Mind Hacks points to some interesting research on language and psychosis.

Mr Z illustrates the marked change in phenomenology that can be observed in such patients. He was a 30-year-old patient diagnosed as hypomanic with a history of bipolar illnesses. His mother tongue was English, and he had learnt Spanish after puberty. When he spoke in English, he was markedly thought-disordered and complained of hallucinations. On one occasion, whilst being interviewed by his psychiatrist, he addressed her spontaneously in Spanish, knowing that she was a Spanish speaker.

To his surprise, and hers, he discovered that when he spoke in Spanish, he no longer appeared to be thought-disordered. He commented on this difference by observing, in Spanish, that when he spoke in this language, he felt he was ‘sane’, but when he spoke in English, he went ‘mad’ (Zulueta, 1984). This bilingual dialogue took place within the space of half an hour. It would seem that in this case and in others with similar differences in psychotic phenomena across languages, the second language may, in some cases, exert a protective function in terms of psychotic symptoms.

Makes you wonder: if most of what you read online is in English, are the 2nd languagers (Dutch, Spanish, French et al) more likely to be writing sanely?

Additional knowledge of the minutiae of daily life can be not just useless, but actually harmful to us when we make decisions.

From thinking to iterating
Last June, Alex Iskold wrote a piece about the new age of continual partial attention:

There will never be less information, there will always be more of it. Much more. The sooner we recognize it and prepare for this change, the easier it will be for us to embrace this brave new world. The age of Continuous Partial Attention has arrived and it is here to stay.

As Linda Stone defined CPA

“With [continuous partial attention], we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities - activities or people - in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

Alex also noted that “these days we replace the deep thinking with rapid iteration.”

And he went on to say that this replacement “is not necessarily a bad thing!”

Fire Hydrants
In one famous experiment, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner and his student Molly Potter had people identify the object shown in a slide as it gradually came into focus. If viewers made an incorrect hypothesis early on, they tended to persist with it, and had trouble identifying the object even as it became sharp.

Thanks Mike

Moral? According to NNT, it’s this:

“The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they’ll be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory we are not likely to change our minds. So those who delay developing their theories are better off … Remember that we treat our ideas like possessions and it will be hard for us to part with them.

Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.”

NNT goes on to describe Paul Slovic’s experiment with bookmakers. First, he showed bookmakers 88 variables in past horse races and asked them to choose the most useful ones. Then he gave them the ten most useful variables and asked them to predict the outcome of races. Then he gave them ten more variables and asked them to predict again.

The increase in the information set did not lead to an increase in their accuracy; their confidence in their choices, on the other hand, went up markedly. Information proved to be toxic“

More is not always better
It’s probably a little simplistic to think that these research caveats apply to all information. They apply to situations where you have to predict or forecast. That said, the caveats do seem to imply various things:

1. The iterative mode in the table above isn’t wholly accurate. It can actually lead to more costly mistakes (through the overconfidence it affords). The partial information is a given for both deep thinking and iterative mode, the real difference is frequency of updates. And iterative mode actually hinders the imagining alternative possibilities. We tend to stick with our first possibility and then not be able to ditch it in favour of the fire hydrant.
2. The iterative mode assumes that the brain is an information processing machine. My guess is that this is idealised but wrong. The brain seems much more like a meaning making engine.

Anyway, as far as RSS readers go, I’m going to ditch some of my BBC news feeds , and (not that he does this) have a think about adopting/adapting Ton’s people oriented approach. And I’m going to renew my subscription to The Week

From Black Swans(p.74):

“People tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of ‘national identity’, which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors was shown to be a total fiction. (’National traits’ might be great for movies, they might be help a lot war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity…) Empirically, sex, social class and profession seem to be better predictors of someone’s behaviour than nationality (a male from Sweden resembles a male from Togo more than a female from Sweden; a philosopher from Peru resembles a philosopher from Scotland more than a janitor from Peru, and so on.)

From Cnet (via Alan):

Even if you just checkmated your new friend in India or took your Russian opponent’s rook, new chess Web sites like Chess.com are encouraging niche social networking. CNET News.com’s Kara Tsuboi sat down with the site’s founder to find out what has attracted more than 100,000 members in less than a year.

“When anyone asks how I can best describe my experience in nearly 40 years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog the like, but in all my experience, I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about. …… I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. You see, I am not very good material for a story”

- EJ Smith, Captain, RMS Titanic , 1907

Fast forward 5 years to 1912.

