Confessions of a raging experimentaholic

2009-07-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Vote for wise latinas.

Letters to a young academic

2009-04-02T02:34:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed Rainer Marie Rilke’s excellent book Letters to a Young Poet, where the older poet gave advice to a younger, aspiring poet. Recently, a few undergraduates asked me about whether they should attend psychology graduate school. The following is the essence of my reply:

In my method and theory class, I give assignments to students in which they have to design and carry out their own experiment. Since they have never had to do this, most students express dismay and frustration, and they complain like there’s no tomorrow, but I don’t relent. But the funny thing is that the most common thing they do is look around the room, notice the horrible shade of yellow in the walls of the Armitage Hall where I teach, and they look down and see a quiz before them. They then come to me and say, “I know! I’m going to conduct a study on whether the color of the walls of the room influence test performance.”

Now, I’m sure there’s a study in that topic, and I know that the sickly yellow walls probably don’t contribute to either the performance of the students or their professor. I wouldn’t be surprised that people would feel better in a well-painted room, and feeling better would influence people to be more relaxed and make fewer errors. But I always tell them that they can’t do that study. They look even more frustrated and complain like there is no next week, but I explain to them that such a study lacks imagination.

“Imagination?” They ask. “You didn’t tell us the study had to be imaginative!”

But as I see it, the underlying problem is that all they did was look around the room, see an ugly colored wall and a test in front of them, and put two and two together and voila, they have their experiment. Yet beyond these walls are other walls, and beyond those walls are other buildings, and beyond those buildings is an entire world. By sticking to immediate perceptions, they elude the most important part of experimentation: the imagination that goes into crafting a well-designed study.

In pushing them to leave the world of perceptions and enter the imaginative domain, I think they come up with designs so creative that they humble me. One student wore worn clothes, sat on the streets of Philadelphia with a cup, begging for money, with the aim of determining whether males or females were more generous. Another went to 10 bars dressed as himself, and 10 bars dressed in a fat suit, to determine whether there is a relationship between weight and the probability that a woman would accept an offer of a free drink. Another recorded the relationship between wearing a suit or clothes typically worn by urban African American youth would influence the amount of time required for store clerks to approach them at the mall.

I have them do these studies because ultimately, imaginative experiments are far more interesting to read than unimaginative ones. Ones about the influence of wall color on test performance. And I think my students learn a great deal more about the nature of the world by going into it, armed with the tools of psychological science, and listening to what the world has to tell them. And in the end, they express satisfaction and pride, and there are few complaints.

So what does this have to do with the question of psychology graduate school. Well, I think most people, including myself, pursued psychology graduate school because they were psychology undergraduates, and they looked around the classroom, saw graduate student TAs and professors who went to psychology graduate school, and say, “I know what I will do with my life! Go to graduate school in psychology!” But beyond those walls were other majors, and beyond those majors other schools, and beyond those schools and entire world. By limiting oneself to doing what is around you, you risk being unimaginative.

For some, that gamble pays off. For instance, I’ve come, if not to love, to at least appreciate what I do, but I was one of the lucky few. Far more common is the legion of graduate school dropouts who never complete because it was the absolute wrong thing for them to do with their lives. Ever heard of the term A.B.D.? All But Doctorate. Yeah…there are a lot of them out there. Most of them were people who looked around the room, but were afraid to walk outside of it and see that there are myriad things to do with one’s life, and that maybe the right thing to do is to explore alternative paths.

Now this is not to say there are not people out there who are A.B.D. and have extraordinary careers doing things outside of academia. I’ve met some. One owns a multi-million dollar consulting business. Loves what he does. Another owns a car repair shop. Loves what he does. Another is a teacher. Loves what she does. So in the end, for most people, things work out, because even if they don’t, cognitive dissonance covers our asses pretty quickly, because we don’t like to think we’ve made the wrong decisions in life. In an experiment done in a methods class, if you choose an unimaginative study, well it’s over in a semester, and you move on. With your life and career, these are the best years of your life. You don’t want to waste several of them on a failed pursuit.

But I know some miserable A.B.D.s who never found themselves. One is a very angry and bitter bartender. Another is a very angry and bitter law clerk. Another is a very angry and bitter secretary. You don’t want to end up like these folks. No one wants to be around them.

So my first piece of advice is “look beyond the walls.”

My second piece of advice is to look beyond grad school. First, graduate school is a very weird place, and it will warp your mind in a way college doesn’t. I have to confess, I didn’t enjoy graduate school. Maybe graduate school is one of those things not meant to be enjoyed, but more importantly, I didn’t like myself much when I was a graduate student. To this day, I don’t like graduate students very much. I find them to be like myself, an unpleasant mixture of confidence and loathing, ambitious and anxious, hope and despair. They have a mean and hungry look…such men and women are dangerous, particularly when you know they want your job. Has a predatory animal ever looked at you at the zoo? You feel sort of safe, but in the back of your mind you can’t shake the feeling that nothing is stopping that lion from leaping over that moat and jumping over that wall and devouring you? That’s the sense I get when I stumble into a graduate student.

Maybe it is just that time in your life, or being an apprentice at something just sucks because you are so at the whim of your master (or adviser), but if you want to ruin an otherwise perfect evening – hang out with a graduate student. If you want to destroy it, just ask how their thesis project is going.

Ask yourself: what do you want out of life, because it goes by so quickly. Do you want to spend your twenties pursuing a career path that might land you a job at some cow college in rural Idaho, or no job at all? I know many a very talented, yet miserable young academic at such a place, who is trapped there because there is no job market for academics in the city where she dreams of living. It’s sort of sad to see people expire their youths in this way, and become bitter and jaded and ultimately abandon their academic careers because of the stupefying dullness of life in a college towns like Ann Arbor or worse still, sleepy small college towns like Juniata, PA, tucked away in the Pennsyltucky mountains.

There are other interesting things in life. Explore them before committing yourself to the academic pathway! You’re only 21 years old, how the hell are you supposed to know that you want to study perceptual categorization or language development for the rest of your damn life? You’re basically a stupid kid, not because you are innately stupid, but because you lack the years of experience that provide wisdom. Experience a summer unpaid internship at a law firm or court of law. Ask lawyers how their lives are, and what they do, and what their friends do. Go volunteer for a summer at a hospital, and ask doctors and nurses what they do, and what their friends do. See the kind of lives they lead, and ask yourself if this is the kind of life you can see yourself leading. Work in a psychology lab for a summer to see what that’s like. Ask professors what they do, and what their friends do. But at such a young age, don’t commit to anything. People used to start their careers after high school, now everyone needs college, and these days, everyone clamors that you need grad school as well. And that may be true, but you don’t need grad school, you need the right grad school for you. And finding the right one – whether it be a med school, a vet school, a law school, a journalism school, an art school – whatever it is, is the most important task.

But don’t just look around the room, spot me, and think, “I know what I’ll do with my life! I’m going to be a psychology professor!” Because then you will be as unimaginative as I once was, and although I am happy that it worked out well for me (mostly) it may not work out well for you. Because there is a lot more to the job that you don’t see than what you do see in the 2.45 hours a week we are together. You might not even like those other parts, like writing papers, crafting grants, and going to conferences (which I am doing tomorrow – I am spending a weekend in Denver, meeting a group of people who looked around their classrooms and thought, “I know what I’m going to do…”). And I’d hate for you to think of me, years down the road, and wish I had warned you, rather than blindly encourage you.

So consider yourself warned, kid. But if you do decide to go to graduate school, I have five short pieces of advice.

1. Ask lots of questions. You’ll be judged more by the questions you ask than the answers you provide in all of life. But importantly, ask the low people on the totem poll. Ask the lowly undergrad RA what it is like to work in Professor X’s laboratory, or how they perceive they are treated by Professor X. These undergrads, having the least to lose, will have no fear in being honest, and if you bribe them with lunch they might tell you the gossip you need to hear. Why does this matter? Because YOU are going to be that low person on the totem pole once you arrive! And although you think your special, and that what applies to others could never apply to you, you’d be wrong about that.

2. Look at the record of the person whom you hope to work with, and that person’s student. Do they publish many articles with students, or mainly sole authored works. Do they publish a few papers a year, or a few years a paper. Because later on for getting a job, the first place people will look on your CV is your publication record, and if you work with someone who never publishes, and their students never publish, then that section on your CV will be considerably sparse.

3. Work with different people. Don’t stick with one adviser. Have several – two or three. Like suitors, they will all vie for your attention (aka time) and if the relationship with one goes sour, you are not cast adrift in your third or fourth year with no adviser. I’ve seen many an academic career end this way. Don’t put your eggs in one basket unless you like broken eggs.

4. Your relationship with faculty and your fellow students will be valuable for the rest of your life. Do not squander this! Later on, they may be invaluable in ways that you can not imagine sitting in this room. Don’t burn bridges, even if you are thoroughly tempted to.

5. Explore options outside of academia at all junctions. Remember what I said about the room. There is a whole world out there, and things to do that may be far more rewarding than an academic career. Don’t let those of us who haven’t left this room for 40 years of our careers convince you that this is the best room in the house. That’s the biggest mind warp of graduate school – they make you believe the only good you can do on earth is find an academic job and continue publishing research. What they are REALLY are doing is trying to increase their own article impact factor by sending out little clones that form colonies of people who continually cite their original articles and make them appear more important than they are. Remember: There are many rooms, and many houses, and many worlds, and many dreams. You’ll find yours somewhere, even if it is far from here. Just be happy with whatever it is you end up doing.

The day after the big day

2009-01-23T16:37:00.000-08:00

So on January 21, 2009, I went to Washington DC to review grants for the National Science Foundation. But the very day before, January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as president. Everyone at the NSF seemed jubilant (do you know what a jubilee is? It is a biblical term for a celebration in which debts are canceled.)

The very next day, after a long series of discussions over grants, my friend Shannon and I went to see the White House and have dinner. Shannon lives in Puerto Rico with his wife and two kids, who would be thrilled to see a video of their father by the White House so close to the inauguration. I myself have a few friends who would enjoy the fact that I was able to get so close to history, both physically and temporally.

Here they are:

Honestly, I don't know who that angry guy is next to me. From the looks of it, probably a republican...

Next we went to the Lincoln Memorial.

The woman in the pink shirt behind me had a shirt that read "Virginity Rocks!" It was the Pro-Life March on Washington day. Virginity may rock, but unfortunately, it rarely works as a viable long-term strategy for preventing teen pregnancy. Just ask Sarah Palin.

Funny - there was a different air at NSF this time. People were actually happy. Maybe having a leader who doesn't aim to squash scientific progress through polemic and draconian executive orders is a good thing. Maybe now we can begin to do stem cell research and come up with cures to diseases like diabetes and parkinson's. Maybe now we can really begin to address climate change in an intelligent way. Who knows? Maybe we have a president who thinks with his head rather than knows with his heart.

The past eight years have not been great for science. Let's hope the future bings a renewed interest and trust in the value of science. There is no other way.

Going there, and coming home

2009-02-08T16:29:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following two years ago around the time I brought a group of students to Japan. Sometimes I try and break writing blocks by writing more freely, as academic writing is stilted and, well, boring. At least when I write. As I am going there in a few weeks to bring a second batch of students there, I figured I'd post this. The second part is my favorite story from my time in Japan.

I. The man in the moon and the rabbit in the sky

It was Mariko who first alerted me to the fact. I didn’t know a word of Japanese when I first traveled to Japan seven years ago, and so I could hardly have known that the sign in Narita airport did not simply greet travelers with the usual, “Welcome” but rather O-kuni-nasai, “Welcome Home.” But I noticed it this time.

Mariko was one of those people who appear in upon the stage of one’s life for a brief moment, deliver a few important soliloquies, then departs, never to appear in subsequent acts. She was a research assistant in a psychology laboratory at Kyoto University. She was half Japanese and half German, but married to the very idea and notion of Japan. For her, Japan was home. For me, Japan was simply an apartment that I learned to love and regretted giving up the lease once the year was up.

But there we were, thrown together, and spent many an evening talking along the Kamo river that divides Kyoto in half, sitting on stone turtles that span the river near Dematchiyanagi station. There, we sat, and talked in English, a language she hated.

But in one of those moments, she told me an interesting fact. We in the West we look at the night sky and see a man on the moon. In Japan, they see a rabbit on the moon making mochi (a type of Japanese candy). The rabbit's name is tsuki no usagi. And in one of those nights, when the moon was full and hordes of Japanese teenagers set fireworks into the night sky, I tried to see the rabbit, but to no avail. It is difficult to divorce oneself from 25 years of seeing a man on the moon, and suddenly see a rabbit.

