Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Impact of the New Tech: Use, Then Judge

Posted inWeb/Tech22 Comments on The Impact of the New Tech: Use, Then Judge

Alain de Botton recently blogged about “one of the challenges of our time”: re-learning how to concentrate. To sit quietly and think without distraction. I agree, except I’m not sure if we’ve ever known how to do so.

Technology broadly defined is usually seen as both culprit and savior. For example, we get nothing done when compulsively checking our BlackBerries, so we must take Adderall to focus. The issues related to how technology affects the way we think are complicated. But apparently this doesn’t deter smart people from making uninformed, simplistic judgement calls.

Steve Coll is a veteran journalist who writes for the New Yorker. (Here’s my 1,700 word review of his book on the CIA and Afghanistan.) Like any curious person, Coll is reflecting on how the internet has changed his profession. Just recently he went on Twitter for the first time. Here’s his report:

I had never been on the Twitter site until I read his recent posts…Last night, fearing what I would learn, I went on the site and scoped out my Twitter fingerprints. There were dozens of recent tweets emanating from South Asia linking to an interview I had given to the Times of India about Indo-Pakistani relations. There were a handful of nice tweets from random people reading one of my books. It all seemed fine. It also seemed like a space that did not require my direct participation anytime soon.

Despite this five second superficial investigation, Coll goes on to riff on whether “technological systems have moral characteristics” and the “qualities of excellence in a great tweet.” New rule: stop listening when someone refers to it as “the Twitter site.”

Michael Lewis, God bless him and his brilliant journalism, alas does the same here:

I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I couldn’t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message. I don’t actually see the point of limiting communication to a haiku. I find the whole effusion of communications technology bewildering. All you have to do is overhear a certain number of cell phone conversations to see that the vast majority of what people say and write to each other is totally pointless.

In other words: I don’t want to try it, I don’t know nothin’ about it, but I sure as hell will judge it. I find this willful ignorance unforgivable — just spend a week using the free technology and see how it goes? Then decide how you feel.

I discussed the issue of information diets, bits vs. books, and whether the web is harming our ability to concentrate in this piece for The American. It is long and therefore itself poses a concentration challenge! But I do hope you read it if you haven’t already. I believe it represents one of the most thorough analyses of these issues yet written.

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The Atlantic is doing a series on the information diets of notable journalists. Felix Salmon is the only one who uses an RSS reader. Susan Orlean uses Twitter to get news headlines which I personally find inefficient. Everyone subscribes to tons of print magazines.

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This Week’s Newsweek

Posted inChile3 Comments on This Week’s Newsweek

There are four articles of note in the latest Newsweek magazine.

1. I wrote a brief personal piece on Chile. I mention other natural disasters that preceded Chile and conclude:

The anonymity then of death tolls, my lack of proximity, and the fact that I wasn't sending or receiving "Are you OK?" e-mails made it easy to think in broad, analytical strokes. But now I'm thinking about people, places, and details. I'm trying to track down friends I haven't heard from, and I'm afraid of what I might find out. I have images of driving on roads and bridges that are now destroyed. When I saw footage of looters ravaging supermarkets during other disasters, I blindly condemned them; I thought, how could this be all right? Now I'm deeply conflicted watching interviews with old Chilean women emerging from broken supermarkets, dodging tear gas, and shrieking into the camera, "I don't have water, I don't have food—what do you expect me to do?" The lessons I'm learning are not necessarily intellectual or academic; they are about empathy.

A few days after the quake, I ate dinner at my favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant, just down the street from my apartment. For the first time, my usual waiter initiated a conversation with me. He asked how I was doing and how I was feeling in light of all that had happened. Normally he doesn't bother trying to decipher the broken Spanish of a gringo. But the bond of our shared experience—for the moment, anyway—transcended language barriers. We all know the clichés: common challenges unite uncommon people; humanity knows no borders, etc., etc. But those maxims really do come to life when life itself is at its most tenuous.

2. Jacob Weisberg takes Obama to task for his vague "it's not the size of government that matters, but whether it works" mantra. Size matters.

3. Robert Samuelson wonders when Millennials will wake up and smell the coffee about the dismal economic situation they are inheriting. Will there be a generational revolt against the Baby Boomers who left us holding the bill? I'm thinking of Buckley's Boomsday.

4. The cover piece is about why bad teachers need to be fired from schools. Aka: Teachers unions are as selfish and reckless as ever. Kind of old news by now….

Pick up the issue at newsstands everywhere!

