Items to Share; 13 July 2014

Education Focus

• Hard Evidence: at what age are children ready for school? 'When are children “ready” for school? There is much debate about when the transition between play-based pre-school and the start of “formal” schooling should begin. The trend in the UK primary school curriculum over recent decades has been towards an earlier start to formal instruction, and an erosion of learning through play. [] But the evidence from international comparisons and psychological research of young children’s development all points to the advantages of a later start to formal instruction, particularly in relation to literacy.'

Other Business

• The Secret History Behind The Science Of Stress : Shots - Health News : NPR 'For the past decade or so, Petticrew and a group of colleagues in London have been searching through millions of documents from the tobacco industry that were archived online in the late '90s as part of a legal settlement with tobacco companies. [] What they've discovered is that both Selye's work and much of the work around Type A personality were profoundly influenced by cigarette manufacturers. They were interested in promoting the concept of stress because it allowed them to argue that it was stress — not cigarettes — that was to blame for heart disease and cancer.'

• Side Effects – Futility Closet 'Much as I admire Gerard Manley Hopkins, I didn't realise he had a sense of humour!

• The Uses of Being Wrong - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'For all the intellectual benefits of being incorrect, however, how one is wrong matters. It is much less risky to predict doom and gloom than to predict that things will work out fine. Warnings about disasters that never happen carry less cost to one’s reputation than asserting that all is well just before a calamity. History has stigmatized optimistic prognosticators who, in retrospect, turned out to be wrong. From Norman Angell (who, in 1909, argued that war among European powers was unlikely) onward, errant optimists have been derided for their naïveté. If the global economy tanks or global economic governance collapses in the next few years, I’ll be wrong again—and in the worst way possible.'

On Trivers "Deceit and Self-Deception"

Trivers R (2013) Deceit and Self-Deception; fooling yourself the better to fool others London; Penguin (p-back edition)

This is a quite extraordinary book. As Robert Trivers comments in the very last paragraph:

"One nice feature of the study of deceit and self-deception is that we will never run out of examples."

And indeed he finds them everywhere, from plants mimicking poisonous varieties, to male fish misrepresenting their sex to gain a reproductive advantage, to the competition within families between the maternal and the paternal genes inherited by offspring, to aviation and space accidents, to international relations and nationalistic myths, and of course religion.

Some of the material is clumsy and clunky and could have done with a brutal editor—principally in the more scientific passages where terms like "donor" and "recipient" are insufficiently precise for a naive reader to follow the argument (not sure he uses those terms, but you get the idea). There's an element here of going through the motions of establishing his unimpeachable biological credential, just so he can move on to the more interesting stuff...

And that stuff—particularly the historical material and the Chomskyan expose of the self-serving myths of US imperialism—is passionate and riveting, but I suspect highly contestable.

Trivers readily admits the limitations of current research in all the areas he covers, but he cites his sources only in end-notes. Generally I prefer this approach in "popular science" texts; author/date citation tends to ruin the flow for the reader, but it is not until you follow up the endnotes that you discover that a whole page of argument may be based on a single source, which may be highly contentious, and the surrounding dispute is not mentioned at all. Much of the discussion of conflict in the Middle East, for example, relies on the work of Robert Fisk—hugely respected, but equally hugely contested in the field, I gather. The intriguing idea that xenophobia and inter-group conflict and religiosity are higher in societies which carry a higher load of parasites and hence probably infections rely on four articles (albeit some in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B—but some of which are not fully referenced). The effect is dogmatic, but Trivers does include occasional exclusions where he acknowledges that he must paint with a broad brush because of the scope of the topic. Hence he starts chapter 12, on religion, with;

"A book could be written on this subject—no, a twelve-volume treatise..."

He is an avowed positivist and reductionist; the social "sciences" in his view forfeit any claim to credibility insofar as they drift away from biology. It's all in the genes, in the Dawkins mould, and he aligns his early thought with E O Wilson (of Sociobiology notoriety in the 70s).

He is also prepared to step into the picture himself, in anecdotes which rarely redound to his credit.

So he has a clear frame of reference, or lens, through which he views a vast swathe of biological to political activity, and as might be expected he finds deceit and self-deception wherever he looks—just as a critical theorist finds oppression and exploitation everywhere. The content and examples are fascinating and thought-provoking, but does the whole really work as anything other than another cynic's charter?

Discuss.

Items to Share: 6 July 2014

Education Focus

• What’s the harm in knowing your times-tables? | Webs of Substance 'Of course, you can get by without being able to quickly recall all of the times-tables. You can work them out if you have to. But this doesn’t represent a gain. It simply reduces the number of tools you have to think with and possibly wastes a bit of time whilst you have to work some of these things out. Given that such facts are stored largely subconsciously in the long term memory, they don’t get in the way of the process of conscious reasoning; they are merely called upon when required. Of course, if the facts are wrong then you do have a problem.' 

• The problem with potential: why the cure for cancer might not be inside the mind of a child who won't go to school - Tom Bennett - TES Community 'Potential merely means that an agent or object, given certain interventions and conditions, can become or achieve some thing else. [...], I don't think that potential can be seen as a limited, fixed thing. I think it’s just a (perhaps mundane) observation that with effort, direction and dedication, most of us could do or be most things. I don't believe in miracles: [... b]ut I do believe in the miracle of diligence, time,industry and determination, often the most undervalued qualities in learning.   

• What the grammar gurus don’t get about how we learn [theconversation.com] '...what some grammar gurus forget is that the vast majority of language is not written, but spoken. Talk to a researcher who studies grammar in its natural habitat, and they will tell you that by just two years of age, children already have a deep understanding of grammar, far exceeding anything that our most powerful supercomputers can currently achieve.' 

• BPS Research Digest: Exploding the 10,000 hours myth - it's no guarantee for greatness '"The bottom line," write Hambrick and his colleagues, "is that deliberate practice is necessary to account for why some people become experts in these domains and others fail to do so, but not even close to sufficient." What else matters? Another relevant factor, they say, is starting age. This correlates with amount of completed practice, but crucially, it remains a predictive factor even after subtracting the influence of practice.