But perhaps this is the nature of the work I was doing at the time: to show that in different cultures, we see the world in different ways. On one of those nights, I told Mariko about the fact that different cultures look at the sky and see different constellations. While most of us look at the sky and see the big dipper, the Ancient Egyptians saw a man laying down being pulled by a bull, and a Hippopotamus with a crocodile on its back. The same stimulus, and wildly divergent interpretations. At that time, I had been reading Jerome Bruner’s work from the 1950s on perceptual readiness, the idea that perception is a dynamic and active process, that we construct our percepts by imposing our desires, needs, wants, expectations, and so on, upon the sensory information that we receive. Different people, in different cultures, in different economic conditions, in different historical periods, in different geographic locations, may have a plethora of divergent wants, needs, desires, goals, and expectations, and thus perceive the world in vastly different ways. But I imagine there are some universalities. For instance, I imagine two people are at this very moment sitting on the Turtles of the Kamo River in Kyoto, sharing their dreams. Some things never change. Some things truly are universal.

II. The secret of lost things

There are others who appear for their soliloquies, never to be seen or hear from again. Like Matsuda-san.

I was naked in the sento, sitting in a bath next to a seventy year old Japanese man named Matsuda. I spoke enough Japanese and he enough English that we could get by simply through hobbling together words from both our languages.

“You must be marry, right?”
“No, not married.” I replied.
“But you handsome guy. Girls fall over you.”
“I wish, Matsuda-san! No, I recently broke up with a woman I dated for several years. I thought it would last but life took us in different directions.”
“Ah. Love. Muzukashi, Ne?” (Difficult, isn’t it?)
“Hontoni!” (True!)
“But you have, how do I say, memories are good?”
“Good memories? Of course. Many of them.”

“That’s good to have good memories. When I was child, I had a toy, uh, how do you say…fire truck. I played with many times. But we moved from Tokyo to Kansai region, and somehow during moving it was lost. I still think of this toy, I am a seventy year old man. But it is to me, object of my childhood times when I was very happy. I don’t think I was ever so happy again as in childhood, playing with that toy. But I think the most valuable thing we own in life are the things we lost. I lost fire truck, but I remember many happy times. Same is true for woman. You lose pretty woman, but you gain good memories. Don’t worry about losing things. In losing things, you gain more important things: good memory things. There is nothing more important than good memories. The things you lose in life are the most valuable things you own in life. This is what I believe.”

I remember thinking then that I would never forget this moment on earth, when two naked guys in a bath house in a small neighborhood in Kyoto from vastly divergent worlds spoke. The most important things we own in our lives, on this earth, are the things we have lost. The very beauty of the appreciation of the beauty in things that pass by, rather than stand still, is uniquely Asian. In America, we tend to collect things. Jay Leno has something like 100 classic cars.

Years later I sat at a table in Tokyo with some of my own students who I brought to Japan. They were saddened by the fact that they would soon be leaving the country, with no plans to return. I told them this story. But I reminded them that they can never truly lose Japan, for it is always here as a place to return. You can only miss being home, you can never truly lose it. And I told them that there is nothing more important in life than good memories.

III. Behind closed doors.

There is something special about revealing secrets. Kyoto was my secret. In my time in Kyoto, I walked its streets, ate at its restaurants, danced in its nightclubs, sung karaoke in its bars, hiked its mountains, saw its temples, meditated in its shrines. But Kyoto was always mine, secret memories locked up that I could reveal and no one really ever could understand.

Like the time I stayed at a capsule hotel.
Like the time I ate a live shrimp.
Like the time I met that old man on the train from Hakkodate to Sapporo, we shared about ten words of each other’s language but managed to entertain each other for an hour.
Like the old women of Kyoto, who each morning go outside with their watering cans and water the pavement in front of their houses and sweep the water into the gutter to reduce the dust.
Like the couple who owned the tofu factory down the street, who would marvel at this foreigner buying bricks of tofu.
Like the time I was on a train in Tokyo, and saw a woman whom I felt I must have known in another life. I exited the train when she did, and followed her down the confusing labyrinth of streets until she got to her house. I watched the lights go on and smiled, knowing that in this universe we are not alone. I walked back and continued my journey.
Like the time I walked over fire.
Like the time I stood and watched Chinese characters burning on the mountainside, guiding the ancestors back to the land of the spirits.

All of these things, and more, are part of my secret world. And it is wonderful to have the chance to share my secret world again and again.

Will Universal HIV testing lead to a suicide pandemic?

2007-01-16T08:35:00.000-08:00

I recently read that the CDC has recommended that all people be tested for HIV as part of a routine check up with one’s doctor. You can read about it here. At first I though this was a great idea, that may have important implications for reducing a preventable and incurable disease. But then I read this book, Calculated Risks, by the psychologist Gert Gigerenzer, who is associated with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. I've always wanted to work with the guy, but he has some kind of beef with this other guy I like named Tom Bayes.

Gigerenzer discusses the fact that people are particularly bad at reasoning about probabilities, particularly in respect to understanding base rates. Now, this has long been known since the pioneering studies by Daniel Kanneman and Amos Tversky in the 1970s, but Gigerenzer has followed up on these ideas in new domains.

I recently posed the following scenario to about ten friends:

Imagine you go to your doctor, who informs you that you should take an HIV test as a routine part of your checkup. You are a heterosexual who has been in a few relationships over the past five years, you have never used IV drugs, and you have no other risk factors for HIV. The doctor informs you that the probability of someone like you actually having HIV are quite low, something in the order of 1 in 10,000. He also tells you that the test is 99.99 percent accurate in providing a negative test when the person is actually negative. A week later, you receive a call from the doctor informing you that the test came back positive, indicating that you are infected with HIV.

What would you do? Please circle all that apply.

Commit suicide
Ask to be tested again
Inform your current sexual partner
Do nothing – forget about it.

Given the facts as stated above, what do you believe is the probability that given a positive test, that you actually have acquired HIV?

0%
10%
30%
50%
70%
90%
99%
99.99%

We’ll get to the results of this informal study in a minute. But first, what actually is the probability? The vast majority of people would likely say 99.99%, because the test is 99.99% accurate. However, this is to forget the fact that the actual prevalence rate of the disease is extremely low – 1 in 10,000 or .001 percent of the population in question, is actually HIV positive. Why does this matter?

Well, it matters because of something known as Bayes Theorem. Bayes Theorem is a statistical solution to what is know as the inverse probability problem. The idea is this: The probability of event A conditional on event B is different than the probability of event B conditional on event A. So, the probability of a person being HIV positive given a positive HIV test is different from the probability of having a positive HIV test given the probability of being HIV positive. Bayes Theorum is a mathematical expression of the relationship among these events.

Think of it this way. The HIV test is highly accurate. 99.99 percent of the time, it will give the right answer: HIV + given HIV +, or HIV – given HIV -. But .01 percent of the time, it will give the wrong answer: HIV + given HIV – or HIV – given HIV +.

Gigerenzer argues that one should think of it in terms of frequencies rather than probabilities. He poses the problem this way: 10,000 people go in to have the test. 1 person will test positive and actually be positive. But 1 person (.01 % of 10.000 = 1) will test positive and actually be negative. And 9,998 will test negative and actually be negative. Hence, if you are from a population in which the incidence rate is extremely low, the probability that the test is inaccurate is quite high. In this particular case, it is .50. You have a 50/50 chance of actually being positive if you have a positive result and are from the population in question.

The problem is that even a test with a high degree of accuracy, if used many many times, will once in a while create a false positives and false negatives just by chance. Blood samples may get the wrong identification number, or samples could get polluted, for instance. As much as they might not like to admit it, doctors are not infallible, and neither are the technicians who actually analyze the samples. I’ve made mistakes in analyzing my own data, as my reviewers often, and often unkindly, point out.

But people don’t often think in Bayesian terms, and it is likely that the only time you encounter Bayes Theorem is in that boring college statistics class (like mine), in which it will quickly go in one ear and out the other. (I can hear my students thinking – “Inverse probability – whatever”). But here is the scary thing, from page 121 of Calculated Risks: “At a conference on AIDS held in 1987, former senator Lawton Chiles of Florida reported that of 22 blood donors in Florida who were notified that they had tested HIV-positive with ELIZA [a common test for HIV], 7 had committed suicide…The medical text documenting this tragedy many years later informed the reader that even the results of both AIDS tests (Eliza and Western blot) are positive, the chances are only 50-50 that the individual is infected.”

This blew my mind! What percentage of those 7 people could have been spared their fate by understanding Bayes Theorem and inverse probability? The thing that scares me the most is the question of whether medical professionals who inform their patients of their HIV status actually know how to calculate a Bayesian probability problem themselves, or are trained in this fallacy of the test so that they can accurately inform their patients. To find this out, I informally asked a variety of friends who hold MDs the same question that I asked my friends – the hypothetical senario. None of them gave the correct answer on the spot (then again, I was asking them at parties so they didn't have calculators on hand). However, several of them answered the question partially correctly – one mentioned that you have to take the overall incidence rate into question. But several gave the completely wrong answer – 99.99%! One mentioned, “I remember in medical school that there is some formula that one can use to figure this out, but I suck at statistics and have no idea how to calculate it.”

So this has gotten me thinking: Should we as a society simply mandate generalized HIV testing? Should we not at least consider the fact that people – even doctors, even professors, even statistics professors – are notoriously bad at calculating probabilities, and specifically Bayesian inverse probability problems? How can we better inform patients about their actual probabilities of having diseases?

And how vast is the problem? What about other diagnostic tests? What about in other domains in which people must make judgments?

Returning to my friends, what were their answers?

Well, on the second part, 7 said 99.99%, 1 said 99%, 1 said 90% and only one said 50%. On the first part, 2 said they would commit suicide. All but 2 said that they would get retested, and only three said they would tell their current sexual partner (I would lament about this for a while, but the fact is that this evidence isn’t fair as I didn’t acquire information as to whether any of them actually have a current sexual partner, but this is an entirely different issue that wouldn’t fit on the margin of this page.)

So let's pretend that my informal sample was a real sample (big leap of faith considering the various raffish and seedy characters I consider my friends) and say that 20% of people would commit suicide if they received a positive HIV test. Imagine we test all 300,000,000 people in the U.S. That's a lot of needles! Just by chance alone, 3,000,000 would test positive and actually be negative. Of those, 600,000 (20% of 3,000,000) would kill themselves. In 2002, 16,000 people in the U.S. perished due to the AIDS epidemic. We could in a single year increase the death rate due to AIDS by some 375.00%. Simply by having universal testing. And the really not funny thing is that 1,500,000 of these people are not even infected with HIV, but were victims of our reliance and confidence in the medical establishment.

If the CDC goes through with this plan, I hope they have better statistics professors than I teaching health care providers how to talk Bayesian with their patients.

I'll have some love with that microscopic $9.95 piece of salmon

2007-01-16T08:36:00.000-08:00

A student of mine once did an experiment using this web site called "Craig's List Missed Connections." Basically, it is a site in which people post notes to the universe that say things like, "I saw you walking down the street and you glanced at me. You were wearing a red hat and a green scarf...coffee?" And so if you think you are this person you can email this individual back and hopefully begin a life of love and lust together. That, or realize you have absolutely nothing to discuss over coffee.

Recently I was reading this site (perhaps perversely to see if someone posted something about that guy in the coffee shop cursing SPSS under his breath when the p value for his most recent experiment is greater than .05.) One thing I’ve noticed in passing through these listings is how there are many posts about missed connections at Whole Foods - the local hip foodstore in my neighborhood.

But this has gotten me into wondering…what is it about Whole Foods that inspires people into longing? Is it something about the air of an organic, expensive grocery store that makes people lust after strangers? Is it that only well-to-do people who can afford well-to-do people’s clothing and well-to-do people’s makeup and well-to-do people’s hair styling can afford shopping at the place? Or is it a unique place in this world - a world in which we communicate so often over the internet that we no longer know how to approach a stranger and say hello, but have to go back to our internet world and post a little "I think I saw you looking at me, but I am not sure and I'm oh so insecure!

(Here I would like to add that such people should read the excellent paper by Clark and Hatfield (1989) in which they had experimenters go around Florida State University's campus and randomly ask strangers if they would go out on a date with them that night. Something like 60 percent said yes! Could be something unique to Floridians, though.)

