Classical College Education in San Antonio, TX
Feb 16th
This post is more or less a “message in a bottle”.
Over the last year or so, I have been searching for groups or individuals in the San Antonio, Texas area who might be interested in starting a project to launch a Roman Catholic “classical education” college in the San Antonio area.
A classical education college is one where the curriculum is based upon the great works of Western civilization, and teaching is done in the Socratic method. The best example of such a school is Thomas Aquinas College in California.
I’ve never done anything like this before, and have no idea what is required. But I figured I would move forward in the following fashion:
1. Look for like-minded persons who might be interested in exploring the possibility of setting up such a school.
2. Work with these folks on putting together a feasibility paper describing the mission, goals, and plan for starting the school.
3. Once the feasibility study is done, and if it looks good, begin to shop the idea around to the Archdiocese of San Antonio and to potential donors
4. Concurrently, look to put together a starting Board of Trustees and teaching faculty, and perhaps begin operations on a small scale.
5. As part of the faculty hiring, find someone to manage the accreditation process.
This could all be a pipe dream and completely unfeasible. But I figure you don’t know until you at least try.
Thus, as a first step, I’d like to ask anyone interested in working on such a project to contact me via email at RL at WELL dot COM. Drop me a note, letting me know what you background is, and why you’d be interested in working on such a project. If I get enough people responding over the next year or so, then maybe we can meet face to face and discuss things further.
Latinos on the Internet: Meeting in the middle
Dec 22nd
The Pew Hispanic Center recently released a report describing Internet usage amongst Latinos in the US.
Overall, the report was very encouraging. From 2006 to 2008, the percentage of adult Latinos who used the Internet grew by 10 percentage points from 54 to 64 percent. The percentage of adult whites who used the internet also grew during this same time period, from 72 to 76 percent. Interestingly, the percentage of blacks using the Internet during this time only grew by two percentage points, from 61 to 63 percent. The authors of this study suggest that these numbers may be underestimated, because of the fact that cell-phone-only homes have grown dramatically, particularly amongst Latinos and blacks, and this survey was conducted across telephone land-lines.
While this overall view is good news, it shows that we still have a long way to to before we achieve true equality in access to Internet resources, and the details of the Pew study bear this out. Latinos born in the US were just as likely as whites to use the internet in 2008, 77 percent to 76 percent, respectively. However, only 52 percent of foreign-born Latinos used the Internet in 2008 (up from 40 percent in 2006). Even more interesting is the fact that this difference persisted when controlling for education levels, household income, and English proficiency. Thus, while young Latinos and US-born Latinos are using the Internet, there is still much to be done to be able to reach foreign-born Latinos.
Another area of concern is access to the Internet by poor Latinos and those with less education. Only 56 percent of Latinos earning less than $30K/yr in household income used the Internet in 2008, up from a meager 39 percent in 2006. By comparison, eighty-eight percent of Latinos earning more than $50k/yr used the Internet in 2008, a number that did not change from 2006. These numbers compare favorably to those of whites and blacks, suggesting that the effects of poverty and lower educational attainment on Internet usage cut across race.
The Pew report also looked at the use of broadband internet connections by Latinos, blacks, and whites. It is important to look at broadband adoption as a population variable because many of today’s web-based applications (e.g. online banking, government services) are bandwidth-intensive and unable to run well on slower, dialup Internet connections. As it turns out, the broadband adoption numbers are similar to those for overall Internet usage. Latinos have gone from 63 percent broadband usage in 2006, up to 76 percent in 2008. These numbers are similar to those for whites and blacks, though Latinos trail slightly behind both groups. As with overall Internet usage, the poor, under-educated, and foreign-born Latinos trailed all other groups in terms of broadband usage.
Overall, there was good news in the Pew report, but there are also a lot of challenges which lay ahead. These challenges are important, because Latinos are the fastest-growing minority population in the US, and we cannot afford to have such a large percentage of our population. But what to do?