Other Business

• Steven Pinker Uses Theories from Evolutionary Biology to Explain Why Academic Writing is So Bad | Open Culture

• Future English: Johnson: Simpler and more foreign | The Economist'...whatever the long run might look like, the next few decades are set. No language has anything like a chance of displacing English. [] Interestingly, about two-thirds of English-speakers are not first-language speakers of English. To put it another way: English no longer belongs to England, to superpower America, or even to the English-speaking countries generally. Rather, English is the world’s language. What happens to a language when it becomes everybody’s? Shaped by the mouths of billions of non-native speakers, what will the English of the future look like?

• And English, loanword champion of the world! - Ideas - The Boston Globe  'It’s the number-one lender of words to other languages--but not everyone wants to borrow them'

• The Role of a Critic [farnamstreetblog.com] '“In many ways, the work of a critic is very easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment.”'

On Threshold Concepts in Vocational Higher Education

My session on TCs in vocational and professional higher education on 3 July at University Centre Grimsby is here. If you were there and want to comment, it is easier on this blog than on the static web-page itself.

Items to Share: 29 June 2014

Education Focus

• You do not need an LMS in order to teach with technology. (Jonathan Rees' 'More or Less Bunk') 'LMS' is American for VLE.

• Another Education Neuromyth Debunked [discovermagazine.com] Lectures aren't as totally useless as you thought. Quite... 

• The beauty of annotating | Pragmatic Education 'Like dewdrops on a dragonfly, annotations are microscopic, fragile and beautiful. I’ve come to believe that they’re the most important secret for teaching literature; a hidden treasure trove, waiting to be discovered. '

• Big Dog, Little Dog: Bloom's Revised Taxonomy: Cognitive processes and levels of knowledge matrix Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (Remember - Understand - Apply - Analyze - Evaluate - Create) not only improved the usability of it (using action words), but perhaps also made it more accurate. However, probably the best feature — the matrix — is often left unnoticed.

• The dip | Teaching In Higher Ed 'When I shared “the dip” that I had experienced in wrapping up each semester, [my colleague] shared that he, too, had that pattern throughout all of his years of teaching. He has been teaching more than 25 years and said that every class he taught had the frustrating time toward the end of it, when it seemed like the end just couldn’t get here fast enough.'  My own slightly different take is here.

• I Hate Training Days | Sam Shepherd 'You probably have training days in some form or another, if you are a teacher, and you probably spend several days of your academic year student free and attending various workshops and presentations about one thing or another. Now, let’s be perfectly honest, in your life, how many of these have genuinely stuck with you? How many of the workshops have been so strikingly informative that you can measure their impact in your day to day practice?' 

• dy/dan » Blog Archive » Don’t Personalize Learning 'a lot of fun learning in math class – argument, discussion, and debate chief among them – is impossible when you aren’t learning it synchronously with a group.'

Other Business

• A spook’s guide to the psychology of deception « Mind Hacks '...a plausible psychological framework for practical deception and influence online. It draws on a mix of persuasion psychology from marketing, studies on scammers and con-men, the social psychology of trust and disclosure, studies of how stage magic works psychologically, and work on what makes organisations work effectively and what degrades their performance.'

• You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are | Neurobonkers | Big Think (Link to video) Lecture on YouTube about the ubiquity of error—and embracing it. 

• List With Legs – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education Seven grammar rules you really should pay attention to, from Ben Yagoda

• Is America’s Personality Changing? A Decline in the Willingness to Conform » Sociological Images On Asch's group pressure experiments; '[...] then there was Vietnam and anti-war protesters, hippies and free love, the women’s and gay liberation movement, and civil rights victories. By the 1960s, it was all about rejecting the establishment, saying no, and envisioning a more authentic life. Things changed. And so did this experiment.'

On an oxymoronic comment

I moderate the comments on my blogs—not a terribly onerous task—and today I picked up this contribution from someone on a class blog from 2007. Interestingly enough, it's the second in the same vein in a month.

It's one of the best common factor that they must know for them to have a good performance on their work. Thus, if you have some problems regarding on your writings, just feel free to consult best dissertation writing service uk review for you to answer your questions.

(The link has been disabled.)

At first I was amazed by its incoherence and bare standard of literacy. How could a message like that possibly encourage someone to sign up for a "service" purporting to provide essays? How could they be so incompetent?

But then I thought of a point made in Levitt and Dubner's latest book, which I haven't read, but the Guardian review may be on the button. They muse on the continuing illiteracy of 419 scam spam and phishing messages. You would have thought the scammers would have learned by now to do it more professionally. Levitt and Dubner apparently argue that the grammatical errors and clumsy expression are deliberate filters to ensure that only gullible and less sophisticated readers are taken in.

That would certainly work in this case; anyone who responded to such a message would certainly be floundering and desperate.

But given the present concern about international students being admitted to British universities on the basis of dubious evidence of their English language skills, these essay mills appear to be in a lucrative business. 

Items to Share: 22 June 2014

Education Focus

• "Active learning" in college STEM courses--meta-analysis - Daniel Willingham 'Scott Freeman and his associates (Freeman et al, 2014) conducted a meta-analysis of 225 studies of college instruction that compared “traditional lecturing” vs. “active learning” in STEM courses. [...] Student performance on exams increased by about half a standard deviation. Students in the traditional lecture classes were 1.5 times as likely to fail as students in the active learning classes.' 

• How to manage behaviour with praise | Webs of Substance '[...] we introduced ‘Assertive Discipline’; an American programme developed by Lee Cantor. Aspects of the training materials made me cringe and there was little suggestion that it was based upon anything more than experience, but in the absence of anything else, it began to form the basis of an approach that I have used ever since..' 

• An hour with the DfE: How should we improve the use of research in schools? - Tom Bennett: TES  'Most teachers get all their research in one big pill at the start of their careers, and then sod all after that, forever. This makes it pretty important that they get good research to begin with, otherwise they'll carry it around with them like a conjoined twin for the rest of their careers.' 