I wanted first to determine if there was an effect at all. I did a quick search and found that in the past 45 days on craigslist there were none less than 37 postings of missed connections at whole foods. But right next door to whole foods is a regular old supermarket known as Superfresh. How many quick glances and subtle smiles have been exchanged there? Only 8. And this includes all the Superfreshes in the city.

I figured I would try different cities. Let’s try Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I know has a Whole Foods because I used to shop there. They also have Kroeger’s, the Ann Arbor equivalent to Superfresh. 1 hit for whole foods, none for Kroeger. I tried Chicago…5 for whole foods, 1 for Dominick’s (there are dozens of Dominicks out there)

What is the probability that this could be due to chance? I'll stick to the Philadelphia one because it has the most data. Imagine that it were purely due to chance that sightings would occur at Whole Foods and at Super Fresh. Then the expected probability would be .50 - a fifty-fifty chance. What we observe is 8/37 or a 0.21 percent sightings at Superfresh. What are the odds that this is due to chance? Luckily, we have the good old binomial test to tell us the odds. The actual probability that this could be due to chance is 0.000007687045. That's a very small odds! There is something fishy going on, and I don't just mean the salmon I ate for dinner. That I bought at Whole Foods.

I suggest you experimentaholics and statistiphiles try this in your own cities. And if I see a post for that guy talking about Chi square at the produce section, I’ll know I’ve finally been missed.

The possible and the probable

2007-01-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

I spent the last few days at the National Science Foundation reviewing grants. Truth be told - you know you're nerdy when you walk into a restaurant after having forgotten to remove one's NSF temporary ID badge reading "Hello, my name is experimentaholic." and are reminded of this fact by an attractive yet not-so-nerdy restaurant hostess. Reviewing grant applications, in and of itself, in not very much fun, because I simply don't like being the one who decides who gets funded and who doesn't. I think everyone should get funded, myself included! But this is not the state of affairs - only some get funded, others get the apology letter. And I've gotten my share of those thin ones.

Which brings me to the topic of the probable and the possible. What does probability mean? For instance, these people who wrote grants submit them, and there is a certain probability that they will get funded, which is based on how much money NSF has to dish out. They also have a certain expectation of the probability that their grant will get funded, which may differ from that which is actually possible given the availability of funds.

But what does it mean to expect an event with a certain probability? Like dying on a plane crash. The probability of this event is quite low - something on the order of one in eight million. So we get on the plane, and most of the time, get off the plane. But when you get on that one plane that explodes, and you ARE that one in eight million, the probability is not quite 1 but certainly close to it. But what does uncertainty mean, at least at the level of a psychological construct?

I know that there is a lot of evidence on this - and most of it points to the fact that people are particularly bad at assessing probabilities and changing their behaviors based upon these assessments. People drove after 9/11 out of fear of flying, and this increase of traffic and the resulting accidents that ensued killed more people than had died on the planes of 9/11. True! I buy a lottery ticket when the powerball is in the hundreds of millions, realizing full well that the probability of actually winning is the same as correctly guessing a random a number between zero and 120,526,770.

I am at the moment in a coffee shop, it is a Friday night, and two students next to me are discussing Spinoza, and specifically free will. This makes me wonder about our free will in relation to our assessment - and flawed assessments - of probabilities. I have always dreaded flying, even knowing that the probability of dying is the same probability of guessing a number correctly between zero and eight million. But what if I am just lucky (or unlucky) that day? Everyone who has ever died in a plane crash has gotten on that plane imagining that the probability of a crash was one in eight million. Which is fine, if you're a member of that elite group of eight million. But if you're not, not.

One way to think about it perhaps is actuarially. When you get on a plane, you have to think of the degree to which taking this trip will actually reduce your life. A related situation is when you buy a lottery ticket. A lottery ticket is really worth what you paid for it, plus whatever the probability of winning the ticket multiplied by the reward. Imagine the senario of the powerball. The ticket costs $1. The jackpot is 100 million But the real value of the ticket is $1 + $100,000,000 X 1/120,526,770. Which is $1.82. Of course, afterwards, any given ticket is either worth $0 or $100,000,000...but in the seconds before the balls drop, it is worth $1.82. What about one's life? The probability of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 8 million. As a thirty year old, I expect (or I should say hope) to live another 30 years at least. More would be better. 30 years comes out to 946,080,000 seconds. But by getting on that plane I am reducing my life by 946,080,000 seconds X 1/8000000 or 118.26 seconds. Of course, after the plane lands or crashes, that amount changes to 0 seconds or 946,080,000 seconds. Is it worth it? Does this way of looking at the problem solve the problem, or just create new ones?

Which brings me back to free will. Does the fact that we live in uncertain world make it such that our free will is compromised? I don't know. How does our inability to reason about probabilities affect our decisions? Probably in some domains, probably not in others. Some people are notoriously bad at making comparative judgments of probabilities and possibilities - those who drove rather than fly after 9/11, who are now in the grave or scattered to the winds because their dread risk overcame their rational capacities.

In this sense, statistical probability and mental probabilities must be related, but they are not homologies. Keyes wrote something about this, on personal probability, but I confess I haven't read it, yet. Perhaps I'll read it someday. It's both possible and probable.

Hope springs eternal in the Garden of Eden

2007-01-22T18:07:00.000-08:00

I was speaking with a friend yesterday about relationships. The conversation we were having was about the fact that just because your last relationship was bad and ended bitterly, how does that influence how you think about future relationships? Not all relationships end in misery, right? ("Just mine" you might be thinking...)

I suspect that the solution to this problem can be found,as always, in an unexpected place: probability theory. There is an appropriately-named statistical problem discussed by the French mathematician Pierre Simon LaPlace (1749-1827) called the “First Night in Paradise." Basically it goes like this:

It is the night after Adam and Eve’s first day in paradise. Together, they watch the sun rise and illuminate the marvelous trees, flowers, and birds. At some point, the air gets cooler, and the sun sank below the horizon. Will it stay dark forever? Adam and Eve wonder, What is the probability that the sun would rise again tomorrow?

Whether Adam and Eve were truly discussing this statistical conundrum, as opposed to addressing less cerebral concerns of a non-probabilistic nature, is besides the point. What is the probability that the sun will rise again?

The classic answer is that if Adam and Eve had never seen the sun rising, they would assign equal probabilities to both outcomes. Gigerenzer, in his book Calculated Risks, likens it to placing a white marble (the sun will rise again) and a black marble (the sun will not) into a bag, and picking one randomly. However, they did witness the sun rise once that morning when they woke up, so they place another white marble in the bag, which makes the probability of the sun rising the next day .66.

(Interestingly, as an aside, one might ask the question, "What was Adam's subjective assessment of the probability that Eve would still be there the next morning?" After all, she did simply just appear there, and who knows? God might just be teasing him and yank her out of the garden.)

As we, know, Adam and Eve woke from that first night in paradise to another sunny day in paradise. But what is the probability now, given two sunrises, that the sun would rise once again the next day? The answer is simple. They add another white marble to the bag, making the probability go up to .75. And the sun rises again and another marble goes in the bag, and so on. This is known as the rule of succession. Introduced by LaPlace, it has a simple formula:

(n+1)/(n+2)

If you are like me, and are thirty odd years old, the subjective probability that I assign to the sun rising tomorrow is quite high. Specifically it is

(365*30 + 1) / (365*30 + 2) = 10951 / 10952 = .99990869247626004. Pretty good odds. I am, in fact, relatively convinced that the sun also rises tomorrow.

But what about relationships? Does the law of succession apply here? What is the probability, given a certain number of previous relationships, that you believe that your next one is headed to splitsville? It is just like adding white balls representing sucess and black balls representing failure to a jar and selecting one.

I asked ten friends and colleagues today how many serious relationships they had been in over the course of their lives. The median value of that number was 7 – your typical friend of mine has been in 7 serious relationships (which I defined as lasting over 6 months).

What is the average person’s subjective estimate of the probability of the next relationship ending given the rule of succession? Quite simple: (7 + 1) / (7 + 2) = 8 / 9 = .888.

So is it the case that with a greater number of failed relationships, does one use the law of succession to determine whether one’s next relationship is going to fail? Maybe. This would be an interesting study to conduct – the correlation between the number of failed relationships one has had with one’s pessimism about the probability that one’s next relationship is also going to fail. Of course there are confounds up the wazoo, but it would be a fun and simple study to do on a larger scale than my ten friends.

But there is hope here. While you might suspect that your next relationship will fail with a probability of .88, that means that you also have a probability of .12 that the next one will work out. And I like that 12 percent – I might like to call it a “Hope Factor.” Sure, the hope factor diminishes after every successive failure, but by definition, this means that one can never lose hope entirely – the law of succession may asymptote very near zero, but it never quite reaches it, due to the fact that the denominator is always one greater than the numerator. Below is a figure of the relationship between the hope and despair factors by the number of failed relationships. You can see how the region of despair increases with every sucessive failed relationship, but that region of hope never quite goes away.

As they say: Hope springs eternal! And perhaps this is why it was the last evil remaining in Pandora's Box.

Principles of indifference

2007-01-25T11:21:00.000-08:00

It’s happened to you, I’m sure, as it has happened to me. You go about your life, working on your computer, editing files, processing data. You don’t get up in the morning thinking that today will be the day. The day that you fire up your computer, with all the hopes of getting that paper written, and instead are faced with the Blue Screen of Death. A message blinks “Can not find hard drive” or something equally vague and frightening.

It happened to me one winter evening in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was a post-doc. I hadn’t backed up any of my files for about six months. I restarted my Mac after it wouldn’t connect to the internet and . . . it never started again. Blank screen. I took it to dealers, tech support…nothing. Someone offered $5,000 to try and salvage the data off the hard drive, but I figured it wasn’t worth it. I could start from scratch, having learned an important lesson. But I lost hundreds of hours of time rewriting papers, reanalyzing data, and piecing together all that I had lost. Fortunately, some of the stuff was recoverable – colleagues who had drafts of manuscripts emailed me the files. But a lot was lost forever.

I ran into our friendly computer tech support director Harold the other day. It is because of Harold’s relentless campaign on backing up data that inspired me to burn all my work onto a CD every week. But it makes me wonder about the psychology involved in backing up one’s data. Even after my experience, I still don’t always back up my data. Some Fridays I just feel like going home – “I’ll do it tomorrow.” And I suppose one of these tomorrow’s I will fire up the machine and get that screen of death.

And who will I call? Harold. And often, what can Harold do? Nothing. This is not because Harold isn’t a great IT person – it is because Harold isn’t Zeus and can not pull a dues ex machina, coming down to earth and intervening with the ones and zeros that constitute the information on the hard drive.

I recently wrote a post about LaPlace’s 1822 Rule of Succession. Gigerenzer talks about a related notion to the Rule of Succession known as the Principle of Indifference. It basically has to do with what probability you assign to the possibility of an event given no prior knowledge. Recall my discussion of HIV infection – you can apply Bayes Theorem to situations in which you know the base rate – or frequency of – an prior probability, such as the proportion of people of a certain population that is infected with HIV. However, when you don’t know this prior probability, you are faced with a situation of indifference in which you assign equal probabilities to the likelihood of an event.

Electronics tend to follow an inverse power law in terms of their life-span. That is, take a hundred iPods. Once they leave the factory, 100 of them work. A month later, 99 work (i.e., you may have dropped it in the toilet by accident). A year later 80 of them work, and so on, until only 1 is still working some years down the line. And this is okay, because electronics are replaced with newer gadgets. But it is the probability of failure I am concerned with here: All electronic devices will someday fail. But why are we so confident that on any given time that you shut down your machine without backing up your data, that tomorrow when you start it, that the machine will in fact work rather than result in the blue screen of death.

I think the answer has to do with the law of succession, the same problem faced by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. When you first buy your computer and turn it on, it is as if your computer gives you a white marble which you place in a box. Already in the box is a Blue Marble of Death, because you don’t know whether or not it will ever turn on again as it could be a lemon. Every time you start your computer and it works, your computer gives you another white marble from its box which you place in yours. Eventually your box will contain a lot of white marbles, representing your confidence in your computer.