Captain Smith seems fabulous material for a story, and a least a discussion. Is there a sweet-spot for mistakes (and learning from them)? Or do we just have to accept that big unpredictable icebergs come along every now and then? (It seems that George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle had very different viewpoints on this at the time). If we do just have to accept it, then it seems that it is at least as important to learn how to cope with the icebergs as to steer the ship.

John mentioned a lovely little quote at dinner last night, from Hermann Abs (apparently one of the great post-war bankers):

Profit is to business as breathing is to life.

Necessary, but not the point.

This caught my eye

“A lot of applications are designed to make things easy. Fun comes from challenge. It’s about taking risks and taking risks that are wrong,” says Areae president Koster … “If you look at eBay, a huge reason that it’s addictive is because you can lose. You get hardcore users who can swipe things from people in the last three seconds.”

And there’s me trying to explain to children that collaboration not competition is the way forward. Maybe I should rethink that. Collaboration is the best way to win?

Finally gotten round to slidesharing a presentation I did for some Unicorn Mums who were worried about what their children got up to online (and wanted some advice about how to go about it). It’s a general overview rather than anything too specific.

As Mr W says (commenting on this slightly depressing article in the Grauniad)

The real question, however, boils down to the amount of privacy you feel your own children are entitled to. In my own case, I am a friend on my own kid’s Bebos, and I’ve also installed imsafer… but neither of these was done without discussing it with the kids first. For me, that is the dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable surveillance…

Completely agree about the dividing line. For what it’s worth, here are the slides (with a few wangy fonts).

| View | Upload your own

October 25th 2007 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on child, online, parents, presentation, safety school

There’s a great article by Olivier over at Headshift.

Two things caught my eye:

Employees are the one who know which tools are relevant for doing their job more efficiently and we don’t have to impose and restrict them (to) a set of tools

and

Social computing for the organisation, call it Enterprise 2.0 if you want to be trendy, is a reality that needs to be evangelised, despite massive information available on the wild wild web

And there’s the rub. If people haven’t heard the Web 2.0 evangelist, then do they know what tools are relevant for doing their job?

From CNN

“Insoo has a difficult math problem as homework. He posts it up on Naver Knowledge iN, a popular online Q&A service with some 70 million entries. Within about 10 minutes of posting, someone chimes in with a good answer, and Insoo awards him with some “Knowledge Power” points — knowledge-based economy in action among 14-year-olds.”

Laurent remarks that Korea provides

“an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to have a preview of what their society might be in a near future. Most of the important technological trends start in Korea five years before they hit us. Think of citizen journalism (started by Ohmynews in 2000), social networking (Cyworld, 1999), or knowledge sharing websites (Naver Knowledge iN who became Yahoo Answers for us).”

And that sentiment seems to be backed up here

All of which presumably ties in with “bottom-up education”.

From a teacher’s perspective, I think it’s great news that children can find so many different sources of help. And it’s great that they stand a good chance at becoming more skilled in collaborating, co-operating and thriving in a knowledge market of sorts.

But.

Perhaps the homework scenario skews things a little? Education is about many things, but presumably a couple of the key goals are encouraging curiosity and fostering understanding. To go online to quickly get some answers so you can quickly finish your homework (and do well at it) is a wonderful skill, but I wouldn’t have thought it’s the goal of the homework exercise.

How, then, can we rejig homework to encourage all of the above - curiosity, understanding, and collaboration?

Well, step one might be to look at the research that homework helps academic achievement. I’ve just bought this to try and find out more, and Harris Cooper at Duke seems to have done some interesting work. Even if it does help, there are pros and cons:

“Most of what homework is doing is driving kids away from learning,” says education professor Harvey Daniels. Let’s face it: Most children dread homework, or at best see it as something to be gotten through. Thus, even if it did provide other benefits, they would have to be weighed against its likely effect on kids’ love of learning.

Step two might be to try to, ahem, make homework enjoyable. Get children using their collaborative skills and their own interests to fulfil that horrendously named thing, the learning objective. Perhaps we should be asking the children how they could learn more about, say, perimeters and area at home, online, together or all three.

[via Rodney’s tip off about Compete.com]

A comment on Rodney’s blog - from Michael - made me think:

“those of us interested in growing on-line communities the message seems to be that setting up special interest groups is going to be less effective than developing a useful application”

If there are 3 types of communities - one of them the type that grows from shared activities, one from shared space and one from shared interest - then maybe Facebook is doing 1 and 2 and blogs are doing 3? Oversimple probably.

