Kevin, MD posted a video of Peter Yarrow who teamed up with CBS to deliver a serious message about the importance of screening for colon cancer. Well, this is not the only video focusing on this issue.
Posted: March 20th, 2010 under Education.
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So you have here a fairly straightforward carnival estimation game, which I decided to complicate by filling up a smaller container with the same kind of (horrid) malted eggs and making that quantity known.
I surveyed my students, my math-department colleagues, some of their students, my principal, and the central office staff. A little over 100 guesses all told. I tagged each guess with the following metadata:
I showed my students the raw data and asked them what they wanted to know. I wrote their questions on the board.
Define "Bounty"
I said I was offering a "bounty" for answers to those questions and asked them to define the term. Some kids had seen Dog the Bounty Hunter and explained it from that angle. I assigned each question a point value that corresponded roughly to a) the difficulty of the question and b) its relevance to my objective — how are absolute value and percent error useful for calculating accuracy? I offered 20 points for a picture of an interesting fact. (See "Interesting Pictures" below.)
They had to scrape together 100 points for the day and I offered extra credit for initiative, divergent thinking, etc.
What Happened
Students worked in pairs on laptops. They downloaded an Excel sheet with all this data, including the real name of every guesser. Naturally, they were into that.
The great part about a sample size of one hundred guesses is how easy it was to determine which groups were taking a tedious, manual approach to these questions and which were using Excel's built-in capability for sorting and calculating. I circulated the classroom and could tell that a group was ready to learn more about Excel because they were using hash marks to count up every freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. Those students were wandering the desert on foot, ready for the water, compass, and camels I could offer them.
Likewise, I saw another group of students subtracting all one hundred guesses from the actual answer (1831) one at a time on cell phones. It didn't take much to convince them to experiment with another approach.
The Constructivism Multiplier
My favorite conversations with students centered around a definition of "accuracy," as in, "who were the top ten most accurate guessers?" Our earlier trick of just subtracting the guesses from the answer messed with Excel's sort mechanism, unhelpfully stacking positives on top of negatives, when, really, we didn't care if you guessed 100 eggs too high or 100 eggs too low. For our purposes, those two people tied1.
Two students were so close to constructing that operation themselves I had to bite off my tongue to keep from spelling the whole thing out ("ABSOLUTE VALUE! SUBTRACT AND THEN TAKE THE ABSOLUTE VALUE!!") and then the bell rang. We didn't graph anything. We didn't get to percent error. Half the groups got to absolute value.
Off moments like this, I have determined my constructivism multiplier to be four, which is to say it takes me four times longer to bring a student to conceptual understanding through conversation and questioning in a social situation the student helped create than does to get up in front of the class and simply give it to them straight, no chaser, through direct instruction and a handout of questions I wrote.
What I find maddening about conversations with committed constructivists (cf. the conversation here) is the reflexive assumption that educators choose direct instruction because they're either power-drunk or self-obsessed or because they lack faith, courage, or high expectations. I can't, personally, wave so dismissively at the massive institutional impediments to student-constructed learning.
Interesting Pictures
Percent Error By Grade Level
Percent Error By Guess Type
It's worth pointing out here that "Math Computation" isn't the same thing as "Correct Math Computation." The most accurate guessers verified their correct math computation with a visual estimate.
Percent Error By Math Class
Percent Error By Job Description
That last graph is what I meant at TEDx when I said that math gives your intuition a certain vocabulary. The math teachers have a more descriptive vocabulary for expressing their own intuitions than the students do. This is also a fair answer to the question, "when will I ever use math?" You might not. You can live without it. But it makes a lot of intuitive tasks a lot easier. And you should also understand the risk that you'll one day be fleeced by or passed over for those who know how to speak with that vocabulary.
The Creative Feedback Loop Of Teaching
Where else can you get this? In all of the creative fields that have ever tempted me professionally — I'm talking about graphic design, screenwriting, and filmmaking — ideas often take months to generate and refine, years to produce, and, in many cases, you can't do anything with the feedback except hope it's good enough to get you your next job.
With teaching, you can get any old harebrained idea on Friday, challenge your students with it Monday morning, then adapt it for your afternoon class based on feedback from the morning. The feedback loop is fast enough to give you whiplash. It's so much fun, this job, it seems impossible sometimes that anyone could ever walk away from classroom teaching.