But your computer doesn’t see it this way. Your computer is doing something different. It starts off with a lot of white marbles in its box, and one blue marble of death. And every time you turn it on, it selects a white marble from the box, and doesn’t replace it – it gives it to you, improving your confidence in it. So it may begin with a thousand white marbles and one blue marble of death. And the next time you turn it on, it selects a marble from its box. With high probability it is a white marble. But with every successive selection from this box, the probability increases and increases that the blue marble will be chosen until that day when suddenly, and unexpectedly, you turn on the computer, with a very high confidence in it working, while simultaneously, the computer selects the blue marble.

The result? You’re screwed.

The following figure provides a depiction of the expected probability that you have that your computer will start given a certain number of prior starts (by the rule of succession), the expected probability that your computer will select the blue ball of death randomly without replacement on any given start up. And then we encounter the real world. This hypothetical computer selected the white ball of hope all the way up to reboot 77. Then, on reboot 78, the computer selected the Blue Ball of Death, and CRASH! There went your work (unless you backed it up).

Do we reason this way? People are bad as assessing the probability and success and failure, which is why do many people gamble despite the odds. Hope springs eternal in the Garden of Eden, in Atlantic City, and in your office. But even with all the hope in the world, there comes a day when your luck runs out. It could happen on the 78^th time, on the 788^th time, or the 7888^th time. But it WILL happen. And you can either lose three hours of your life, or three years.

Your choice.

Notes from a fellow experimentaholic

2007-01-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

One of the world's most famous experimentaholics was the British polymath Sir Francis Galton. Galton had a fetish for measuring, and he measured everything, from people's heights to their attractiveness to their intelligence to their fingertips. It was galton who first came up with the notion of regression to the mean, a common occurance such that people who do well on a test tend to do worse the second time one takes a test, and those who do really bad improve on the second. This has to do with the fact that people who do very well are smart, plus had a little luck. Test them again, and they may not be so lucky. Galton came up with the correlation coefficient and other handy statistical tools. He also was the father of eugenics, something perhaps not to be so proud about.

However, in leafing through issues of the journal Nature from a hundred odd years ago, I found this curious little solution to a common problem: the fact that one can have one's cake and eat it too, but not having the appetite to finish the whole thing. The problem is that those cut parts that lay exposed to air get stale. A common problem. Well, apparently, a "F.G." devised the solution described in the following Letters to Nature section. On further investigation, I discovered that our curious cake consumer F.G. is none other than Francis Galton himself!

This goes to show - it was easier back in the day to get something published in Nature. If only that were the case today!

Experiments in Punditry

2007-02-01T17:46:00.000-08:00

I recently appeared as a talking head on an hour-long cable news show concerning a bill introduced in California that would ban spanking. I was asked if I would make some points as to the limitations of the bill, which I agreed to, so long as I could clarify that I was anti-spanking and that there are many alternatives to corporal punishment that are more effective and less harmful.

But then what problem do I have with a bill banning spanking? Well, basically I believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If we as a society really care about children, we should teach children how to be good parents – by being good parents ourselves, and by developing programs that teach pregnant women and their partners and families about the challenges of raising children, and how to deal with all the stresses inherent in being a parent. To intervene AFTER the spank has occurred, as this law does is pointless – for whatever harm is inherent in spanking (if any) is already done, when the entire harm could have been avoided in the first place if we only took the steps of educating people before the harm occurs. Also, there are many people who are unfit to be parents, and they need to be discouraged from fostering children until they are ready to be assume what amounts to one of the most difficult social roles imaginable.

We could go on for hours about semantic issues related to the meaning of a spank versus abuse, ontological issues related to what is discipline and punishment, teleological issues related to what is the aim of good or bad parenting, epistemological issues related to how we learn to practice parenthood, and so on. That is an issue for another blog.

My main concern has to do with the use and abuse of research to put forth an agenda and the nature of scientific objectivity. The other guests with whom I was discussing these issues, while I respected their thoughts and viewpoints, all had some agenda. For instance, one was a member of the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative think tank. The other owned a company that runs programs that teaches parenting skills. What struck me was the extent to which these individuals were emotionally invested in the issue. I never really thought much about spanking, because there seems to be larger issues at hand – pardon the pun – such as child physical and sexual abuse. But I respect that in certain cultural contexts, spanking is a normative practice, and even if in some cultures it may not be prescriptive, to apply a universal standard would be to ignore the fact that parental discipline occupies a complex cultural space in which various factors – cultural, social, educational, economic, sociological, and so on – intersect. The inner workings of the family is not a sphere in which a “one size fits all” policy seems appropriate.

I have always taken issue with extremes. “Anything goes” and “Nothing goes” seem to be fruitless approaches towards thinking through most problems. But I believe that the vast majority of people, the vast majority of the time, shy away from thinking through an issue but rather feel through it. Steven Corbert was onto something when he popularized the term truthiness. Most people’s convictions are based upon how they feel, not how they think, and often what we feel we should do, and what we really should do, are in stark contrast. Too many people trust their guts, and unless you are a gourmand, you probably should question what your stomach tells you.

So it was kind of fun to be on television. They had a make-up lady do my face and hair - it was the first time I had to wear makeup since that time in graduate school when I went to a party in drag. There were lights and cameras and satellite hook-ups and all sorts of interesting things. I went into this with one thought in my mind: “Imagine the hypocrisy of a state that practices the ultimate form of corporal punishment – the death penalty – trying to outlaw spanking.” It didn’t set well with the liberal side of me. But neither does spanking children. I do regret one thing that I said…that one alternative to spanking is distracting children – that children have short attention spans and that if they want to touch a hot stove, to distract them with something else, like the television.”

I want to officially say here that I think that spanking is far better than forcing a child to watch the garbage that counts as television these days. I had a nightmare last night of parents following the sage advice of Professor Experimentaholic and putting their children in front of Bill O’Reilly's No Spin Zone. Now there should be a law against THAT. I'd be the first in line to vote for that.

At another level, I guess I am being a bit hypocritical because I say this after having appeared on television myself. Oh well.

I don’t think I would ever make a very good pundit. Pundits tell you what to think, not how to think. Pundits tell you what is right from wrong, not how to determine for oneself what is right and wrong. Any bit of knowledge or wisdom that I could tell you in 30 seconds or less is probably not knowledge or wisdom worth having.

But what I didn’t get to talk about is the nature of the research on corporal punishment, the vast majority of which is fundamentally flawed. The main flaw comes in the form of mistaking correlation for causation. The vast majority of these studies do something like this: Get a group of parents and ask them whether they spank their child, or how frequently, or how hard. Then they measure behavioral problems in the two groups of children, do some multiple regression with dummy variables, and find that children of parents who spank them exhibit more behavioral problems. Then the wise researcher then goes and says that spanking causes behavioral problems. The problem with this approach should be apparent immediately to anyone since Aristotle’s Metaphysics. With this quasi-experimental design, you can not say that the spanking causes behavioral problems because it is equally possible that children with behavioral problems are more likely to get spanked. To do the study right, you need to take a group of new parents, and divide them into two groups – one who spank their children, and one that is prohibited from spanking, and measure the outcome. However, quite fortunately, I doubt there is an institutional board out there that would be willing to allow researchers to tell a group of women who wouldn’t spank their children to do so, and with vigor!

So we are left with some pretty questionable causal links. (There are a number of other problems I won’t go into, such as the fact that parents who spank their kids also are more likely to abuse them, which is not to say that spanking is a gateway practice into abuse, which is again another causal misinterpretation). And I don’t mind studies with poor causal links: they lead you down the path to more careful empirical investigations. My only fear is that given this fact, people – people with Ph.D.s and official-sounding titles at important-sounding institutions who really should know better than to pull this kind of nonsense - seem willing to make sweeping interpretations and inferences based on this paucity of available data. And the only rationale I can come to is that they were convinced of interpretations of the data long before they ever looked at any data of any kind. It doesn’t matter what the data says when you approach it with the zealotry of a pundit. You’ll find what you want in it – it will be like a Rorschach test. And you will always find what you want in your data when you have a vested financial or spiritual interest in the outcome. It’s not even worth citing a study, or citing research, or even pretending that you are even doing science at all.

I caution the reader, as I caution my research methodology class, that warning bells should start ringing in your head when any talking head says, “Research shows that…” or “Studies have determined that…” or variants thereof. What research? Which studies? Are there studies that show the opposite effect? Who did them? Who funded them? How were they collected? Who were the participants? Who were the interviewers? What scales were used? The devil is in the details, and I don’t want to start basing social policy or law or putting people in jail or funding some guy’s company that teaches parenting skills based upon poorly constructed and controlled quasi-experiments. Or worse still, evaluations of former participants of such programs. Or the fact that the president of this company has several lovely children who he never laid a hand upon and who have grown up to become well-adjusted productive members of society. This isn’t evidence of anything. But to parade this as evidence seems to me to be about as dubious as the kind of claims made by alternative resistance exercise machines, diet pills that will make you lose 10 pounds a week, and dead Nigerian kings whose heirs have to remove $10,000,000 from the country.

If I had my thirty seconds of sage advice, it would be this: I think one needs to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. Likewise, it is useful to have convictions, but you shouldn’t let those convictions lead you blindly down the road to conclusions. And it is easy to be a talking head, but a head not attached to a solid body of empirical data and carefully designed research should have its microphone turned off.

Reviews Blues

2007-06-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

So, I seriously got a case of the reviews blues, and I got a tell you, it hurts so bad. I could sing a song about it, to a blues rift. I received a set of reviews from a journal asking me to basically go back to conceptual square one and redesign this entire piece of work. And run more Experiments. Normally, running experiments makes me warm and fuzzy inside, but it is summer, and there are no students around to serve as subjects. So the paper will have to lay dormant until the start of subject pool time.

I recently presented some data at the Association for Psychological Science conference in Washington, D.C. I like the conference because it is filled mainly with people of an experimental sort – not those clinical folks. Not that I have a problem with clinical psych – some of my best friends are clinicians! (I love that excuse) But if another person says, “Are you analyzing me?” when they find out I’m a psychologist…there will be hell to pay. But the highlight for me was meeting my doppelganger – a professor from the Midwest who falls asleep reading statistics books, and not just to read something so boring that she falls asleep, but because she loves statistics. Mmmm. My kind of person! She actually did something really cool – she taught a statistics course that had a service learning component in which the students created this large project to eliminate plastic bag waste. You can read about it here. I’m sold on the idea because I am sick of all the plastic bags crammed in my closet.

So in the meantime, I sit and peruse the internet, when I stumbled upon this great website called edge.com that is a community of people who are much smarter than I am. Every year the host of the website posts a question for people smarter than I to answer, questions of a metaphysical nature. In 2005 the question was the following:

“What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

The answers to this question are intriguing – and worth reading. (You can find the answers at the Edge Foundation website above). But this got me into thinking how I would answer the question.

My first response is that basically everything I believe to be true I can not prove. I don't even know if there really is anything I can prove to be true, but rather, I can only tell you how likely something I found to be true will replicate if you try to figure it out for yourself. But I believe I am composed of 70 percent water, I believe water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atoms, I believe that atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and that protons are composed of quarks, and so on. But I can prove none of it. I accept it as truth because I have no real reason to doubt these beliefs, and I don’t see how anyone has anything to gain by foolishly making me believe these falsehoods (perhaps the corporate entity that makes the VitaminWater I drink religiously?) But this is a somewhat unsatisfying answer – a cop out, if you will. The following is a list of some of the things I truly believe but can not prove, but wish I could.

Destiny is for the most part a series of random accidents one can not predict

Who are you? I am a cognitive-developmental-cultural psychologist who studies memory, spatial reasoning, and culture’s effects on the mind. I am also a pianist, a painter, a photographer, and on some rare days a writer. But how did it come to pass that these things came to identify me?

That I am now a professor of psychology is a total accident. Once, while an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was walking through a building. I could have taken a shortcut through a quad, but I decided to take the longer route for no real reason. In walking down the hallway, I noticed a help wanted sign for a lab technician in a psychology laboratory. Needing a bit of cash, I took the number down, called, and was interviewed and hired. The job was boring - transcribing hundreds of hours of videos of children interacting with parents – but the professor noticed that I worked hard and encouraged me with posing that I work on an idea that eventually became my M.A. thesis.

I often wonder about the person I didn’t become – that moment the universe divided and in this alternative world that person who once was me took the shorter route. I wonder what his destiny would have been. Maybe I would be here (here is a coffee shop in the Bella Vista neighborhood in Philadelphia) or maybe I would be somewhere completely different. Either way, my feeling tends to be that we would like to believe in destiny because it makes the universe seem purposeful. I’d rather simply accept the world I happened to stumble into.