October 04th 2007 | Comments(1) | Thoughts, Notes on activity, blogs, chart, community, facebook, online social software

Richard Sambrook [thanks Euan]:

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, made a really good point at the Clinton Global Initiative:

He said the current education system of grades and exams puts people in competition with each other and is a top down command-and-control model. As the leader of one of the world’s biggest IT companies he believes future education should concentrate on networking and collaboration - which will support greater innovation and cross-discipline creativity. It will also, he said, attract talent. Call it Education 2.0 then…

I completely agree at University level, and perhaps 16+, when education becomes optional. But I’m not sure it’s an either or before then. I’m just a little suspicious of completely ditching the top down. And I do think broad brush statements about education and how we should do it need to be narrowed take into account the strengths and proclivities that we have as a result of our age.

When I first got email, a lot of it was a joke. Literally. Funny and not so funny pictures, videos and jokes forwarded by friends (some more than others) and forwarded on. I don’t get them anymore. Perhaps because I don’t send them, but perhaps too because although for a while it felt fun, and it felt like you were ‘connecting’ with people, when common sense resurfaced it felt pretty hollow. Mouse clicks not emotions.

Facebook reminds me of that. Mouse clicks not emotions.

If you assume that the internet, blogosphere et al are complex systems, what might their waste be? And how might we “recycle” it better?

One of the many things I’ve learnt from Steven Johnson’s Ghost Map, is that waste recycling is a hallmark of almost all complex systems.

At a more micro level, without the bacterial process of decomposition, we’d have been overrun by dead things years ago.

All of which had me wondering about internet waste.

The obvious waste is the hardware to support online life. Oxfam and others all work hard to recycle the motherboards, cables and chips that help us connect. But there’s still a huge amount left, and lots of that goes to China and the third world. [See e.g. the BBC ’s Disposable Planet, or Salon’s article]

Then there’s the paper.

But most interesting, I thought, is what we do with all the old articles, thoughts, posts etc. I know I personally rarely look back over all the guff I’ve written. But I don’t particularly feel any qualms about leaving it up there. The amount of memory it all takes up is so small in the scheme of things I don’t really have to bother. That said, as things stand a lot of it is, if I’m honest with myself, waste. It may or may not have been at the time, but now, a few years on, it probably is.

So how best to recycle it? The easy way is just to delete it all. Alternatively, on the rainforest model, rather than delete everything, I could delete everything that had no comments/links to it. (As such, it would be much the same as an email retention policy)

I’m probably a little nostalgic for that. Part of me thinks that a yearly revisit to old posts might in itself be useful. (It’s amazing how much you can forget). And part, as I’ve said before, thinks that doing a social network analysis of your blog to look for structural holes could be instructive.

Anyroad, probably barking up the wrong tree … and perhaps in a few years time I might delete this …

Toby Hemenway argues that

“Virtually any service system - electricity, fuel, food - follows the same brutal mathematics of scale. A dispersed population requires more resources to serve it - and to connect it together - than a concentrated one”

Cities as such serve to reduce humans’ environmental footprint. Or put another way, if you’re going to move out the country, it would seem you’d have to invest substantially more homegrown food, solar panels, electric cars and the like before you even begin to be level with a city-dweller in terms of carbon neutrality.

Source: alykat [via Urban Nature]

In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady - take your pick), Professor Higgins claims to be able to change Eliza Doolittle from flower-seller to duchess. He’s pretty successful, but as Eliza says to the Professor’s friend Pickering:

“You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will, but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

And there, in a nutshell, is the Pygmalion effect. How you treat someone affects how they perform.

Pygmalion in the Classroom

In 1968, Robert Rosenthal, a Harvard University professor, and Leonore Jacobson, a Principal of an elementary school in San Francisco, published “Pygmalion in the Classroom“.

Daniel Schugurensky describes the what they found:

In the experiment, Rosenthal and Jacobson gave an intelligence test to all of the students at an elementary school at the beginning of the school year. Then, they randomly selected 20 percent of the students - without any relation to their test results - and reported to the teachers that these 20% of students were showing “unusual potential for intellectual growth” and could be expected to “bloom” in their academic performance by the end of the year. Eight months later, at the end of the academic year, they came back and re-tested all the students. Those labeled as “intelligent” children showed significantly greater increase in the new tests than the other children who were not singled out for the teachers’ attention. This means that “the change in the teachers’ expectations regarding the intellectual performance of these allegedly ’special’ children had led to an actual change in the intellectual performance of these randomly selected children.