• The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom : The New Yorker

Other Business

• A Don’s Life: Time Management 'I have picked up a few "time management" tips -- on the job. For example, start booking appointments from the end of the day backwards (they tend to sprawl less that way, for reasons I dont quite understand). Try booking appointments at slightly odd times (12.05, rather than 12.00) -- as it makes it rather clearer that your time is squeezed.'

• RIP, Daniel Keyes, author of "Flowers for Algernon" - Boing Boing Obituary for the author. "Flowers for Algernon" is short, intelligent, thought-provoking, haunting and memorable science fiction. Read it! 

• Human rights: a straitjacket on liberty | spiked A very clear article attacking the shibboleth of "human rights"—well worth arguing with! Does not mention Isaiah Berlin on negative and positive rights, but a commenter does. 

• Jessa Gamble – Life without sleep [aeon.co] 'New technologies are emerging that could radically reduce our need to sleep - if we can bear to use them'

Items to Share: 15 June 2014

Education Focus

• Leave The Laptops At Home, Kids « The Dish (Full New Yorker article here): 'I banned laptops in the classroom after it became common practice to carry them to school. When I created my “electronic etiquette policy” (as I call it in my syllabus), I was acting on a gut feeling based on personal experience. I’d always figured that, for the kinds of computer-science and math classes that I generally teach, which can have a significant theoretical component, any advantage that might be gained by having a machine at the ready, or available for the primary goal of taking notes, was negligible at best...' but see also: Three issues with the case for banning laptops  - The Chronicle of Higher Education .

Other Business

• The Turing Trick – The Chronicle of Higher Education 'On Monday morning, the news was everywhere that the famous Turing Test—in which a computer program tries to convince people that it is a human being carrying on a normal conversation—had been passed for the first time.' 

• Writing In The 21st Century | Edge.org 'Steven Pinker begins by stating his belief that "science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life— because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? [...] There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself [...]'

Items to Share; 8 June 2014

Education Focus

• A physicist weighs in on the rigor of education research - Daniel Willingham 'Can you use the results of your research to predict with some accuracy what will happen in a new situation? A common mistake is to believe that in education one ought to be able to predict outcomes for individual students; not necessarily so, any more than a physicist must be able to predict the behavior of each atom. Prediction in aggregate—a liter of gas or a school of children—is still an advance.' 

• A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop - Scientific American scientificamerican.com
  'New research [...] demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Across three experiments, [...] students [took] notes in a classroom setting and then [were] tested [...] on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half [...] to write the notes out by hand. As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.' and:

• What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades - NYTimes.com 'Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.'

• Motivation and mindset anchoring | Pragmatic Education

Other Business

• A heuristic for sorting science stories in the news | Understanding Uncertainty "Ask yourself: if the study had come up with a negative result, would I be hearing about it? If NO, then don't bother to read or listen to the story" (Jo Willey, take note. She is the health editor of the Daily Express, and the most egregious perpetrator of this crap.)

• New Statesman | How mistakes can save lives: one man’s mission to revolutionise the NHS 'After the death of his wife following a minor operation, airline pilot Martin Bromiley set out to change the way medicine is practised in the UK – by using his knowledge of plane crashes.' Excellent piece—but no reference to Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto" (2010), strangely. Education rarely experiences such critical incidents—but there are things to learn.

• Photos of the Week: 5/31-6/6 [theatlantic.com]

• BPS Research Digest: Committed nurses cope with stress by dehumanising themselves and their patients - Italian study 'Nursing must be one of the most stressful professions. Not only are the hours long and the work challenging, many nurses are exposed routinely to patient suffering and death. A new study conducted in Italy finds that nurses appear to cope by seeing themselves and their patients as less than fully human.' Not much has changed in 45 years, then? (Since Menzies-Lyth's study in 1967.) 

• The Search for Psychology's Lost Boy - The Chronicle of Higher Education Who was Little Albert in Watson's famous experiments?
  

Items to Share: 1 June 2014

Education Focus

• Motivation and instruction | Pragmatic Education 'In a series of five blogposts, I plan to explore what we as teachers can do about motivation, self-control and willpower in school. There’ll be stories of elephants, chimps and bees; mindsets, biases and self-fulfilling prophecies. The heroes of the story will be Carol Dweck, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein, Jonathan Haidt, Kelly McGonigal and the Heath brothers. Going beyond the cognitive psychology I’ve been exploring, this is a journey into our social, intuitive minds.' and...

• Motivation and emotion | Pragmatic Education 'As a student, what makes you look forward to the lesson? It’s not so much what you have next, as who you have next. Emotional interactions between teachers and students are some of ‘the most powerful hidden dynamics of teaching’, according to Robert Marzano, as they are ‘typically unconscious’.'

Other Business

• The Five Second Rule « The Dabbler 'The five-second rule is a widely repeated belief that food dropped on the ground will not be significantly contaminated with bacteria if it is picked up within five seconds of being dropped.' 

• Nigeness: The Missing Forecast '...[H]ow deeply entrenched the Shipping Forecast is in our national culture. For most of us, of course, it serves no useful purpose and is largely incomprehensible, but it operates at some deeper level as a quasi-liturgical celebration of our maritime heritage and our status as a sea-girt island afloat on mysterious waters, storm-prone but somehow ordered.'

• Rory Sutherland — This Thing For Which We Have No Name [farnamstreetblog.com] 'Most of the progress that’s made in business is made through a kind of trial and error where you accidentally stumble on something that’s successful. Of course, the way business works quite well is that things that are unsuccessful get killed off fairly quickly and things which are accidentally successful get invested in; a very crude feedback system but it kind of works, broadly speaking.' 

• Now THIS Is a Synapse – Phenomena: Only Human [nationalgeographic.com] 

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): Clever Stockholm subway advertisement

On Set Books

It's unlikely that you have been able to avoid the arguments now simmering around changes to the syllabus and set books for GCSE English Literature.

Here is part of a post I first wrote in 2012, which touches on some of the issue from another angle:

I passed the local branch of a chain bookshop on Saturday, now featuring the "back to school" window display. Prominent was a "study guide" to To Kill a Mockingbird --presumably a set text again for some exam or another.