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The Power of the Phrase “It Turns Out…”

Posted inWriting7 Comments on The Power of the Phrase “It Turns Out…”

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that…’ or the craven ‘they say that…’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

That’s from this interesting Hacker News thread about the rhetorical power of “it turns out.”

The post that sparked it is here, and the author discovers that Paul Graham is a particularly avid user of the phrase. The concluding logic:

Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter—as though the situation simply unfolded that way. Which is precisely what the phrase “it turns out” accomplishes, and why it’s so useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y.

(thanks to Ramit Sethi for the pointer)

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Colleges Work to Maintain an Information Deficit About Their Effectiveness

Posted inSchool / Education27 Comments on Colleges Work to Maintain an Information Deficit About Their Effectiveness

To graduate from college students do not have to demonstrate anything whatsoever beyond passing grades. Students do not, for example, take a standardized test administered to students from multiple universities, so their performance cannot be measured against a common benchmark. As Philip Greenspun points out, “There is literally no way that a university can be embarrassed by its graduates’ poor overall performance.”

Without accountability, colleges don’t have an incentive to actually succeed at teaching students basic critical thinking skills. And so a majority of college graduates enter society without them. According to Kevin Carey, in the journal Democracy: “A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in ‘prose literacy’ — being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example. More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can’t calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue.” Remember, this is 31% of the 25% of Americans who even have bachelor’s degrees.

Unfortunately, it’s exceedingly difficult to figure out which colleges are helping students and which aren’t. Right now there is no “objective, publicly available information about how well colleges teach and how much college students learn. Nobody knows which colleges really do the best job of taking the students they enroll and helping them learn over the course of four years.”

It’s not for lack of data. Colleges are now collecting rich data sets about how students learn, how much time they spend studying, how engaged they are in class, and how well they know certain concepts. There are dozens of studies conducted by outside organizations and government regulators about student learning and professor teaching — and yes they probe for things like critical thinking and creativity.

The reason there’s no access to the data is because colleges do not want it to be public.

One of the most powerful special interests lobbies that nobody’s ever heard of…is the American Council on Education (ACE), the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), and a host of other alphabet-soup organizations conspire to maintain higher education secrecy at all costs.

For example:

in 2006, Mark Schneider, the commissioner of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, proposed adding some new questions to the annual survey all colleges are required to fill out in exchange for federal funds. Colleges would be asked if they participated in surveys and tests like NSSE and the CLA. [Tests which measure teacher effectiveness and overall student learning.] If the college answered “yes,” and had already chosen to make the data public, it would be asked to provide a link to the appropriate Web address. It would not be required to participate in any test or survey not of its choosing, or disclose any new information. It would just have to tell people where to find the information it had already, voluntarily, disclosed. One Dupont Circle rose up in anger and the proposal was summarily squashed.

Why are colleges so eager to keep private the data? The obvious reason is because the data are embarrassing and everyone would prefer to be held less accountable. The more interesting reason is that the older colleges with better reputations dominate the lobbying effort and they benefit disproportionally from the “existing, information-starved reputation market.”

See, the lack of data about which colleges are doing a good job — whose graduates are succeeding, whose are not — means that the customer (high school seniors) suffer from an information deficit. As Carey explains, this turns college into a “reputational good”: “You’re paying up-front for professors you’ve never met and degree programs you probably haven’t even chosen yet. Instead, you rely on what other people think of the college. Of course, some students simply have to go the college that’s nearest to them or least expensive. But if you have the luxury of choosing, in all likelihood, you choose based on reputation.”

If there were clear data about which colleges were doing a good job and which were not, colleges could distinguish themselves based on how well students actually learned. This would give newer entrants into the higher ed market a better shot at competing. At present, even if they’re doing a good job teaching students, newer colleges must wait for reputation to catch up to reality. This can take generations. Wouldn’t it be better if there was a detailed database online showing every possible metric?

Bottom Line: The sorry truth is that “colleges remain indifferent to how well they help students learn, graduate, and succeed in the workplace.” And “like the church…they see themselves as occupying an exalted place in human society, for which they are owed deference and gratitude.” We should demand that all data around the effectiveness of colleges at teaching students be made public and easily searchable so that consumers of higher education can make more informed choices.

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Quote of the Day

Posted inHumor, Quotes3 Comments on Quote of the Day

The craziest sentences uttered at the Vancouver Olympics came from Norwegian silver medalist Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset describing his performance in the men's 4×10 cross-country relay:

"My name is Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset. I skied the second lap and I fucked up today. I think I have seen too much porn in the last 14 days. I have the room next to Petter Northhug and every day there is noise in there. So I think that is the reason I fucked up. By the way, Tiger Woods is a really good man."

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In other news that made me laugh:

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