Accel Team have listed some ways that teachers (and managers for that matter) communicate expectations. These include:

• Waiting less time for lows to answer questions
• Criticizing lows more frequently than highs for incorrect
  responses
• Praising lows more frequently than highs for marginal
  or inadequate responses
• Providing lows with less accurate and less detailed feedback
  than highs
• Interrupting lows more frequently than highs

While it’s probably a useful checklist, further Rosenthal & Jacobson research suggests that the effect happens at a much lower level. In 1992, they

… showed that 10 secs of video without sound of a teacher allows students to predict the ratings they will get as a teacher. Similarly hearing the sound without vision AND without content (rhythm and tone of voice only) were enough too. This is powerful evidence that teachers differ in ways they cannot easily or normally control, but which are very quickly perceptible, and which at least in students’ minds, determine their value as a teacher.

Kind of frightening. How well your students do seems to be decided within the first 10 seconds of walking into the classroom.

Some implications
Steve Draper, a psychologist at Edniburgh, has some fantastic notes on what this might mean for teachers and education.

Tim O’Shea once told me that in all studies where one of the variables was the teacher, the effect of different teachers was always bigger than the effect of different treatments (usually what was meant to be being studied). Basically, teachers have a huge effect but one we don’t understand at all…. Assuming this is true, this is the most important effect in the whole field of education.

As Steve points out

if this was true in medicine, then it wouldn’t matter much what treatment you gave a patient, the most important thing would be to get the best doctor regardless of drugs, surgery or other treatments.

The implications Steve lists are as follows:

1. the professionalistation of teaching does not help an improvement in learning, other than from a social standpoint, and regulations to exclude the worst practitioners,
2. teacher training, other than giving the trainee more experience in a classroom, does not necessarily improve.
   

   if we don’t know what it is about teachers’ behaviour that has such large effects on learning, how can we usefully train them? … while it is quite possible that teachers learn either by unaided practice, or by unconscious imitation of other teachers (apprenticeship learning), there is almost no evidence on whether that training makes a difference.

3. “learner-centered” approaches and theories such as neo-constructivism are
   

   “flawed because they do not acknowledge or give a place to teachers of the prominence that they in fact have in the causation of learning.”

All grounds for serious thought. One point that I’m still struggling to come to terms with is how it relates to the “Generation Me” issues Danah pointed to. If the Pygmalion effect suggests that letting students know they can do well affects their performance positively, and the book focuses on the social chaos that can result from relying too heavily on the “I can be anything I want” school of though, then where, oh where, is the balance to be struck?

Anyway, below are some notes on the original Pygmalion and other incarnations, if anyone’s interested.

The Myth
Ovid [Metamorph. Bk X:243-297] seems to be the first source for Pygmalion. The short, gutted version is this: Pygmalion despises the lewdness of the locals, and spends his lonely time instead honing his sculpture skills. He sculpts his ‘ideal woman’, Galatea, from ivory, and such is his skill that he ends up adoring with the statue. Venus eventually fulfils his wish and brings the statue to life.

Dryden et al. were more poetic:

Pygmalion loathing their lascivious life,
Abhorr’d all womankind, but most a wife:
So single chose to live, and shunn’d to wed,
Well pleas’d to want a consort of his bed.
Yet fearing idleness, the nurse of ill,
In sculpture exercis’d his happy skill;
And carv’d in iv’ry such a maid, so fair,
As Nature could not with his art compare,
Were she to work; but in her own defence
Must take her pattern here, and copy hence.
Pleas’d with his idol, he commends, admires,
Adores; and last, the thing ador’d, desires.

-translated into English verse [17thC] under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and other eminent hands

Pygmalion Revisited
The myth has been reinterpreted in numerous ways over the years and in most art forms. Dryden, Burne Jones, Goya, Schiller, Gilbert & Sullivan, Rodin, George Bernard Shaw, Woody Allen and others have all revisited the story.

And different interpretations emphasise different aspects. In the Middle Ages, Pygmalion served as a warning of the excesses of idolatry; in the 18th and 19th centuries, the sculpture came to life cold and unresponsive to the overtures of her adoring creator; and in perhaps the most famous reworking of the story, George Bernard Shaw used it as a basis for a comedy of class and manners.

And lest we forget, there was Mannequin.

Will Richardson has a good list of links that might come in useful if you’re trying to explain what social computing might offer to teachers. [Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for the link]

It’s no bad thing to try to explain it to teachers first, and let them use these tools as they will in classroom settings. A different way, which might be easier, is to reverse that. By doing so, the teachers and staff can learn from the ways the children use the technology.