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is 86 and reclusive. I wasn't surprised to see a "study guide" in the window, but it did set me thinking about what had been made of her wonderful story, whose very accessibility and gentle power has conspired to its reduction to a commodity--knowledge about it can be traded for exam credits, while the point is lost.

I'm not merely speculating here. Robert Westall was my art teacher at school. We became friends and remained so for thirty years until his death. [...]. As the link shows, he was a wonderful author of stories for children and young adults, acquiring many awards for works from his debut novel The Machine-Gunners in 1975 to posthumous publications. The Machine-Gunners was serialised on BBCtv in 1983 --and of course found its way to being a "set book" for 16+ examinations...

I don't remember when it was first set, or when the first cribs came out (for examples of current stuff go here and scroll until you get to the title--I make no comment at all on the quality of the resources offered. They are simply an accessible example of the kind of material on offer.) But I do remember discussing it with him.

I congratulated him. He'd really made it! And—since he was always something of a contrarian—I didn't really take it seriously when he said he wished it hadn't happened, and that perhaps he had a right to be consulted about it. (As far as I can remember, the first he found out about it was from his publisher or his agent, because they had been warned to increase print runs and approached about annotated editions. But then, most set authors are dead already, so...)

But his argument was persuasive. He did not want young people to see his work as "the kind of stuff they made you read at school." Once they saw it in that light, he would have lost them.

And of course he was right.

Of course it's just possible that Gove is really a big fan of Harper Lee and John Steinbeck, and trying a kind of paradoxical injunction*. By removing them from the required list—forbidding and banning them, he may be making them transgressive and thus all the more attractive to adolescents...

* Introduced in Watzlawick P, Beavin J and Jackson D (1967) Pragmatics of Human Communication New York; W W Norton.

On Missing a Trick

Walking the dog this afternoon, we passed the "Factory", as my partner calls it—it's the local university campus, which is currently a building site. Again. (Although that is not necessarily a Bad Thing.)

In true Poppletonian style the shuttering proclaims in almost-perfect corporate-academic gobbledygook:

But there is a buzzword missing. "Learning"?

Of course the acronym for "Academic and Student Learning Experience Enhancement Project" might have been just too apposite?

On "Make it Stick" (Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, 2014)

Brown P, Roediger H and McDaniel A (2014) Make it Stick; the science of successful learning. London; Belknap imprint of Harvard University Press.

It was a rave pre-publication review in Times Higher Education (3 April) which grabbed my attention:

'If you want to read a lively and engaging book on the science of learning, this is a must. Two cognitive scientists, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, and one storyteller, Peter Brown, have teamed up to explain how learning and memory work. [...] This is a rich and resonant book and a pleasurable read that will leave you pondering the processes through which you, and your students, acquire new knowledge and skills.

I went away for a couple of weeks and then tried to buy it in the best physical bookshop to which I have access (Heffers in Cambridge) only to be told that it had sold out. Even better!

So I resorted to the black arts of the net, and Amazon--I have to admit--delivered for free within 48 hours (yesterday--and I must say it is disconcerting to get a message in your inbox saying "Your order has been posted through your letter-box" and to go there and find it so...).

I finished it a couple of hours ago. I was looking forward to being the first (trivial pleasures loom large at my age) to spread the news across the course network, in time to get it on reading lists and library orders for the new academic year.

OK. It's good, but not that good.

If you haven't a clue how to teach (or indeed how to study academic material), and you want a primer, it's great. It talks to you directly (it uses the second-person more often that anything I have read for years). It is up-front about "everything you thought you knew about learning is wrong". It makes a good job of bridging from arcane research to practical application, and—its Malcolm Gladwell point—it has (mostly) terrific and engaging stories to support its arguments (although they do take over sometimes, like exhausted analogies...)

It is by no means unusual for academic authors aiming for a wider audience to engage ghost-writers (usually barely acknowledged) or collaborators. Leavitt and Dubner of Freakonomics fame are a classic example of the latter model. I can't remember which is the economist and which the journalist. In this collaboration, despite the detailed and scrupulous acknowledgements, the writer (Brown) seems to have taken the lead, certainly (going by the notes) undertaking much of the leg-work and interviews. That's not a problem, but it does influence the structure and the style of the book.

Its strength is therefore in its readability. I read it in about as long as it would take me to read a novel of similar length (main text; 253 pages). The authors are explicit about the structure of the book—it will, they promise, re-visit its main themes several times over, and it will inter-leave them. This approach mirrors their recommendations about studying, and is generally very effective. Where it does get rather repetitious is in the final chapter, which they introduce rather apologetically by saying that they had been explicitly asked by pre-publication readers to draw out the practical implications of the ideas. They were clear enough already, and in any case flagged by a "Takeaway" section at the end of each chapter. What they do not do, however, is make the connections; the ideas are consistent with those of Bruner on the spiral curriculum, for example, and a reference in the notes would have enabled them to point readers to further material and indeed debates.

I dislike it when reviewers complain that a book should really have been another book altogether, and I'm not going to do that—as an introduction to learning for beginning and even experienced non-specialist teachers it is excellent, but rather like a purely conversational approach to learning a language, it is in danger of being self-limiting. And there's an enormous amount which is not even mentioned, such as how to explain stuff to students, or even much on what the teacher can do to improve learning—apart from some examples and vignettes of practice. The key to learning is presented as memory and recall, and they are unapologetic about it being hard work—they make a good case for why it ought to be regarded as hard work, and indeed for the introduction of "deliberate difficulties" into the process.

The authors do quote Rumsfeld, of course, on "unknown unknowns" (p.17), but their approach to reviewing practice in order to correct and develop it does rest on the assumption that best practice in teaching and learning is well-known and not contestable. See also their account of Sternberg' "dynamic testing" (pp.151-152). As the argument proceeds, this becomes more of a hindrance, and the section on training in the final chapter raises more questions than it answers. (Here, a short discussion of Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation would have helped a lot.)