People do not differ in intelligence, they only differ in their intrinsic motivation to come up with correct answers

People do not differ in intelligence. This is the great error with our national fetish for testing and ranking, quantifying without truly understanding what the numbers mean. One’s I.Q. score may say something about a person, but it is not any intrinsic and innate level of cognitive abilities. It is rather a habitual and chronic level of motivation for trying hard enough to answer questions correctly.

Now, this claim is in a way is a notational variant of intelligence – you could say that if they both have the same predictive power, why chose motivation over intelligence? However, it is very different from an ontological perspective, and the implications for pedagogy is enormous. You can not change one’s innate level of cognitive ability, but you certainly can change their level of motivation.

Babies are far stupider than many developmental psychologists claim, but they have enormous potential

I recently attended a conference in which one fellow was claiming that babies have an innate sense of helping and hurting behaviors, another was claiming that they could solve complex statistical and mathematical problems, and another was saying that infants can judge the intentions of others. Some of these guys I consider my friends. However, I can’t help but wonder why it is the case that a 6 month old infant can solve probability problems, but my 20 year old undergraduates struggle like it is solving Fermat’s Theorem. And as I see it: either the developmental folks are simply wrong, or we get stupider as we get older.

I truly believe that babies start out just like John Locke stated – a blank slate. But not any old blank slate…a slate with lines already carved onto it. These lines are the hardwiring of what will eventually be a rich and complicated system of interacting systems and mechanisms. But there is nothing there are the beginning. There is nothing there in the genes that we can consider to be representational knowledge. And what gets written onto those lines of this blank slate are some kind of universal language that has to do with the universal experience of being a baby – learning to see and perceive the world, act upon and within it, and ultimately, come to understand that the probability of getting heads or tails with the flip of a fair coin are 50-50. We come prepared to learn a great deal about the world, but I can not buy the claim that we come hardwired with a rich set of conceptual schemes.

White Capri pants are an evolutionary mistake

White Capri pants universally make anyone wearing them look terrible. I don’t know why this is, but I have never seen someone wearing white Capri pants and said, “Wow, that person looks great!” Perhaps it is something local, having to do with my own fashion preferences, but I think there is more to it than that because I’ve had many a discussion with many a man and have not yet once met someone who hasn’t held the same opinion.

You are almost there

This is a fortune from a fortune cookie that I keep in my wallet. I opened this one in Chicago, in China Town, shortly before I left the chains and shackles of graduate school. I believed then that I was almost there. I believe now that I am almost there. And I believe you, too, are almost there. I don’t where there is for me, nor do I know where there is for you, but it is comforting for both of us to know that it is approaching. I hope it is beautiful for me. I hope it is beautiful for you.

Experimentaholic discovers a new force in the universe!

2007-06-20T15:10:00.001-07:00

Leg day. There is nothing worse than leg day.

So ever since my semester ended, I have been spending more time at my gym. I generally don’t have much time for working out during the semester, but summer means time to try and avoid the ravages of time by exercise. Once you turn 25 apparently you lose a pound of muscle and gain a pound of fat per year. Lord knows I’m fat enough already to know that I don’t need another pound of fat come January, so there I go. But the other day I was really annoyed about going, since it was leg day.

Leg day is the day everyone hates, the day when you throw several hundred pounds on the barbell and do squats, or hold dumb bells and do lunges. Arm day is easy. Leg day just blows. But one thing I have noticed recently is that most men skip the leg exercises. They have skinny legs but massive chests and arms, which is obviously because they only do chest and arm exercises. But women don’t seem to skip those leg exercises – there are generally many women doing the ass and thigh machines. With one exception.

Over a month ago, when I started to go to the gym more regularly, I ran into this woman named Kelly. Kelly is stunningly beautiful. Tall, dark hair, gorgeous eyes, she could be mistaken for an actress. (She is actually a fashion model and aspiring actress…I know this only because we once got into a conversation because we were both wearing the same university tee shirt.) Kelly is one of those women who does her leg exercises quite regularly. And suddenly one day I noticed something rather perplexing about the nature of the universe. First, I noticed Kelly was doing her leg exercises. But then I noticed that there were several men, also doing leg exercises. I thought, “Wait a minute – that section is usually empty!” The next day…same thing. The following day, yet again.

Then, I had an epiphany. Maybe there is a new physical force in the universe, akin to gravity, that emanates solely from Kelly. Let’s call it the Kelly Field. It is a physical force that somehow attracts men to go to the leg section of the gym and work away those chicken-legs. I felt like Newton, but instead of an apple that struck me, it was a dumb bell.

I began to wonder how I could test whether Kelly was the source of a new force field that should be further investigated by more empirical studies, or whether this effect was merely due to chance or coincidence. So I designed a little experiment to test the hypothetical existence of the Kelly Field. Whenever I saw Kelly doing leg exercises, I counted the number of men and the number of women who would also be doing leg exercises. But after about two seconds of thinking, I realized this is not a very good experimental design: One needs a control condition. Maybe it is the case that when anyone – not just Kelly - goes into the leg section, that it attracts men to that section of the gym. So I had to have an alternative hypothesis…the existence of a Experimentaholic Field. If it were the case that anyone going to the leg section would attract men, then when I go to the leg section I would find just as many men working their legs as when Kelly was working out in that section. So I simply began to count the number of men in the leg section when Kelly was working out there, and the number of men when I was working out there. I eliminated a possible confound by never doing leg exercises when Kelly was doing leg exercises. Unlike other men, I was somehow unaffected by this force field, or at least could resist it at times.

At the end of three weeks, I had tallied the following totals over the course of 10 observations of Kelly and Experimentaholic. Below is a chart with the actual counts

Kelly: Men = 20, Women = 14

Experimentaholic: Men = 3, Women = 18

As can be seen in the contingency table above, there were far more men doing leg exercises in the presence of Kelly than in the presence of Sean. But this could be due to chance, right? How can one tell?

Well, the British statistician Karl Pearson saved the day when he came up with the formula for the Chi-Square test. Chi square allows you to determine whether there are associations among binary variables are likely to be due to chance. I ran the test, and found that the Chi Square test showed that the probability of such a large discrepancy in the number of men versus women working on their legs in the presence of Kelly versus Sean being due to chance is extremely low…like one in ten thousand. So the effect is real: there actually is a Kelly Field.

I wonder about the mechanism behind the Kelly Field. Does it work like gravity, and that its effect is a function of the squared distance between Kelly and men? Or is it something more like magnetism? Will we someday be able to throw out the theory of the Kelly Field and replace it with a Quantum Kelly Relativity Theory? Or a String Theory of Kelly? Only further investigations into the Kelly Field will provide us with these answers.

Currently I am working on my manuscript for the journal Science about this.

Actually, I’ll get to it once I get back from the gym.

Finding the missing piece

2007-07-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

Summer is time for love, and I offer you an analysis of the probability of meeting your soul mate. In his Symposium, Plato writes that people were originally both male and female. To prevent them from acquiring the power of the Gods, Zeus cut them in half. Life then became for humans a search for the other half that was lost, in order for them to once again attempt to ascend Mount Olympus.

It is a pretty story, and one that resonates with many a New Age follower’s conception of love. Even if it doesn’t quite jive with reality. But why not?

The reason once again has to do with probability. There is a well known problem in the statistics literature called the Birthday Paradox. Basically, the paradox questions, “How many people do you need to put into a room to get a 50% chance that two of the people have the same birthday?” The answer to this is 23. Therein lies the paradox – this seems like a very small number. Most people intuitively think that one needs to have 365/2 or 183 people in the room. But that intuition is wrong. The true formula is as follows:

N = .5 + SQRT((.25 + 2 * 365 * ln(2))

I would like to generalize this problem to the question of finding one’s soul mate. Specifically, the question I address is how many people would you have to include in a room for there to be a 50% chance that any two people in the room were once joined at the hip before Zeus took his shears and sliced them apart? Now, this assumes that the people in the room were randomly selected from the entire world population, which is approximately six billion people. The answer to this is simple, and follows the formula above:

N = .5 + SQRT((.25 + 2 * 6,000,000,000 * ln(2)) = 91,202

Wow! It would take a room of 91,202 people for there to be a 50% chance that any two people in that room were actually soul mates. One would have to have a pretty big room, perhaps as large as this room, which fits over 100,000 people.

Imagine a speed dating service in which you have five minutes to talk with every other person in this room. For those two lucky halves to actually have a chance to meet, the speed dating round would have to last for 91,202*5 minutes, which comes out to 316.67 days. All for only two of those 91,202 people to meet. This says nothing of the 91,200 people who leave Michigan Stadium brokenhearted or satisficing with someone who is not their other half.

But that doesn’t help you, dear reader, who doesn’t care about any two people encountering their soul mate, but rather about the probability that YOU will meet your soul mate. Well, the problem is that to calculate this, one would require a supercomputer that can handle a hell of a lot more decimal places than my humble Dell laptop. Needless to say, you would need a room about as big as this place to have a 50% chance of meeting your other half.

What does this tell you? Well, quite simply, you have about as much of a chance of meeting your other half as you do winning the powerball lottery. Either that, or the search for love isn’t a search for that one soul mate that Zeus cut from your side, but that any of a number of possible other halves fit approximately well enough that they can serve as soul mates. I tend to believe this is the case, because I know many a person who has claimed to have met their soul mate, and I know the probability of this actually occurring has about a snowball’s chance in hell. And whether or not I believe in soul mates matters very little. I do believe in probability!

But I tend to be hopeful. And I am a romantic who enjoys Greek mythology. I know my other half is wandering around out there. Of this I am certain beyond any statistical doubt. Whoever she is, I know she would appreciate my calculation of the infinitesimally small likelihood that we would ever meet.

Can environments be made smarter?: Building a better bin for recycling

2008-03-06T12:56:00.000-08:00

We all have THOSE objects in our life, objects that frustrate, defy, and annoy us. My frustrating object is the cable tv box. When I want to turn it on, I never know which of two buttons to press, because depending on how the television was turned off, one or the other button won't work. Typically, I can't remember how I turned the television off. So half the time, I press the wrong button, then need to get up and walk over to the television to turn it on physically. A minor itch, but I find it infinitely annoying. I believe we all have those nagging itches that end up annoying us more than the real problems we face in life.

The problem with the remote is one known in the psychological literature as object affordances. An affordance is a physical aspect of an object that provides obvious cues as to how the object should be acted upon. Hanging strings afford pulling behavior, while fixed buttons afford pushing behavior. Some objects have obvious affordances, such as a door whose handle is designed so that it is clear whether you push or pull it. Others have not-so-obvious affordances, such as my remote, or my telephone at work (it's been three years and I still can't figure out how to forward a call), or my bank's online teller system (which is ridiculously complicated so that I can never sign into it correctly).

We interact with objects on a daily basis, but rarely reflect upon how well objects are designed to afford a desired behavior. There is a whole field of psychology about this issue which is known as ergonomics. People who study ergonomics examine aspects of the design of objects that improve their usability. A classic example I am using right now is the QWERTY keyboard. The keyboards we all use today were designed on ergonomic principles. Back in the days of the dinosaurs, when people would actually use manual typewriters, a problem would arise that commonly used combined letters like "-ed" would cause a jam of the typewriter. Note that in the alphabet, e and d are next to each other. The swinging letter e would strike the swinging letter d and would cause a jam. To avoid this, the American inventor Christopher Sholes designed a typewriter in which commonly combined letters would be spatially displaced on the keyboard, so that with the QWERTY keyboard, e and d were separated by a number of keys so they would not interfere. Unfortunately, however, the QWERTY keyboard actually serves to slow people down in their typing. Now that typewriters have gone as extinct as the dinosaurs, better designs exist, but the fact that so many people are used to the QWERTY design, it remains like a vestibular organ, useless but pervasive.

Humans design many artifacts, such as QWERT keyboards, desks, lamps, and monitors. One artifact that exists in our world are receptacles for disposing waste. Any economist would claim that humans are fundamentally consumers, yet an unintended byproduct of consumption is disposal. We drink a bottle of water, and subsequently must dispose of the bottle. In the second half of the 20th century, the idea of recycling became commonplace, and many institutions and municipalities have developed recycling programs to help reduce the amount of waste that gets buried in landfills. According to the EPA, the average american produces 3 pounds of trash per day. An unknown proportion of this trash consists of recyclable material such as bottles or cans that ended up in the general waste stream. Some of this material may be carelessly thrown out because people did not notice a recycling bin nearby.