Till recently I was working at a primary in Kew called The Unicorn. (It’s a great school! ).

As a side project, I set up a blog for them called Code Unicorn. It was intended to be a blog written by them, with as little as possible involvement from me. This opt-out wasn’t laziness, but instead an effort to encourage them to write about things they were interested in (rather than stuff my thirty-something brain thought would be fun). I didn’t announce it publicly, just said it’s up to the interested parties to spread the word.

It took a little hand-holding - albeit a lot less than I’d expected - and by the end of last term there were some regular contributors, and a switched-on boy called Max had done a little ‘viral’ marketing campaign round the school. He printed out some stickers and stuck them on friends jumpers, asking them to pass them on to a friend.

Anyway, teachers and parents started paying attention, and started commenting.

By watching how the children were using it day to day, it was much easier for staff to translate research and factoids about social computing to ideas for integrating it into the classroom. Ali Lim, the art teacher, has begun to use Flickr as another way of displaying the children’s work. And the big result was one of Roberta Linehan’s comments.

“I think this is a great site! Can teachers have one too?”

Roberta happens to be the head teacher.

I’d accepted as one of those givens, because I’d heard enough people say it, that one of the reasons Nixon lost out to Kennedy in the 60’s election was the media-savviness of Kennedy.

“People who heard the first televised debate on the radio thought that Nixon had won, while the TV viewers thought that Kennedy had won. However, since far more people watched the debate on television than listened to it on radio, this was a net gain for Kennedy. Nixon was so upset by his performance (and sickly physical appearance) in the first debate that he refused to watch any video of the debate for the rest of his life.”

Nixon apparently refused to wear make-up, and looked grim as a result.

But this (again from Everything Bad is Good For You) is a really interesting take:

“What if it wasn’t Nixon’s lack of make-up that troubled the TV watchers? After all, Nixon did turn out to be shifty and untrustworthy in the end. Perhaps all those voters who thought he had won after they heard the debate on the radio or read the transcript in the papers simply didn’t have access to the range of emotional information conveyed by television. Nixon lost on TV because he didn’t look like someone you would want as president.”

This idea - of mass emotional intelligence working via TV - is tantalising. And I’d love to be able to wholeheartedly believe it. But the Clinton/Lewinsky, Blair/Iraq style memories bring me up a little short.

The thing, I suppose, that worries me is not that EQ can’t work. It’s when it doesn’t. What if the mechanisms for making corrections are much more awkward than a more ‘rational’ approach? What if you stay wrong for longer, in the same way a Juliet can be blind to a Romeo’s faults? And if there is this divide, then which is preferable: a system that is more frequently flawed but easier to correct, or a system that is less frequently flawed but harder to correct?

I’d plump for the former.

First off, take an imaginary league table of surgeons. The further up or down surgeons are in that list, the more they get paid. The goal of the table is to make sure that the best surgeons are given the most difficult and dangerous jobs, and so, hopefully, to optimise the system. Brain surgeons at the top, and, er, earwax removers at the bottom.

How do you measure the surgeons? One way would be to score them on results: some fiendishly complicated, combination of number of malpractice suits, of numbers of ensuing complications, of “deaths at the hands of”, etc.

Sign off this wonder-system and see how the surgeons do…

Enter the brain surgeon, at the top of the table, with a scalpel as sharp as his mind. He has two types of surgery open to him: brain and non-brain. Brain surgery is high-risk and as well-paid as you can get, but why would anyone do it? High-risk means that there’s a high chance that you will be scored down, which means there’s a high chance that s/he’ll have fewer first choices on surgery, which means that it’s more likely that you’ll get given higher-risk jobs (because nobody really wants them).

Effectively, if the personal goal of the brain surgeon is to do the best surgery he can and at the same time get as well paid for it as possible, he will sub-optimise the system. In fact, won’t there be a whole talent scramble to avoid risk and so sub-optimise the system?

This made me think.

“The concepts of a ‘mainstream’ and an ‘underground’ are laid to rest by networked culture. There are only open and closed networks. Everything is flat.”
- via the very bright Anil Bawa

Hmm … instinctively like the idea, but I’m afraid I don’t believe it.

Peridot is a green jewel. Most of it comes from the San Carlos Native American Reservation. But the unemployment rate there is 76%. In Jewels, the author meets a local called Franklin:

‘Outside the reservation, you see news stories of people worrying about a recession,’ Franklin told me the day before … In the reservation we don’t worry about it. Our recession has lasted for generations … Boredom, that’s the worst thing.’

I wonder whether boredom is community’s kryptonite?