Similarly, there is over-simplification in their account of dyslexia (although they do enter a disclaimer about engaging with the "enormous body" of literature on it), but that chapter 6, titled "Get Beyond Learning Styles" is otherwise well-balanced, and even cites Coffield et al. (2004), although they do give Gardner's "multiple intelligences" a rather easy ride... On the other hand, that chapter, dominated as it is by a rambling eight-page case-study of an all-American self-made entrepreneur which totally loses sight of the wood for the trees, fails to tie the illustrations to the ideas. Occasionally, material seems to be dropped in because it is part of the cognitive science canon—such as the obligatory reference to Mischel's "marshmallow" experiments; mentioned (unnecessarily) at the start of chapter 7 and then ignored. And, saddest of all, all the invaluable material from Hattie's and Marzano's meta-analyses is not discussed at all. I haven't been through it all (there are some issues with varying terminology, too) but the authors' contention about the effectiveness of spaced versus mass practice is massively supported by Hattie (2009: 186), so why isn't the point made?

However, the book is certainly good enough to hope that there is a British edition in the pipeline; anyone unfamiliar with US sports will be baffled by some of the examples and illustrations, and even the educational terminology needs more background (although the arcane mysteries of UK A-levels are spelt out in some detail for the US readership; p.190).

And as the THE review highlighted, it is refreshing to have a book to recommend which a reasonably motivated student or colleague can actually sit down and read through—which is perhaps ironic given that that is a method the authors would not recommend.

Items to Share: 25 May 2014

Education Focus

• Introducing Carl’s Banned-Word Scanner – Phenomena: The Loom 'I’ve gotten very persnickety about the individual words and phrases that students choose. I’ve built up a list of “banned words” that I’ve come across in assignments and which I never want to see in class again. It’s not that those words are absolutely wrong in terms of their meaning. It’s just that writers–both new and veteran–should try to do better.' 

• Top 5 Ways to Explain - badly... (Tom Boulter: Thinking on Learning) 'There have been some fantastic blogs appearing recently on what seems a bafflingly marginalised topic in much teacher training and INSET: the techniques and strategies behind constructing clear, effective and memorable explanations.'

Other Business

• Notation, notation, notation: a brief history of mathematical symbols | Joseph Mazur | Science | theguardian.com  '[A]lmost all maths was written rhetorically before the 16th century, often in metered poetry. Most people think symbols for addition, subtraction or equality had been around long before Euclid wrote his Elements in the first century BCE. No!'

• Devorah E. Klein , Gary Klein and Shawna J. Perry take a critical look at a key component of health-care reform. - Project Syndicate  'As we consider a likely future in which physicians adhering to [Evidence-Based Medicine] are paid more, we must consider the cognitive limitations and the human cost of unquestioning compliance with so-called “best practices.” A more effective approach must be to combine EBM with the expertise and intuition of experienced caregivers, and to take the benefits of both.' (Gary Klein is well-known for his studies of firefighters and other practitioners who have to make fast decisions: see this conversation between him and Daniel Kahneman—also on video.)

Items to Share: 18 May 2014

I've been away for a couple of weeks, so this catch-up is even more random than usual!

Education Focus

• The Opposite of Boring  : Conceptual Understanding Hocus-Pocus | Webs of Substance Two stimulating posts from Harry Webb.

• BBC Radio 4 - Intelligence: Born Smart, Born Equal, Born Different 'BBC Radio 4 has just concluded an excellent three-part series on the controversies over the genetics of intelligence and it’s one of the best and most nuanced discussions you’ll hear about the topic for many years.' (Vaughn Bell: Mindhacks) 

• Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds | Science/AAAS | News 'The meta-analysis, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that teaching approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation.' (Breaking news!)

• Is Rereading the Material a Good Study Strategy? | Faculty Focus  '“Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the material.” (p. 10) I was a bit taken back when I first read that. But part of the argument made sense immediately....' 

• A System for Remembering What you Read

• One scientific insight for curriculum design Joe Kirby on quizzing. 

• What is a more effective way of taking notes - laptop or notepad? | Neurobonkers | ''The researchers found that on factual recall questions, the students performed equally well no matter how they took their notes but for conceptual questions the students using the laptops performed worse. The students writing longhand wrote fewer words and used less verbatim transcription but scored better when tested on what they had learned.' 

• ResearchED York- the blogs ResearchED York: It's great up north  Two posts from Tom Bennett on the latest ResearchED conference. Zombie bølløcks: World War VAK isn't over yet - Tom Bennett again

• But I Already Learned MLA! Why Do I Need APA Style? A dubious article which implies that knowing how to comply with APA style in detail is a sufficient credential for membership of a professional community=== There's a form of dogmatic fundamentalism about this which can only detract from students (or even academics) daring to experiment or even speculate in their writing...

• What the PISA problem-solving scores mean--or don't. - Daniel Willingham  'So the PISA 2012 is surely measuring something, and what it’s measuring is probably close to something I’d comfortably call “problem-solving.” But beyond that, I’m not sure what to say about it.'

• Making It Stick - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education  '"Make It Stick", the single best work I have encountered on [memory and learning]. Anyone with an interest in teaching or learning will benefit from reading this book, which not only presents thoroughly grounded research but does so in an eminently readable way that is accessible even to students.'

Other Business

•  Seeing red? The mind-bending power of colour - Telegraph telegraph.co.uk
  '[O]ur perception of colour really does affect our minds, and our bodies. A 2004 study found that football teams wearing red were statistically more likely to win than teams in other colours. Another, in 2008, found that male volunteers shown photos of averagely attractive women on red and white backgrounds rated the women on red as more good-looking. Meanwhile, an experiment in the Seventies found that male prison inmates became physically weaker when they were housed in pink-painted cells.'

• phdcomics.com research methods,  ethics, humour  

• Phineas Gage neuroscience case: True story of famous frontal lobe patient is better than textbook accounts.
  

On nuances of loss

I've just finished Stephen Grosz (2013) The Examined Life: how we lose and find ourselves (London, Vintage).  As so often, it comes with lots of hype on the cover, but for once it may be justified.

It is a series of essays, perhaps meditations, or even reflections on some of his patients, their experiences and the experience of therapy. They are not case-studies—that term implies far too much distance. It is very readable, moving and thought-provoking.

