’ll avoid the strain you were vaccinated against, only 10% of the time you’ll avoid the flu. What’s really happening is this: there are dozens, possibly scores of viruses out there every year. Some are flu strains, most are not. Many of these viruses cause the same flu-like symptoms (fever, aches, chills, cough, sore throat, etc.) and your odds of resisting all of these in any given flu season with a flu vaccination is 1 in 10.

That’s not terribly effective.

More Research

This month’s The Atlantic came out with an interesting article that goes even further, citing a variety of reputable researchers who claim that all of the studies indicating that people who get the flu shot are half as likely to die as those who don’t get the flu shot are probably the effect of cohort bias (i.e., typically only health-minded people elect to get the flu shot; this group is already half as likely to die as those who aren’t health-minded).

Here’s one lone voice in the wilderness:

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season.

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.”

There’s tons more in this article I won’t spoil for you. The point is, that most scientists stink at doing real science. I didn’t really want to say that or believe it. I want to believe that the men and women in lab coats and protective eyewear are serious-minded people, who have turned their back on wealth and prestige for the greater good of research and knowledge.

But I’m beginning to see that they’re kind of like everybody else in the world: you have a tiny group of hard-core awesome passionate people who are willing to sacrifice their social standing for the sake of the truth, and a vast herd of group-thinkers smart enough to play the game but not smart enough to realize that the real game is one you play against yourself, and where everybody else wins because you play.

Krugman was partly right

In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.”

(economist.com)

But precisely what was useless and harmful turns out to be Krugman’s own espoused Keynsian beliefs. John Cochrane explains:

Most of all, Krugman likes fiscal stimulus. In this quest, he accuses us and the rest of the economics profession of “mistaking beauty for truth.” He’s not clear on what the “beauty” is that we all fell in love with, and why one should shun it, for good reason. The first siren of beauty is simple logical consistency. Paul’s Keynesian economics requires that people make logically inconsistent plans to consume more, invest more, and pay more taxes with the same income. The second siren is plausible assumptions about how people behave. Keynesian economics requires that the government is able to systematically fool people again and again. It presumes that people don’t think about the future in making decisions today. Logical consistency and plausible foundations are indeed “beautiful” but to me they are also basic preconditions for “truth.”

(John Cochrane)

Cochrane’s short paper is a really beautiful response to Krugman and his archaic, causality-reversing Keynsian answers to everything.

Paul, there was a financial crisis, a classic near-run on banks. The centerpiece of our crash was not the relatively free stock or real estate markets, it was the highly regulated commercial banks.

Ouch.

It can wait. It really can.

Certainly, texting while driving is one of the stupidest things a motorist can do. A study published in July by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute showed that drivers who text while driving increase their risk of a crash or near-crash 23-fold compared with those who do not. Reaching out for something moving inside the car represents a ninefold increase in risk; dialling, a sixfold increase; combing hair or putting on make-up raises the risk almost fivefold.

In a previous study, Virginia Tech found that 80% of crashes and 65% of near-crashes involved some form of distraction within three seconds of the incident. The most common distraction by far was using a hand-held phone.

(economist.com)

Told ya: OLPC doesn’t work

I’ve been saying it for a while: students learn better with qualified, caring teachers and quality teaching materials than anything else, and One-Laptop-Per-Child is an expensive distraction from real education.

I think everyone who has been educated knows this instinctively. We can all point to a mentor (a teacher, a parent, a caring friend) who guided us, encouraged us, and cared enough about us to help us learn what is worth learning and what is not worth learning.

Giving a child a laptop does neither of these things. Some argue that simply having access to information will be the child’s ticket to a bright future, but now that the results are in, we can finally stop beating this dead horse.

You will always find exceptions: highly motivated students will learn no matter what you do to them, and giving them access to a computer will certainly give them an opportunity to get the information they want faster; but for the majority of students, giving them a computer will do little good, and will often do much harm, to their education.

The Internet is not a discriminator of information, and this is its chief problem. A classically-based education, as an example, imposes a hierarchy on knowledge. It says, “These things are more important than those things.” And when I say “it” I really mean a classically trained teacher guiding a student through a classical curriculum.

The Internet can’t do that for you by itself. You still need a guide, a mentor of some kind to help you know what’s worth learning. Autodidacts learn this early on and quickly learn which voices in life they want to trust (generally by way of books and other reading material), but the rest of us simply don’t know where to go.

And while we’re on the topic of online learning, did you hear of the recent meta-study by the US Department of Education? Everybody in the tech world is feeling validated, but they shouldn’t. It claims:

The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.

Read the study and notice that it’s a meta-study, largely sampling the results of self-selecting, uncontrolled learning experiements. Highly-motivated students, the kind who opt to take online courses, will always perform better than unmotivated students, no matter what medium they’re using.

The abstract concludes:

Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K–12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education).

(emphasis mine).

So don’t take this as a validation for K-12 computer learning. Additional studies over OLPC and K-12 computer learning aren’t encouraging:

Under the auspices of the No Child Left Behind Act, the U.S. Department of Education and Mathematica Policy Research recently completed a rigorous, two-year test of reading and math software (using programs that had at least some nonexperimental evidence that they “worked”) in dozens of school districts nationwide. With one minor exception, the studies found that children using the software scored no better than peers who did not have access to the software.

and this:

Economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches studied a program in Romania that distributed discount vouchers for the purchase of home computers to low-income families. When they compared the families that used the vouchers to acquire computers with families that were just above the income cut-off to receive the vouchers, they found that computers had a negative effect on students’ grades and educational goals.

and this:

(Leigh) Linden (an economist at Columbia University) also led one of the few experimental studies to show a positive impact from the use of computers — a project in India that provided computers and education software to schools and randomly assigned some schools to use the software during school hours and others to encourage computer use after hours. This study found that using computers during school hours-—essentially substituting computers for teachers—actually hurt learning, while using them after hours as a supplement to traditional classroom teaching had dramatic positive effects on the weakest students. Even this outcome doesn’t really support the OLPC mission, though; the software evaluated is very much in the “drill and practice” model that Negroponte has explicitly derided.

I won’t spoil all the fun of this article, but there are far, far better and less expensive ways to improve education than giving a child a laptop. In developing countries the list includes deworming children, providing tutors, and creating more private schools.

In the United States, computers in classrooms and schools should be removed and with the money not spent on technology, hire additional teachers or give the existing teachers a raise. I’m certain we’d get more of what we’re really looking for.

Hiking Timp with Brooke

Brooke was invited by an old friend (as old a friend as an 11 year old can be) to hike Mount Timpanogos last Saturday. While we didn’t make it to the saddle or peak, we did make it all the way to the upper meadow just below the saddle. What a great little hiker! Here are some photos and video clips.

A little stinging nettle. If you’re in the hills and feel like you have to go potty, these leaves are a great choice to help you eliminate that desire. (full size)

(full size)

A medely of trickles.

We made it to Scout Falls. (full size)

The cliffs of insanity.

(full size)

A well-worn stump.

(full size)

Here’s the slope up to Pika Cirque that Ana and I took in 2005. It was still covered in snow at the end of September that year.

(full size)

Sassy! (full size)

Girls and dads (but me). (full size)

Looking north to Little Cottonwood Canyon ridge.