In a study I recently submitted to a journal, my co-author Michelle Verges and I began thinking about the perceptual affordances of recycling receptacles. I had noticed that in my office building, there were two types of recycling bins. One type had a wide opening at the top and looked pretty much like a trash can except for the words "Cans and Bottles" on it. Another kind had a lid cover with a small hole cut in the center that was narrow enough to accept bottles and cans. The first type with wide openings contained about as much trash as your typical trash can. People may have mistaken the recycling bin as a trash can. The second type with a narrow hole contained only recyclables. This got Michelle and I to wonder whether it be the case that recycling bins might be designed to be smarter (by improving recycling compliance) or stupider (by reducing compliance rates).

Being an experimentaholic, I aimed to find out the answer. First, I secretly went around my building and manipulated the lids of the recycling bins. See the figure below. The bins were identical except for the presence of the lids. Half of the bins were manipulated to look like the photo on the left, with no lids, while half had the lids present as in the photograph on the right.

I went around twice a week measuring how many bottles or cans were deposited in each of the three bins for four weeks. At the end of the time, I tallied the results and found that with the condition on the left without lids, the recycling compliance rate (i.e., the proportion of recyclable cans and bottles deposited in the recycling bin) was 57%. However, with the lids present, the recycling rate shot up to 93%. The likelihood that this effect could be explained by chance is over 1 in 1,000,000.

So I have been going around taking photographs of smarter and stupider recycling bins. Here is a small gallery, of which I will increase over time.

1. SEPTA's Market East Station

This is a dumb design for a recycling bin. First, the sign is ridiculously small. Although it says RECYCLABLE, NEWSPAPER ONLY, people simply use the bin as a trash can.

While this one had some newspapers in it, there was also a plastic cup, a plastic bag, and a glass bottle. (I was rooting through it. All this education and I end up picking through trash...amazing).
Perhaps the problem is that the recycling bin looks too much like the trash can, and the heuristic that GREEN = RECYCLING is not yet very standardized or widespread (some of the trashcans at the very same station were the recycling bin above without the little sign. No wonder people mistake recycling bins for trashcans and vice versa!

2. Swarthmore Train Station

Swarthmore Township is a wealthy township where Swarthmore College is located. I recently went there to meet a colleague, and I spotted a recycling bin.

Here are individual pictures of the two recycling bins, and the contents. As you can see, the lids afford recycling paper or bottles by being a much smaller hole than the hole in the SEPTA train station.

Apart from a plate, a piece of plastic, and a piece of paper, everything in the recycling bin was appropriate for that bin.

Here is the newspaper bin:

Apart from the plastic bag, everything inside is newspaper.

The key however is not what is IN the recycling bin, but rather what WASN'T IN the adjoining trash can. There were no recyclable materials (cans, bottles, or newspapers) in the trash can.

3. Patco Station:

You don't need to buy special recycling bins in order to have high recycling rates. An ordinary trashcan lid, properly cut, makes a fine recycling bin, like this one spotted at the Camden, NJ PATCO train station:

4. Reading Terminal Market:

In order to increase recycling, why not make a bin that looks like a bottle? Although the study I completed does not speak to the effectiveness of this particular recycling bin, a look inside the trashcan next to it revealed several bottles and cans, which may indicate that people might simply be confused by what the object actually is (It could just be a plastic statue of a soda bottle to indicate that yes we sell drinks here.)

5. Japan

My favorite recycling bin was photographed by my friend Jeff Mosenkis in Japan. It is a frog. At least it is somewhat rewarding to shove a paper down a frog's throat if the news that day was bad. Unfortunately, though, my colleague Michelle is deathly afraid of frogs.

My Japanese colleague Etsuko writes, "The Japaense writing on the frog says "Kae--ru Box: For Newspapers and Magazines Only". The frog is pronounced as Kaeru in Japanese. With the same spelling in Roman letters, but with a different intonation and a Chinese character, Kaeru also means return. So, they are using a pun here for the recycling box."

Feel free to send me some pictures of your very own favorite recycling bins! I will post them here and have an expanded gallery.

Why we should all eat more chicken

2008-04-02T12:36:00.000-07:00

Former playboy model Jenny McCarthy has written a piece appearing on CNN's website regarding her suspicions that the chemicals in vaccines are implicated in the development of autism. You see, McCarthy has a child who was diagnosed with autism some years ago. McCarthy has since become a proponent of a movement in the autism community claiming that the etiological origin of autism can be traced to vaccines given during the second year of life.

In her piece, McCarthy states that a recent federal court "conceded" that vaccines "may be" implicated in the development of autism. If only the federal court is made up of scientists rather than lawyers!

Apparently, there is a considerable number of parents who have joined McCarthy, armed with little scientific data, making wild and speculative claims of conspiracy between the government, doctors, and the pharmaceutical industry in hiding the risks of vaccination. At first, their fingers pointed towards the mercury compound thiomersal that was used as a anti-bactericide in vaccines. When panel after panel of scientific organizations determined that there was absolutely no evidence of thiomersal's relation to autism arose, the vaccinations themselves were blamed.

I'm not buying the argument. Most scientists claim that the link between vaccines and autism is a myth, and I believe them over the former playmate of the year. As cognizant organisms, we tend to seek out connections between events. It so happens that vaccines are given around 15 months of age, and it is around this time that the symptoms of autism begin to emerge. It is easy to point one's finger at vaccines and claim that they cause autism because the mechanisms underlying how vaccines work and how autism develop are poorly understood, either by the general public or most scientists. Many children are safely vaccinated and do not develop autism. Children who do not get vaccinated out of autism fears are threatened by far more life-threatening illnesses such as influenza or tetanus.

In part, the reason people may believe in a link between autism and mercury is that recent years have seen a dramatic rise in diagnoses of autism, as well as an increase in the use of thiomersal-based vaccines. However, to make this interpretation is to fall victim to a common logical fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for "with this, therefore because of this"). It is more commonly known as mistaking correlation for causation.

In my research methods course, I tell my students that I have incontrovertible evidence that consuming chicken decreases murderous rage. You see, I conducted a study in which I examined statistics published by the U.S. Federal government's Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Justice. You can get the data yourself here and here. What you find on the one page is that chicken consumption has increased from the period between 1996-2005. On the other page, you find that murder rates have been sharply declining over that same period. Thus, eating chicken somehow reduces murder. Right?

Here is a graph of the relationship. You can see a clear negative relationship between per capita chicken consumption in pounds, and the murder rate per 100,000 people. The correlation is strong, at .84.

Of course, this is all a bunch of horse manure. Why? Because especially over time, many things increase or decrease, such as the amount of chicken people eat (due to health concerns) and the murder rate (due to a decrease in the use of crack cocaine). If you took the correlation between my age during the years and either of these variables, you would find significant correlations because my age increased while chicken consumption increased or murders decreased. Just because something correlates with something else doesn't mean one causes the other.

Likewise, the use of a vaccine and changes in the diagnostic category of autism (i.e., more children mistakenly diagnosed before as mentally disabled now receiving the "correct" diagnosis of autism) can make it look like there is a causal relationship between the two, when in reality there is only a coincident relationship.

The problem I have is that far more people probably respect and follow the flawed logic of the former playboy playmate of the year than doctors and scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the Center for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization. These parents might avoid vaccinating their children, who may then acquire a disease like encephalitis, which could permanently damage the child's brain.

Remarkably, in this article, McCarthy writes that her child has recovered from autism and is developing normally! After lambasting the medical establishment for not rushing to her door to inquire, she attributes her child's recovery based to the dietary and socialization regiments.

Now I'm no expert in autism. What I really think is happening here is that children who are completely normal are being diagnosed as autistic when they are just going though a stage in which they are not developing 'normally.' They grow out of this stage and end up normal people because they were always normal, but that a frenzied crew of 'experts' have rung the alarm bell over autism and that many children are being misdiagnosed as autistic when in reality they are just developing on a different path than other children.

Autism is not cancer or HIV in which you can take a biopsy or blood sample and know to a high degree of accuracy whether the person actually has the disease. (But see my former post on problems with this in respect to HIV). Autism is nosologized as a set of behaviors that must be interpreted by doctors and parents, and there is no way of seeing autism in a microscope or on an assay. So in a culture of fear over raising children fueled by experts wanting to be experts (McCarthy being one of them as the author of a parenting guide), you end up with 'experts' who have made virtual careers over developing dietary interventions, intervention schemes, and the like, which low and behold work for children who never had autism in the first place, and were just kids going through an unusual developmental trajectory. These diets and regiments may or may not work for those who truly have the affliction of autism, but they always work 100% of the time for normal kids misdiagnosed with autism.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not denying that autism exists, and I have seen many children diagnosed with autism. A difficult child myself, I used to bang my head on the ground and had a strange fascination with the drain spout of the washing machine, which would fill the basement sink with bubbly water. My mother, who is a social worker trained to diagnose mental illnesses, often says I would have been diagnosed with autism. True, had I not been born in 1976, but in 1996, at the height of the epidemic.

In sum, I don't mean to belittle McCarthy or her family's experience. I am sure these years have been difficult for her and her son. But I think that people in the limelight should realize that the mass of people may take the wrong message. Do we need children dying of rabies because their parents are afraid of vaccinations? I think not.

Water water everywhere, but not one drop to drink

2008-04-02T18:26:00.000-07:00

After class, I go around the room where I teach and pick up and discard bottles and cans. One thing I've noticed recently is that people often leave plastic bottles of water laying around the room, half full. This has always bothered me, because the night watchman, an older gentleman, has to then go around and pick up the bottles. But this has gotten me thinking.

At my university, a 12 fluid ounce bottle of water costs $1.50. A gallon has 160 ounces in it, so there are roughly thirteen 12 fluid ounce bottles of water in the gallon. That means that people are paying $19.50 per gallon of water by buying that bottle of water, which they leave on the ground.

People complain that gasoline costs will hit $4 a gallon this summer. However, they have no problem leaving half a bottle of spring water that costs $19.50 a gallon on the floor of my classroom. Of course, you're not really paying 19.50 for the water - you get the plastic bottle, itself made of petroleum.

When I brought this up this evening to the night watchman, she shook his head. "I guess these kids have some rich parents paying their way through..."

You're WELCOME, world.

2008-11-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

You're welcome, for helping elect the distinguished senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, as President of the United States.

For the last several weeks, in what free time I had, I volunteered at the South Philadelphia Obama campaign headquarters. Normally, I don't get involved in politics, but this time was different. I cared because in the past eight years, I witnessed our country go from being a beacon of hope to being the world's most defiled nation, hated and scorned by nearly everyone. While there are a number of reasons for this, most can be traced back to the irresponsible actions of the George W. Bush administration.

It was most clear to me in 2004, when I was living in Kyoto, Japan, and a stumbled into an Iraq War protest. I have always been against all form of war, and was particularly confused about the Iraq war, because I never quite understood its necessity. But a group of Japanese approached me, trying to pick a fight, asking me if I am an American. Quickly, I responded in Japanese, "No, I am from Europe. I can't stand America."

I said those words. At the time, only one of them was a lie.

But I went back to my Japanese apartment and cried - literally. There was part of me I saw slipping - a patriotic side that respected the nation and saluted the flag. And in that moment, I spat on my country just to get out of a confrontation. I opened my computer and emailed my republican senator Rick Santorum, a notorious conservative Pennsylvanian who earned the nickname "Smegma" - that thanks to the republican neoconservative war, I am no longer proud to be an American. He must not have cared - I never received a response.

I couldn't stand what America had become - hawkish and arrogant, unilateral and imposing, unnecessarily menacing and fearful. Within America, I saw changes too. Just to take one small example, I saw in my own field that fewer and fewer scientific articles were published by authors at American Universities. To take another example, I watched as bridges collapsed and crushed unfortunate Americans. To take another example, I saw housing prices increase at insane and irrational levels, with no one stopping to question whether a humdrum 3 bedroom colonial in Florida should REALLY be worth 1.5 million dollars.