The Grand Prize
Not those horrid malted eggs, that's for sure.
Posted: March 20th, 2010 under Education.
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Posted: March 20th, 2010 under Education.
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Posted: March 20th, 2010 under Education.
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As I’m doing PhD in clinical genomics and I’m really interested in the connection between internet and medicine, so I was very happy when Pathway Genomics, one of the newest direct-to-consumer genetic companies, offered me a free genetic test. After an interview I did with them, I sent my saliva sample back and 3-4 weeks later, I received an e-mail that my results were ready. This is just an entry about my experience and the things I found interesting. As I got a free test from Navigenics a year ago, I plan to compare these services in a future entry.
The reason why I was very interested in the service of Pathway Genomics is what they analyze:
1) Sampling: It was quite an easy process with only a few papers to fill (though it’s always hard to solve FedEX issues from Europe) and clear instructions. A video about a patient showing the whole process in 1-2 minutes including salive collection and filling papers would be useful.
2) Preparations: I liked that I had to fill a questionnaire focusing on my lifestyle and patient history (Your Environment and Lifestyle, The Shape You’re In and You and Your Family). As family history is the best genetic test out there, it’s important to use that data while analyzing genetic results. Though, I couldn’t calculate my BMI (couldn’t use kg and centimeter) and the Family history app has never been working for me.
3) Results: I still think that predicting risk of diseases based on a few SNPs cannot be accurate enough and we cannot base a medical decision on that. But drug responses and carrier status are totally different. For example, now I know I’m not a carrier for any of the disease they analyze, and I’m a slow metabolizer of caffeine (I never drink coffee as it has quite a negative effect on my work maybe due to this slow rate of metabolization).
4) Health conditions: Based on your genetic profile, it creates different groups for conditions such as Immediate Action, Take action, Be proactive, Learn More and Live a healthy lifestyle. It’s also shown whether the risk is based on validated or preliminary study results. It seems to me it creates a score for diseases based on SNPs and elevates the score by the number of questionnaire answers that proved to be risk factors. That’s where a genetic counselor is very important. For example, just because I’m 25 years old and Caucasian, I’m in the risk group for ulcerative colitis. I would love to see the combined risk (genetic + lifestyle) and would love to download the raw data in order to analyze it again with Prometheus and SNPedia.
Also I’m not sure whether an SNP with 1.07 odds ratio can really elevate my risk for anything.
Anyway, it’s easy to navigate among the results and I like that there is no percentage of risk which makes it easier to understand for laypeople. I plan to contact one of their genetic counselors next week.
5) Ancestry: I’m in the same maternal haplogroup as Benjamin Franklin or Marie Antoinette (see migration map below on which we can adjust the migration pattern with the timline). The descriptions are detailed and full of references information. I particularly liked the numerous Pubmed links. My paternal haplogroups is quite interesting and is the same as Thomas Jefferson’s.
My friend, Blaine Bettinger also commented on this test.
6) To sum it up: I liked the service mostly because of the carrier status and drug responses features. It helped me analyze the results, find more information in peer-reviewed journals and maybe make lifestyle decisions.
Pros:
Cons:
In the next entry, I will compare my experiences with Navigenics and Pathway Genomics.
Posted: March 19th, 2010 under Education.
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Posted: March 19th, 2010 under Education.
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the chinese government has bought an entire mountain in peru and plans to ship it back to china – every last ounce. why? it’s one of the largest copper resources in the world and china is desperate for copper which it is planning to use to re-wire its entire infrastructure. this from the bbc…
The Peruvian government is happy with the $3bn (£1.53bn) that Chinalco will invest in the Toromocho mines. The Chinese will be even happier. They have got themselves a bargain. The copper Chinalco extracts from Toromocho will cost something like US$410 (£210) per ton. Today, the price for copper on the London Metal Exchange was $8,255 (£4,220) – 20 times more. Chinalco stands to make a 2,000% profit on its investment.
here’s a short video clip.
Posted: March 19th, 2010 under Education.
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Posted: March 19th, 2010 under Education.
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Posted: March 19th, 2010 under Education.
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Posted: March 19th, 2010 under Education.
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