Grosz is a psychoanalyst. That has always been a confusing label. He is not a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist. It's not even clear whether he is a psychologist (clinical psychologists treat behavioural and psychiatric problems in ways which do not involve medication or other physical interventions, usually based on established treatment protocols originating from academic and clinical research). He is a psychotherapist, technically, in that he practises "talking cures", but that is too broad a label, in that it now includes practitioners of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), who are very effective for "routine" cases of depression etc. (I hasten to add that there is nothing at all "routine" about the experience of clinical depression.)

Grosz is a lay (non-medical) psychoanalyst. Technically that implies that he is a follower of Sigmund Freud, but that is much less likely to be the case than 25 years ago, when he began to practice. Freud's daughter, Anna, gets a look-in in the book, but only when a young patient mixes her up with Anne Frank. Sigmund gets one mention in the bibliographic notes. So does Dr Seuss.

I labour this point a little because psychoanalysis (now much more a critical "lens" for the humanities than a serious approach to the treatment of neurotic disorders) does have a few very distinctive features:

It takes its time. As Grosz puts it;

"Most of my work [...] has been with adults in psychoanalysis--meeting with one person for fifty minutes, four or five time a week, over a number of years. I have spent more than 50,000 hours with patients." (p. xi)

It takes as long as it takes. It has to be acknowledged that "efficiency" is not psychoanalysis' strong suit, particularly when patients sleep all through their allocated time, and the analyst lets them ("Through Silence" p.199). And it does tend to support David Cohen's observation (from memory) about psychiatry in the USA, that the better qualified and the more skilled the practitioner, the more trivial the problems he deals with... And of course there is the skewed demographic profile of patients, because it is extremely expensive. But the other side of the story is that there is no need to push patients into pigeon-holes. (I remember a couple of professionals in the field--no idea of their professional labels--catching up  before a case-conference settled down to business. One said, "Oh, her? British Standard Low Self-esteem, level 3!")  Grosz readily admits formulating initial hypotheses about the problem, and then abandoning or refining them, or waiting months for the evidence to test them.

It contextualises the presenting problem within the life-space of the individual patient--and perhaps their family or immediate relationships. There's almost no jargon in this book, and indeed some trenchant dismissal of conventional wisdom (especially the "closure" myth; "My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow..." (p. 209). Instead, there is a much more dynamic view, characteristic of humanistic depth psychology at its best: What is the point of this behaviour/reaction/experience? What does it do in this particular setting/relationship/personal history? What is it preferable to (i.e. defend against)? What is involved in giving it up?

This is, I think, the defining characteristic of psychoanalysis and its variants. Freud was wrong about practically everything, but every great innovator is practically bound to be. So was Marx. So was Darwin (less so, of course; he just didn't have the tools we have today). Initial formulations are simply starting points. But the recognition of what lies behind trivial issues and interactions (such as vacillating about whether or not to take off one's shoes before getting on the traditional couch [p.169]) and how minutiae can expose great themes is a transformative framework.

The sub-title, "how we lose and find ourselves", suggests that loss will be a major theme, as indeed it is. The section on "Changing" (pp. 121-196) discusses the issues of loss implicit in even the most beneficial change. It's long been an interest of mine, but while I have tried to explore some of the general principles in respect of learning (“Learning as Loss”), Grosz engages with specific instances and manifestations in the lives of specific individuals. His stories are far more nuanced than anything I could aspire to.

Incidentally, I was also reminded of a psychodrama exercise; the Magic Shop (Moreno, 1948), which focuses on the “bargain” of change, and how everything has to be paid for. It is a far blunter* instrument than Grosz would use, but I've used it effectively (I think!) in the past in an educational context.

* I almost wrote that it was a far too "gross" instrument... Now what would that imply?

Items to Share: 20 April 2014

Education Focus

• The Lost Art of Memory: Moonwalking with Einstein | Pragmatic Education Techniques for memorisation extracted from Joshua Foer's 2011 book

• Cheating Lessons, Part 3 - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'A robust body of research shows that taking frequent exams improves learning more effectively than studying or reviewing notes.' 

• Issues with Cognitive Load Theory | Webs of Substance 'This theory implies certain teaching practices. For instance, when learning new material, we should be careful to structure teaching programmes so that the concepts are broken down into small numbers of interacting elements in order to ensure that students can apprehend all of the required concepts in their working memories. As learning develops and relevant knowledge is built in students’ long term memories, we can start to make use of chunking and expose our students to more complex concepts. This is why the prior knowledge of our students is important and why teaching a group of students with a wide disparity of prior knowledge is problematic.' 

• My First Year of Teaching - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'I didn’t know what to expect of my first year in the classroom. And as an American teaching U.S. history in England, I didn’t know what to expect of British students.'

Other Business

• The Art of Wisdom and the Psychology of How We Use Categories, Frames, and Stories to Make Sense of the World | Brain Pickings '[W]hat can we do, as a society and as individual humans aspiring to be good, to cultivate that deeper sense of right and wrong, with all its contextual fuzziness and situational fluidity? 

• The Poetry of the Trading Floor, Going Beyond Bears and Bulls - NYTimes.com 'Meanwhile, stags buy new issues in the hope of a quick return. Black swans swim in unexpectedly, as dishonest brokers perform goose jobs (promoting a stock to increase demand so that they can unload their inventory). And when all such people have been fired, the remaining dealers, left huddled together for warmth, are called penguins. The dogs of the Dow bark, but the caravan moves on. Bulls make money. Bears make money. And PIGS get slaughtered.'

• Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 Historical Films on YouTube

• The Surprising Science Behind Why and When We Yawn : The New Yorker 'At its most fundamental, a yawn is a form of communication—one of the most basic mechanisms we have for making ourselves understood to others without words. “It’s often said that behavior doesn’t leave fossils,” Provine says. “But, with yawning, you are looking at a behavioral fossil. You’re getting an insight into how all of behavior once was.”