I stood by as America became an unrecognizable and bizarre country. Then we began to see the meteoric rise of Barack Hussein Obama. I knew Obama from my days at the University of Chicago, where I was a student. I'd pass him on campus, recognizing him from the cover of the book he wrote, which I saw on the shelves of the Coop bookstore. I thought at the time. He once came into a restaurant I was at and shook everyone's hand at my table, sitting down with us and asking for our support. I told him I was a student and registered in another state. He said, "Too bad, but it doesn't mean you can't stop by my campaign office and work for the cause." (I never did, and kick myself now for that lack of judgment...who knows what governmental post I might have gotten if I joined in those early days). People would always talk about this Obama guy, and I didn't really think much of the talk at the time because the guy was a state senator. "Big deal"

Boy was I wrong. I watched his speech during the 2004 campaign and thought, "damn." There was always speculation that he would run for office, but there was always a big mountain in the way: Hillary Clinton and her political machine. I watched the primary with great interest, although I was ambivalent - I wanted both Hillary and Obama as president, because I think the nation needed a symbol of what that represents: equality of gender, equality of race. But it was not to be. Obama somehow battled his way, gaining the support of African-Americans who pundits believed did not see Obama as one of their own, and prevailed. History spoke.

I am not much into politics but I would have continued to have sat in the sidelines but for one factor that mobilized me to action. You know what is coming.

The nomination of Sarah Palin. As an east coast elitist quasi-intellectual, I look at Palin and see her for what she is - someone who thinks Africa is a country, who can't name the signatories of NAFTA. Someone who can't even dredge up the Dred Scott Supreme Court case that legalized slavery in the territories in the 1850s as an example of a decision she would disagree with. Someone who can't name a single newspaper when asked what she reads, and subsequently blames her ignorance on her frustration at the question.

THAT Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin represents an American concept that disgusts me: exceptionalism. Exceptionalism, to me, is the notion that we as Americans are exceptional without having the excellence to back it up. It is a philosophy adopted by many Americans in their inflated self-esteem and self-indulgence that places the Joe the Plumbers and Tito the Builders as heroes, as if they are any different from the plumbers anywhere. The only difference is probably that in Japan, a plumber who says they will show up at noon comes not one minute late, unlike the American plumber I called a few months ago who failed even to show up, resulting in my having to run down the street to the corner wine bar to pee for a night. Exceptionalism is a philosophy that places dangerously unqualified people like Sarah Palin in dangerously powerfully positions of authority.

When McCain chose Palin, I read her biography, almost vomited, donated money to the Obama campaign, found where the nearest Obama headquarters was, left my apartment, slammed my door, walked to the Obama campaign headquarters, walked up to the first person I saw and said "use me."

I did a whole bunch of things while volunteering for the campaign, none of it very intellectual, but that was okay. I sat on South Street, asking people if they were registered to vote. I personally registered over 150 people, increasing my vote from 1 to 151. Other days I manufactured pins using the button-making machine (which was fun! I used to joke that I felt like I was in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but no one, except for an economics professor I met understood that joke! What? Me? Elitist?) Other days I knocked door to door, handing out information. Other days I entered data from people who had knocked on doors. Some days I would spend the whole day working, others I spent just a few hours.

And an amazing thing happened. People would come up to me, and thank me for what I was doing. A big guy in a military uniform approached - I thought he was going to knock out my teeth - but he shook my hand and said that as a member of the military he was unable to volunteer for a political campaign but that he's voting for Obama because the war in Iraq is hell. People would shake my hand while I sat at the table and ask if I wanted a coffee from the shop next door. They would high five me, chanting "GoBaMa!"

In my real life as an academic, I write journal articles that maybe a handful of people actually read, tiny and unseen bricks in the wall of knowledge. No one ever writes, "Thank you for that great chapter" - you send your work into the world, and the reaction is typically silence. But here, African Americans, Hispanics, Caucasians, whoever, would come in the office and say, in their own way, "use me." From perfect strangers, we would work on a common cause, however trivial it might seen, in order to elect a leader who doesn't see the world through a narrow ideological lens, and who not only knows that Africa is a continent, but has expressed enough interest in the place to visit the place.

In the end, I don't know in exactly what way my help changed the nature of this campaign, and I doubt that it was my individual influence that was the critical straw that broke the camel's back. Pennsylvania was won by far more votes than doors I knocked or pins I handed out.

But in the end, it was not just ME, but a city, and a state, and a nation of WEs, all of us who were so enraged at the status quo and the anti-intellectualism Palin represents collectively slamming the doors of our apartments and yelling ENOUGH! ENOUGH of this collective self-loathing of being American, ENOUGH of these collective excuses of being from Europe, ENOUGH of this Republican bullshit...America, WE ARE TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK. And we did, door by door, pin by pin, excel spreadsheet by excel spreadsheet...we who believed in change, created change we believed in.

I met many great people along the way. Juan, Matt, Sula, Greg, Seth - a whole community of people who like me, could not accept someone like Palin one heartbeat away from the Presidency, and one finger press away from nuclear annihilation. Who were desperate for change.

There are those who question change as an empty promise, and in some ways it lacks solvency in itself. But what change means is something more fundamental and ephemeral, something that motivates the spirit. It means adopting a new philosophy for negotiating the challenges of the 21st century, something George Bush utterly failed to do. It means negotiating with words rather than with bombs. It means that instead of running off of a cliff, our nation may somehow redeem itself, reenter the 21st century, and reverse the course of history. It will be a tough mountain for all of us to climb, but I imagine the view is breathtaking and worth the work.

Election day volunteering

My last volunteer effort was to help manage lines at the polls. I found that unlike in other cities, Philadelphia does a pretty good job of managing elections (who would have thought?) Here are a few of the events of the days, via youtube, for posterity. note that I didn't try and make the best videos for an academy award - these are just some snapshots.

My friend Matt calls me from our poll at 7 AM, saying there is a long line and he needs help. I get there and there are lots of people waiting, so I go to a local coffee shop to get coffee. The coffee shop girl gives me a whole huge coffee dispenser full of coffee for free. There was a 45 minute wait.

Lines subside. There were no further lines during the day so we stood there handing out free coffee and doughnuts. I got to vote at my own polling station.

This is the polling place I was helping at. The guy electioneering was some republican who was described variously as "creepy" or "insane" - too bad he only garnered 55 votes against several hundred for his democratic opponent:

At some point a bunch of children walked by, chanting "Don't forget to vote!"

We waited all day and until 8 PM for lines to show up, but we knew they wouldn't because by noon, already about 2/3rds of registered voters had already voted. At 8 PM, they closed the polls.

Afterwards, Matt and I went to his girlfriend house, we had Vietnamese hoagies, and went to a local tavern where many people seemed to be filling in.

We watched as they called Pennsylvania and Virginia. We knew at that point that Obama had won (McCain would have had to win California for that to happen), but they did not announce the winner until 11 o'clock. Watch the reaction in South Philly when CNN calls the election:

We did not watch history last night, we MADE history last night, one button, one door, one vote at a time.

You're welcome, world. I'm an American, and I am once again proud to admit it.

Obama WILL NOT win Philadelphia so say window signs.

2008-10-30T21:38:00.001-07:00

In the past few days, I have gone around counting political campaign signs in my neighborhood in Philadelphia. The purpose was to see whether the number of signs in the neighborhood would predict the election. Now - this was shoddy science - I know that this is a big country, and that a small sample of signs in the windows of some streets in Philadelphia is no way to call an election. But that was going to be my point.

But understand: I live in South Philadelphia, home of the Phillies Stadium and most of the neighborhood consists of hard core Phillies fans, the type who go to the games even as the Phillies are losing, which they have a long history of doing.

However, this year, the Phillies are most decidedly NOT losing - in fact, last night, they won the world series - the first time in 28 years. I walked to Broad Street after the win, where tens of thousands of fans literally were hooting and hollering well into the night, and woke up this morning to overturned newspaper boxes and almost every passerby wearing Phillies sweatshirts. It was an electric experience, and perhaps a once or at most twice in a lifetime event.

But in walking around, looking for campaign signs, I found that if I didn't know better, there was a third candidate for the general election for president, someone with the name "Phillies" who must be running in the election because his signs are literally everywhere. So the final tally of signs resulted in the following:

Obama signs: 135
McCain signs: 17
Phillies signs: 197

That's it. Sorry, distinguished senators from Arizona and Illinois - this guy Phillies has won in an electoral landslide! Who would have thought that a third-party candidate would have struck such a home run in this largely democratic section of the city of Brotherly Love? Maybe Chase Utley?

The social psychology of campaign signs

2008-10-24T23:54:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have been volunteering a bit for one of the presidential candidates in the 2008 general election. A few weeks ago, people were approaching me at the campaign office requesting window signs so that they could show their support for the candidate. Unfortunately, we didn't have any at the office where I was working. People were devastated and desperate for these political signs, in no small part due to the historic nature of this election season, and also, for psychological reasons associated with the psychology of our political climate, on which I admit I am not an expert.

So I ask one of the head volunteers whether we could get some signs. This volunteer is a University of Pennsylvania student. Now, I have to admit I used to be an academic elitist. I thought that the fact that I was educated at THE University of Chicago meant that I was some kind of genius and could make carte blanche statements about just about anything. Penn is a very similar institution - Penn students think that because they are Penn students, the world should bow to them and that their farts smell like roses. I know better.

"The campaign doesn't want to waste resources with signs. Research shows that signs don't work."

Really? So for a while, I told people that they could go to the campaign website and print out signs as pdf files. People weren't convinced. "More money has been spent this year than any other, and you can't print signs? This is ridiculous." "I donated $100 to your campaign and I can't even have a sign? Go to hell." "I will stop by every day until you get them in." I didn't know that people were so connected with their political signs, but it was getting so bad that I went to kinkos and printed 100 xeroxed pages so these people would have something to put up in their damn windows. I ran out within an hour.

Later, I looked into how this research was conducted. Apparently, pollsters go around asking people questions like, "What factors were important to you in your decision to vote for X candidate." People then rank ordered the importance of the various factors. Somewhat unsurprisingly, people ranked things like the Iraq war and the economy very high. They ranked window signs near the bottom. Why not? People don't think they would be influenced by something as ridiculous as a little sign on one's lawn! Based on this evidence, the researchers concluded that candidate window signs were not effective in persuading people to vote for a particular candidate, and so people in the campaign have not provided signs.

This is also why, in my research methods courses, I am somewhat critical of a lot of survey research. Simply put, people don't understand themselves. Now this may seem elitist and pompous for me to say, and I don't mean it to be this way. I too, don't understand myself, at least in how I think and make decisions. When you ask me what 2 + 2 equals, I have no idea how I come up with the correct answer of 4. What influenced me to say 4 and not 5? I don't know. I can't see my thought processes, and I can hardly fathom them. I know something is going on up there, but I have no idea how it works. Much of psychology since behaviorism has been about illuminating those processes that work up there, and we're not all that much closer now than we were when we started.

So I don't know how I know that 2 + 2 = 4. Then how on earth will I know what factors, of the thousands of factors, that influence me to vote for a particular candidate? How am I supposed to remember all the many times I thought of economic issues, or thee Iraq war, or window signs I passed. Humans have limited processing capacity - although we spend our lives convincing ourselves otherwise. We take mental shortcuts, or heuristics, or we trust our gut over trusting our minds.

This all reminds me of two clever experiments. The first is a classic, performed by Solomon Asch (who spent part of his career at Penn, incidentally). Asch ran an experiment in which he had a naive participant come into a room. Then two confederates (actors) walk in who pretend to be other participants. Asch then shows the three lines that vary in length, and asks the participants to determine which is the longest.The two actors say that the medium sized line is in fact the largest, and far more often than not, the naive participant ends up agreeing with them, even though the line is clearly shorter.

The second is a more recent study by Robert Cialdini, of Arizona State University. He has one person standing below a high rise, staring up at the building. No one stops and looks up. But get a group of 2 or 3 people to be staring up at the top of the high rise, and suddenly you find scores of passersby stopping and looking up, wondering what the heck the original few were staring at.

What's my point here? Well, people are influenced by things they don't even recognize they are being influenced by. So when you ask the guy in the Asch experiement, he doesn't necessarily understand that the opinions of the others are tacitly influencing his perception of the length of the line. And second, that it is possible that a few window signs on each block might convince several other people on the block to look up and put a window sign up, or even vote for the candidate in question.

There is a lot of poorly designed research out there. There has to be - if not, there would be very little demand for researchers to improve upon what we know. But the first step in evaluating the world is to begin by noticing patterns. If every person who stops by a campaign office is asking for window signs, but you have some research report by some pollster showing that window signs are not very effective, then maybe you need to reevaluate whether the research report is in fact valid. Scientists are in the business of possibly being wrong. For no other reason than the fact that any result may be due to chance, or that some finding occurs because you don't have the tools necessary to evaluate your hypothesis.