From the results of the Pew report, it is clear that foreign-born Latinos, poor Latinos, and under-educated Latinos are the primary groups that should be targeted in any plan to promote Internet usage. There is likely much overlap between these three groups, but there is also an opportunity to craft interventions aimed specifically at getting more members of each of these 3 groups to use the Internet, and to connect via broadband connections from home. Granted, dealing with these issues entails dealing with a complex universe of interrelated issues, from racism to immigration reform to unemployment. But there are likely many interventions and policy actions which may help alleviate some of the most obvious differences between Latinos and whites.
In spite of high levels of education and income, many foreign-born Latinos are not using the Internet. This may be due to a lack of awareness of the utility and value of Internet resources. Awareness may be positively influenced by advertising aimed at getting more foreign-born Latinos interested in using the Internet, as well as education. As more and more children of foreign-born Latinos attend colleges and universities, it would be incumbent on organizations such as the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) to work with federal and state lawmakers to make sure that these schools can provide the resources necessary to enable these students to learn about the resources available on the Internet, and understand the benefits of broadband access. Similarly, under-educated Latinos are in desperate need of these types of resources, particularly at the K-12 levels.
Poor Latinos are likely beset with the problem of limited access to the Internet in areas where they live, and especially limited access to broadband. The federal government has plans in place to extend broadband access to underserved areas but such plans are dependent upon accurate maps of broadband usage. The creation of these maps has been a political and technical challenge. From the political side, there are many who are opposed to the idea of broadband mapping, claiming it to be a waste of time and resources. Technically, broadband maps require the cooperation of numerous private and public sector entities, and getting all of these entities to agree on common terminology and common standards is problematic.
In sum, Latinos have greater access to the Internet and to broadband than they ever have. If they can just work on building up awareness and education regarding Internet resources, perhaps policy makers can meet them in the middle with better and better plans to extend the technical infrastructure to those who are newly aware of the vast world of cyberspace.
Top 10 bits of advice for surviving graduate school
Dec 20th
This advice is intended for anyone interested in pursuing graduate education (toward the Ph.D.) on a full-time basis, not for part-timers or weekend scholars. Also, my graduate education was in the sciences, so some of what I say may not apply to someone in, say, management or the humanities.
1. Maintain a positive attitude
I wish I would have known this bit of advice when I was in grad school. Being a poor graduate student is, for the most part, a miserable existence. But, you get to share it with others going through the same thing. Bond with these folks, and make it a point to be positive in the face of adversity. Combine this with hard work, and you’ll make a great impression on the graduate faculty.
2. Don’t get married or be married
Being a full time grad student in science is a very self-absorbed undertaking. You’ll be eating, breathing, thinking nothing but graduate school for at least 3 or 4 years. Unless your spouse is another graduate student, or VERY, VERY patient and understanding, you’ll end up with a ruined marriage at about the same time you receive your doctorate. You also won’t be earning a lot of money, and that can stress out some couples as well.
3. Expand your horizons
Take time in graduate school to explore other areas of knowledge, to get to know faculty members in areas outside of your own. This extra knowledge and experience may come in handy to differentiate you from other job applicants when trying to land that tenure track job.
4. Maintain professional relationships with your mentor and graduate faculty at all times.
If you have a very good mentor, like I did, he or she will keep your relationship professional and will make sure your relationship with other faculty members is professional as well. Why is this important? Because of academic politics. The graduate faculty at your department likely has a nasty, ugly history of bloody politics. They all do. The last thing you want is to get involved in these politics, such that you hurt your chances of successfully jumping through all the hoops of the hazing ritual known as graduate school. Keep professional relationships with everyone, document EVERYTHING you say and that is said to you, and treat everyone with respect.