• Science & Cooking: Harvard's Free Course on Making Cakes, Paella & Other Delicious Food - Open Culture

• Ants Build Complex Structures With a Few Simple Rules | Simons Foundation 'Ants might even shed light on the complex organization of the organ we use to study them — the brain. The behavior of an ant community resembles the organization of neurons into a functioning brain, [...] “Each neuron is relatively dumb, but if you take billions of neurons, they interact in a way that we have only scratched the surface of understanding.”'

• The Stoic Reading List [farnamstreetblog.com]  'something I wish I had found a few years ago when I first started reading philosophy, a stoic reading list.'

Items to Share: 13 April 2014

Education Focus

• Bringing the Locker Room Into the Classroom - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Over the past couple of years, I have come to see what a classroom dynamic of engaged participation and collaboration might have in common with the fast-paced give-and-take of a basketball game.' What academic teachers can learn from sport coaching.

• Teacher's poem blasting Michael Gove and his 'Dark Ages' curriculum hits a nerve on YouTube - Education News - The Independent 'An excoriating poem lambasting the policies and the “Dark Ages” curriculum of Education Secretary Michael Gove has become an internet sensation among teachers. 

• No Child Left Undiagnosed | Psychology Today On the pathologisation and medicalisation of childhood.

• Tom of Finland Part 2: Should Learning be Fun? - Tom Bennett - Blog - Tom Bennett - TES Community 'I'd love to find some evidence to substantiate the claims that the Fun Learning camp makes- I'm like an atheist, glumly investigating every miracle hoping to find God- but every time I put my hand out it melts away like mist. [] Can learning be fun? Of course. Is learning sometimes fun? Undoubtedly. Should it be fun? That's a whole different question. Simply saying yes damns every act of learning that isn't enjoyable, and you would have to be completely bonkers to think that everything you learn should be fun as well. Almost everything worth achieving requires sweat, grit and the ability to stick with something when it's hard- also qualities I'd like to see in my students in general. I don't want them bored, but I have no problem if something they do is boring, if it's necessary. 

• Joe Moran's blog: Fail better ''Teaching is mostly about failure, because it is based on conversation and words are always liable to fall on stony ground. Reading is about failure, because most of what we read we forget, and quite a lot of it is not as interesting as we thought it would be. Writing is about failure because, even if we manage to finish something and send it out into the world, we will mostly come up against a wall of indifference made of people who have other things on their mind and other things to read and write. [...] In other words, you just keep throwing enough mud at the wall until some of it sticks. Maybe you only have to succeed once, or at least to fail less catastrophically.

Other Business

• Ronald Blythe sees the contradictions in a funeral held in the spring What an extraordinary sensibility and what an extraordinary writer!

• Get Comic Neue The free and (a bit more) stylish successor to Comic Sans

• Antifragile: A Definition 'The classic example of something antifragile is Hydra, the greek mythological creature that has numerous heads. When one is cut off, two grow back in its place.'

• So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent : Parallels : NPR Using the wisdom of crowds to interpret international relations.

• Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius [buzzfeed.com] He's performed on and off (mainly off) since the '50s. His entire repertoire is 37 very dark and very clever songs... Taught maths at Harvard but never finished his PhD. Fascinating profile. 

On the Whole Game

 (An expanded version of a piece for the student newsletter, with links and references.)

I took a workshop session at a recent Study Day on "Emotional Aspects of Learning and Teaching"—of course it had to be very selective, and I missed out one very important emotion; boredom. I was reminded of that at some of the teaching observations I have done recently, and how much of a challenge it poses to the teacher. When we express concerns about behaviour management, many of the problems follow from learners being bored.

Many years ago, David Hargreaves suggested that teachers fall into three categories; lion-tamers, entertainers, and "new romantics". Lion-tamers believe that learners do not want to learn, but they will if you crack the whip hard enough. Entertainers also believe that learners do not want to learn, but they will if you make it fun enough. New romantics are foolish enough to believe that learners do actually want to learn, and the job of the teacher is as much to get out of the way as anything else. Lion-taming is the position taken by many starting teachers—often because they are nervous. It is something of a dead end, because once students detect nerves, they close in. But there is something in both the other positions.

At least the entertainers recognise the pernicious effects of boredom—it's just that all too often overcoming it becomes the prime objective, often to the detriment of actually learning anything. The new romantics, while they may be accused of some naivety, are aware that teachers can sometimes be impediments to learning. If the prime requirement of medical personnel is "first of all, do no harm", that of teachers may well be, "first of all, don't turn students off".

And yet we do actively, if unintentionally, do that.

I'm thinking particularly of vocational courses I have sat in on over the past few years, and how boring they often are. The teachers try to liven them up with activities and an engaging manner, but they are trying to roll a rock up a hill, and the moment they relax the boredom rolls back in.

Why? There are many reasons of course, but one is the way the content has been pre-processed and pre-digested so that it can be taught in small incremental gobbets, each of which can be assessed and added to a portfolio. The learners go through the motions, and they do "achieve", but there is little connection with the real world in what they have to do, and it is indeed boring.

(And PowerPoint doesn't help, either. It defaults to bullet-points and there is nothing more calculated to fragment content and lose any sense of context and connection than a bulleted list. See, of course, Edward Tufte on this.)

“M... was teaching a group of nursery nurses coming to the end of their [...] course, and she was, as she said, tidying up loose ends. Their syllabus required them to have studied team-working [... ]

At a technical level, M. is a good teacher: she tried to draw information and ideas out of the students but since they had little experience to draw on, she could not get the “right” answers from them. […] At last, she put up on the whiteboard the three essential components of good team-working ... I thought at first, that was interesting. Then I put myself in the position of the students, who were dutifully making notes, and thought, they have to remember these points for their exam: there is a lot more to studying in this area than I thought. Perhaps I ought to make a note of these points for my own future reference?