But what disappointed me the most was the Penn student's response. "People are so stupid. Perhaps if they wern't such cows they would realize that their stupid window signs don't make an ounce of difference. It is so infuriating."

Tell that to the woman to contributed $100 and only wants, in return, a sign that costs less than a cent to manufacture. The worst thing a scientist can do is attribute a phenomenon to the stupidity of the participants. None of us should be presumptuous to have the intellect of a messiah, and we should always be both respectful, as well as skeptical, of any scientific finding. Just ask this guy:

What is chance?

2008-10-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, I had a long conversation with my good friend Dave Falcone. Dave is a professor of psychology at LaSalle University, and it was his developmental psychology course that I took as a high school senior (as part of a program in which high school students could take a few courses at a local college) that was my first psychology course. As history had it, I ended up becoming a psychology professor myself, and we get together from time to time to discuss a variety of issues, usually at local restaurant Cocos, on 8th street in the heart of the jewelry district in Philadelphia.

Our conversations ramble as good conversations should, from topic to topic ranging from the politics of academia to Emerson's concept of nature. The other day, our discussion somehow stumbled upon the question of what is chance.

Chance is hard to define, and determining what exactly chance means is no easy task. To some, chance is an extension of the idea of probability - which is the idea of the likelihood that an event occurs. For instance, I am fairly sure that with all I know about probability, that the sun will rise tomorrow. How do I know this? Well, because the sun has risen today, and it did yesterday, and it did every day I personally remember, and historical records show no day that the sun didn't rise, so I am fairly sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, and in fact, if I had to bet my meager life savings on it, I would bet that the sun will in fact rise tomorrow. I will also bet that I will wake up tomorrow, in part because I am relatively young and healthy, and have no reason to suspect that when I lay myself to sleep, that my life and soul will keep. But, one of my favorite lines is from the movie Breaker Morant, in which a character to be executed the following day exclaims, "Live every day as if it were to be your last, for you're bound to be right some day." Someday, perhaps when I am older and my heart weaker, I will reassess the probability of waking up tomorrow.

What is all of this based on? Well, a considerable amount is due to empirical experience. I have a number of friends my age, and thus far, only a small number have died in their sleep. At 70 or 80, I will have a much larger number. But although probability has a lot to do with chance, it isn't exactly synonymous with chance. The other notion of chance has to do with randomness.

I take a die and roll it. As it flies through space, turning and moving, forces that go well beyond my understanding interact with the die and work on it, moving it left and right, spinning and bouncing against tables and walls, ultimately resulting in a 4 or a 3 or a 6. So, there is an element of what we call randomness in the process.

But is it really randomness? I once met a man in Chicago who told me he mastered the art of flipping coins. He could flip ten fair coins in a row and every time get a heads up. I bet him five bucks he couldn't, then gave him a coin from my pocket and watched him flip not 10 in a row, but 25. Understand: the guy wasn't fooling me with a two headed coin - I checked each time. Rather, he mastered his finger motions and hand movements so that the coin would flip in the air a specific number of times before he would catch it, revealing the face of good old George Washington.

From one perspective, chance is a force in the universe that somehow acts on coins and dice that are flying in the air. It is chance that, at the last moment, makes the coin end up tails or end up giving you a 5. But another perspective on chance - one that I probably subscribe to - is that chance is simply another term for ignorance. Ignorance of the myriad forces that interact with objects like coins and dice, such as air resistance, the coefficient of friction encountered by the object as it strikes the ground - that, if fully understood, could result in knowing the result of a chance event before its outcome. Like the guy I met in Chicago - he understood perfectly how to flip a coin in the air at just the right speed to have it every time end up as a head toss. After many years of practicing, over and over, the flipping of coins, he was able to remove the randomness, the ignorance of outcomes - and win five bucks in the process.

But another perspective exists, one that I do not subscribe to, but I have no way of disproving, is that chance is an actual force in the universe that interacts with objects like flipping coins and dice, and at the right moment, provides the right nudge to make the die end up as a 2 or the coin as a tail. I have no reason to suspect that this force actually exists out there, and that it only acts when a person is flipping a coin to determine who answers first at a presidential debate, or what team faces what direction in a football match.

But it is possible. It is possible that with all of our knowledge, we will never be able to predict coin tosses because so many degrees of freedom exist in the world - the slight imperfections in the minting of the coin, or the roughness of a particular edge of a particular coin. To be fair, my Chicago friend was not able to make the coin end up heads when he wasn't controlling the situation. For instance, I had him flip the coin onto the table, not using his hand to catch it, resulting in a meager 6 heads and 4 tails. Not to be a nerd, but using the binomial approximation, there is an 89 percent change that someone would flip 6 or more heads out of 10. But maybe, given enough time, and enough practice, this guy could learn the affordances of the table well enough that he could master the art of flipping coins onto it.

As for me, I don't believe we are allotted enough nights in our lives to spend them trying to master the art of flipping coins. There are other tasks well worth exploring, and hopefully you will engage in them. After all, my Chicago friend only made 5 bucks in the process. Anymore, that's hardly even a beer.

Porky Pig Projectors

2008-10-20T17:41:00.001-07:00

I've been avoiding blogging about presidential politics because at times, both parties infuriate me with plans. It turns out, however, that McCain wins the prize for getting me riled up enough to search for my password to my blog.

At one of the presidential debates, John McCain lambasted Barack Obama for a pork barrel project - a grant for a 2 million dollar projector for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Planetarium projectors are expensive and sophisticated scientific equipment. (If you want to learn more about those that are commercially available through the Zeiss company, check out their webpage). And check it out - it is pretty cool what these new planetarium projectors can do. You can virtually ride through a black hole (without actually having the experience of event horizons or spaghettification - look that one up too). You can travel through space, explore the subatomic structure of atoms, learn about different galaxies - explore the world and all of its wonders from the smallest of the small, to the largest of the large. You can even travel through time and explore what happened at the time of the Big Bang. The new projectors can even simulate oral surgery, something my friend Michelle knows a bit about.)

In today's climate of rapidly collapsing scientific educational standards and the decline of American scientific achievement, you'd think this kind of projector would be exactly what we need to inspire the next generation of students to pursue science careers. Perhaps the reluctance for doing so is our unvoiced shame that the next generation of Americans will be burdened with our generation's disgraceful stewardship of our universe. Future scientists will need to devise new ways of obtaining energy, as we wastefully plow through the earth's limited supply of fossil fuels. They will need to deal with the challenges of climate change due to our extensive use of these fuels in almost every aspect of our lives. They will need to solve many of the problems we have created, from economic to environmental devastation.

I first learned about event horizons and spahettification at a planetarium, during a show on black holes. And maybe knowing the details of the working of black holes isn't worth much these days. But it was experiences of my father taking me to the Franklin Institute's planetarium that got me interested in science in the first place, and launched my career. Now, I became more of a soft than a hard scientist - but a scientist nonetheless. And I owe it not to my science teachers in school (although they may have played some role) but to our Sundays at the museum.

It is a general anti-intellectualism represented in McCain's criticism of the projector that I simply don't understand and will never agree with. Planetariums inspire young minds, they introduce children to the cosmos, they create wonder. Wonder about the sheer improbability of our existence - how small we really are. They provide us with culture - culture being the work of countless generations of individuals - from Kepler to Einstein and beyond, who spent their lives trying to figure out how the universe works. And through their efforts, we have even been able to step out into that universe, and for the first time in history walk on other worlds.

Do we want to live in an America that denies its youth of the inspiration of the scientific endeavor? It is already bad enough - I know undergraduates and even graduate students who don't know the order of operations of math (to refresh, it is exponents and roots, then multiplication and division, and finally addition and subtraction). The decline in scientific education has caused none other than Bill Gates to appear before a congressional committee asking for loosening of visa requirements so that talented scientists from other countries can work in corporations that so desperately need their skills. American scientific education is not working - and parents seem unfazed. It is this ridiculous illusion of American exceptionalism: We're number one, We're number one! Meanwhile, look at your 401K - you don't need to know the order of operations to understand what the "less than" sign means.

In fact, it's worth reading the Adler Planetarium's response to the whole affair - response It points out, among other things, that they never even received the funding for that projector. So Adler planetarium continues to use their 40 year-old projector that no longer has service or parts. Well, some might say that if it's broken, they'd be better off praying for it to fix itself, because they don't have a ghost of a prayer if the likes of anti-intellectual John McCain and Sarah Palin are elected president.

In fact, if you are wealthy and would like to donate to the Adler so they can purchase a working projector, here is a page about donations. If our government can't fund the future, I guess we have to.

A joke worth mentioning

2008-08-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

My friend Matt is always up for a good joke, worth repeating. I love the guy. The other day, he told me this one, which I will paraphrase.

So there is this student and a teacher. The teacher asks the student, "So imagine there are three birds on a telephone wire. I take out a gun and shoot one of them. How many birds are left?"

The student answers, "None. The sound of the gun frightened away the two other birds"

The teacher says, "I like how you think, but you're wrong. There are 2 birds left. I appreciate how you think, though!"

The student ponders this.

After a while student says to the teacher, "So there are three women on a bench. One is eating a triple ice cream split, the other two are eating a low fat frozen ice cream. Which one is married?"

The teacher thinks for a minute. "Well probably the one that is eating the ice cream split."

The student replies, "No, the one that's married is the one that's wearing the wedding ring. But I like how you think."

There has to be some kind of truth to this one, don't you think?

Things I have had to do to do experiments

2007-12-26T16:22:00.000-08:00

I was talking to my friend Michelle the other day about all the various things I have experienced on the way to gathering data for research. Lately, I've been watching a lot of Discovery Channel shows about various odd and dirty jobs people have, and also those shows about those crazy academics who go out in dangerous waters infested with killer jellyfish. It makes me realize, wow, I'm glad I wasn't stupid enough to choose a topic that almost kills me. But I have had my moments. Here are a few:

The peeing baby incident: That time when I was conducting research on infants' vision, a mother had to change her baby's diaper. In the midst of doing this, I turned to give the mother privacy and was working on my computer. Suddenly, I felt this weird wet sensation down my back and turned. Yup, you can fill in the rest of this story, but I was on the receiving end of a 6 month old's golden shower. I wonder if this baby (who must be about ten years old now) knows that he pissed all over some poor grad student at Chicago.

The vomiting RA: One time in Chicago, I had an experiment where I needed a confederate, someone who is pretending to be a naive subject but is actually in on the game. My RA came in the lab on a Saturday morning reeking of bar (stale cigarette smoke, cheap beer). She was still drunk. She apologized, and just as the subject showed up, vomited into her hands, which seemed to make things worse, spraying the flow and all over me and my laboratory. Just as the subject was coming in. Needless to say, she didn't last long after that.

The forgotten subject: This one didn't happen to me, but I caused this one to happen. One time, I had a friend of mine come in for an experiment in which the participant decided whether a particular fish was a member of category A or B on a self-running computer program. You see examples of fish on the screen and have to classify them as A fish or B fish, until you get 25 correct classifications in a row, at which point the experiment ends. I started this friend of mine, then somehow got distracted and forgot about him. Most people got the 25 correct in a row in about twenty minutes. Five hours later, I walk into the room for another reason, only to find my friend still at the computer, head in his hands, classifying fish. He got up and started screaming that he was going to Fing knock my Fing teeth out of my Fing mouth if I Fing make him Fing classify Fing anotherFing one of these Fing Fing fishes. I actually had to edit that - he said it with a lot more F bombs. He never let me forget that fish experiment. I think he is still scarred.

Chimp piss: When I was in Japan, I visited the National Primate Research Institute, where they have chimps. While watching one experiment, a baby chimp climbed to the top of his cage. I was about two feet away from him. He then let forth a violent spray of urine, covering me. Interestingly, that was the day I actually peed my own pants the next day, a story you can read about here.

Baby vomit. I was holding a baby for my experiment and it burped, then a little swish sound, and that familiar warmth down my back. I gotta stop working with babies!

There are probably other stories I have locked in the vaults of memory. I'll post any if I remember. Always remember - Don't due this at home. We're what you call, "professionals."

Overheard

2007-09-19T11:44:00.000-07:00

I was talking with Matt, a friend of mine, last night. We were speaking about those people who are simply oblivious to the fact that they are completely obnoxious. In the course of the conversation, he said...

"You have a real problem when the biggest problem you will have to face in your entire life is you."

I have to say, never have truer words been spoken.