5. Cherish the friendships
Graduate school is an ordeal, an ordeal that you suffer through along with others. If you’re lucky, this group suffering will cause a strong bonding experience, and you’ll make a lifetime of friends. There are only two good things about graduate school: 1) finishing it, and 2) the friends you make. Cherish especially those friends with whom you can share your feelings with. You’ll have a lot of ups and downs in grad school.
6. Learn to write and to speak well
Do everything you can to get better at writing and speaking. Ask your mentor and other profs for writing feedback. Write as many papers as you can, and take the feedback seriously. Do a teaching assistantship and learn how to deliver good lectures and explain difficult concepts to others. Ask others for feedback on your speaking or teaching. Videotape yourself giving a talk or lecture, and find ways to improve. You might be the most brilliant scientist since Einstein, but if you can’t communicate your ideas well, no one will pay attention to you or want to hire you.
7. Develop a routine
Develop a routine that will allow you to study, teach, conduct your research, and take care of yourself every day. This is why it it important to be unmarried and unattached. You need to develop a routine that depends as little as possible on the routines and actions of others.
8. Take it one task at a time.
If you sit down and look at the sum total of work you have to accomplish to earn a doctorate, you’ll get discouraged. Don’t think about it. Just take things one exam at a time, one paper at a time, one experiment at a time. Trudge through it with a positive attitude and you’ll be done before you realize it.
9. Just get it done!
There are going to be many, many times in the course of your graduate education when you are just going to want to quit. At the very least, you’re going to hit a wall, and will be unable to bring yourself to write your thesis, run that experiment, analyze those data, etc. This is where you just have to pull yourself up and just do it. There’s just no other advice that I can offer, it just boils down to sucking it up and forcing yourself to complete those aversive tasks. Just realize you’re going to have these moments, and mentally prepare yourself for them.
10. Read phdcomics.com
No one has captured graduate life the way Jorge Cham has in his webcomic, Piled Higher and Deeper. The comics don’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t suffered through graduate school. But after your first semester you’ll appreciate how hilarious these comics are, and they’ll make you feel a little better, knowing that you’re not alone!
“Learning Styles” and the classical education
Dec 20th
One of the big ideas in the world of education (both K-12 and postsecondary) is the whole notion of “learning styles.” By this, we mean that people have different ways of learning and recalling knowledge and information. For example, some people consider themselves “visual” learners, which means they need to see pictures and words related to the concepts under study. Ask any college student, and s/he will profess to being of one “type” or learning style or another.
But is there any scientific evidence for the whole concept of “learning styles?” Sure, there is a lot of money spent in developing learning tools suited to different learning styles, and people will swear up and down that they are this type or that type. But have learning styles ever been demonstrated empirically?
In the most recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork address this very question, and their answer is quite startling. As it turns out, there is virtually NO empirical evidence to support the idea that people with a certain “style” of learning will benefit from teaching suited to their “style”.
The authors reviewed a lot of literature, looking for properly-done studies that demonstrated this effect. They found none. The few studies they did come across showed that there was no effect. More precisely, they found that there was no interaction effect between a person’s learning style and a matching teaching style. If there was such an effect, you would expect that people who are of learning style “A” would only benefit from teaching if that teaching was designed for learning style “A”. Learning style and teaching design should interact, but in fact there’s no evidence to suggest that they do.
This is a huge finding, but not surprising. I can recall some 20 or so years ago, when experimental psychologists blew up the whole myth of “left brain” versus “right brain” thinkers. It used to be thought that “left brain” thinkers were more concrete and analytical, and “right brain” thinkers were more abstract and creative. As it turns out, there’s no basis for this idea. That’s not to say that there aren’t differences between, say, concrete and abstract thinking styles. Rather, there is simply no evidence to suggest that these types of thinking styles are determined by lateralization of brain functions.