Then I “woke up”. [...] I have been involved in team-working for the past twenty years, working in and leading teams myself, and conducting training and consultancy on it. There was nothing “wrong” with the three points on the board, but I had never conceptualised the issue to myself in that way, and I saw no particular advantage in doing so.[...] They seemed to represent the outcome of the text-book author’s search for three simple headings under which to organise his required thousand words on team-working. But for these students, this was now the definitive knowledge on the subject, to which their experience had to be subordinated ... As M. said afterwards, it was what they were expected to “know”... (1999)

On another of many occasions:

This class was part of an "access" course. (Access courses provide an alternative route to "A" levels for mature students wanting to go on to train for—chiefly—occupations such as nursing, social work, and teaching. Many access students are women whose youngest child has started school.) It was on Human Growth and Development, and concerned language acquisition, exploring the competing accounts from Skinner and Chomsky. It proceeded in a rather pedestrian but informative session for the first half, and then there was a brief comfort break. When the students came back, they were much more animated, swapping stories about their children and when they had started talking, and the mistakes they made. The teacher could barely get a word in edgeways...

Afterwards, she was very apologetic. "I'm sorry about the second half—I really let it get away from me, didn't I?" It took her a while to realise that those animated conversations in the second half would have provided a solid experiential base for the ideas of the first half, had she been able to swap the lesson round—and with a little more practice she could have drawn the formal "teaching points" out of what the students already knew at one level, but had not yet conceptualised.

(And with one of my own classes);

We were discussing the importance of making content relevant to learners' experience, and I referred to a session I had observed a few days ago, in which the teacher (also teaching about motivation, and stuck in a bind about having to "deliver" prescribed schemes of work, but doing her best) had taught well on the basis of "this is stuff out there which you need to know in order to pass the assessment".

She could have connected and taught much better by drawing on the learners' shared interest in sport. This wasn't accidental. It was a course about "Sport Leadership" [...]

But hey! Motivation and sport are topics made for each other.

I know nothing about sport. [...] But even I could see this connection and use it to get the class discussing forms of motivation and the tactics coaches use to hype it up...

(More on the observations behind these reflections here and here, and an interesting post about what professors can learn from coaches [in the US context], here. The Access example nicely suits Kolb's learning cycle, too)

Attempting to reduce material to simple concrete items which can be made a note of or memorised sucks all the life out of it. It strips away the context, and it is context which brings it alive. Without that, the knowledge is in David Perkins' (and A N Whitehead's) term, "inert". It's not used—"it just sits in the mind's attic, unpacked only when specifically called for by a quiz or a direct prompt but otherwise gathering dust." (More here, from Perkins 1995:22)

Put it into context and a sequence—draw on your experience, or better still get the learners to draw on their own experience if possible—and it becomes a story. Much more memorable and engaging.

I sat in on a class last week which included why certain finishes might be used for partitions in a building. Sadly, the students were bored much of the time; they weren't concentrating, and they drifted off the task at the merest opportunity. The teacher agreed later that she had had to act like a sheep-dog, trying to keep them together and going in the right direction...

But then—it might have been a slight digression—but the teacher was talking about how fast-food restaurants use bright colours, especially red, to get customers energised and more inclined to eat and move on, rather than to relax over a leisurely meal. I remember that and it will probably come back to me next time I have a hamburger, but I still can't think what the three types of building plaster are...

And then during groupwork a student told a spontaneous—and relevant—story about how his firm had modified an original design in order to improve the customer's requirement for better soundproofing; the body language of the rest of the group clearly showed how the material was making sense and coming alive.

David Ausubel (1968) famously (well, relatively, if you move in the right circles) said that the most important determinant of learning is what the learner already knows. From this he developed the principle (already known to good teachers for centuries, of course) of the Advance Organizer. It's an introductory strategy to put the lesson into the context of what the students already know, but in practice it can be used at any time, as the teacher mentioned above did, without being aware of it. Hattie rates them as just below average effect-size (0.38), but on the other hand they are so easy to use, what's not to like?

And back with sport as a context, and with David Perkins; he explores these matters in what he calls the "whole game" approach to teaching:

'Perkins sees two unfortunate tendencies in education: One is what he calls “elementitis”—learning the components of a subject without ever putting them together. The other is the tendency to foster “learning about” something at the expense of actually learning it. “You don't learn to play baseball by a year of batting practice,” he noted, but in learning math[s], for instance, students are all too often presented with prescribed problems with only one right solution and no clear indication how they connect with the real world.

'The way to let young learners play the whole game is to find or construct a junior version of it. ...

It is in many respects the obsession with enabling learners to "achieve" their qualifications, rather than actually to become better builders, hairdressers, nursery nurses or travel agents which leads to this denaturing of the course content and the stultifying boredom which besets many classes—and which learners compensate for by messing about.

As ever, read Becker (again).

---

Hargreaves D (1972) Interpersonal Relations and Education London; Routledge and Kegan Paul

Perkins D N (2009) Making Learning Whole; how seven principles of teaching can transform education San Francisco; Jossey-Bass (Also discussed on the blog here.)

Items to Share: 6 April 2014

Education Focus

• ResearchEd: cognitive science in the classroom | Pragmatic Education Andrew Old's talk at the ResearchEd conference in Birmingham last weekend. And Part 2: Three Applications of Cognitive Science | Pragmatic Education 'From a hundred years of research, there are three deceptively simple insights that when applied well in the classroom, have very powerful effects. They are not quick wins, silver bullets or revolutionary innovations. Instead, they offer something more modest: a chance to focus our teaching and help pupils remember what they’re learning. And expert teachers have been doing them since time immemorial.' 

• Active learning is powerful magic | Webs of Substance 'I think we can do without the notion of ‘active learning’. It serves no useful purpose.'

• We're good at something, but what is it? PISA problems [Tom Bennett] '"Pupils in England are 'significantly better' at problem solving than the average for the industrialised world, the latest results from an influential comparative education study show. [] The country finished 11th among the 44 different international territories where 15-year-olds took new computer-based tests, as part of the last round of Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment).' But what does it actually mean?

• The Adult Learning Theory – Andragogy – Infographic [elearninginfographics.com] 

• The 50 great books on education [Dennis Hayes] 

Other Business

• Big data: are we making a big mistake? - FT.com 'Cheerleaders for big data have made four exciting claims, each one reflected in the success of Google Flu Trends: that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote “The End of Theory”, a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”.' 

• Cool Ad Watch [Andrew Sullivan]