Similarly, just because there are not yet any empirical findings supporting the idea of distinct learning styles, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork make a point of saying that studies looking at this issue need to be conducted, and conducted well. Valid and reliable criteria and tests need to be developed to determine an individual’s learning style. Then teaching methodologies need to be developed for each type of learning style. Finally, it needs to be demonstrated that individuals identified with a particular learning style benefit the most from teaching that fits their particular style. Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork have described this well in their paper, and it should serve as a useful framework for anyone wishing to do research in this area.
In the meantime, I wonder about all of the other teaching fads that have influenced education over the last few generations. Why is it that we in the United States spend more per child on education than any other nation in the world, and yet produce such mediocre results? I suppose everyone has ideas on why this is, and it is probably the case that everyone is at least a little bit correct. I think some of the blame may be placed on the training and education of teachers in the U.S. Most of the education departments in the U.S. have been heavily influenced by post-modern thinking. Post-modernism tells us there are no universal truths, no differences between the sexes, and that one moral system is just as good as any other. The only successful accomplishment of post-modernism has been to utterly drain the arts and humanities of any significance, of any meaning. For hundreds of years, the arts and humanities were the most important components of any advanced education. Now they are nothing more than punchlines to jokes told by college graduates who can barely put two sentences together.
Fortunately, there is a movement afoot to bring back more traditional forms of education, the so-called “classical education” movement. This movement seeks to bring back into the fold the study of Greek and Latin, and of all the classical works of western thought, from Homer to Einstein. Most of the K-12 classical education movement is taken up by home schoolers, and I suspect that it will remain that way for a very long time. But in the post-secondary realm there are a few colleges that have launched degree programs focused entirely on the study of the western canon, and which employ the Socratic method in the educational process.
Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Clara Paula, CA is one such school. Since their founding in the early 1970s, they’ve established a reputation for being one of the best liberal arts schools in the nation. Critics of this type of education typically argue that students are being prepared for great careers… in the past. I vehemently disagree with this. By being exposed to a classical education, students are being prepared for life in at least 3 ways:
1. The “great books” curriculum at places like Thomas Aquinas exposes students to the sum total of knowledge upon which our civilization is based. Anyone with a deep understanding of these basics will be prepared to understand and learn about anything.
2. The great works are presented in a unified manner, such that a student learns of the connections between different fields of knowledge. These connections occur as regular patterns across time, and a student who can recognize them has a distinct advantage.
3. The Socratic method teaches students to think on their feet, and to learn to think fast and work well with others. Combined with mandatory essays, this type of education will equip a student to be prepared for any type of work requiring the communication and understanding of sophisticated knowledge.
I doubt very much that such an approach to education would ever catch on with even a small minority of folks. Still, I feel that the fads and post-modern influences that the educational field has suffered over the last few generations has been extremely harmful. At some point, we may be able to jettison such nonsense, and go back to the search for truth and meaning. I think the only useful thing that postmodernism has taught us is that we can and will get ourselves into a meaningless mess when left to our own “rational” devices To successfully pursue the search for truth and knowledge, we need to look outside of ourselves.
Stress, poverty, and academic performance
Dec 15th
In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Chen, Cohen, and Miller report that kids from low socioeconomic status (SES) families show elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. From their abstract:
Individuals with a low socioeconomic status (SES) are at increased risk for mental and physical health problems, and the relationship may be mediated by the stress hormone cortisol. Over a 2-year period, children from low-SES backgrounds had higher levels of cortisol than did those from higher-SES backgrounds. Children from lower-SES backgrounds reported greater perceptions of threat and more family chaos, both of which may raise cortisol levels.
This is a fascinating finding, and something I was expecting. We know that chronic exposure to stress hormones like cortisol can cause damage to key areas of the brain associated with learning and memory, most notably the hippocampus. We also know that children who come from low SES families tend to do poorly with regard to academic performance.
Given all of this, the next set of studies to focus on would be to examine the effects of current stressors on academic performance, as well as the role of chronic stressors. I would imagine one study where you had at least four groups:
Group 1: Low current stress and low chronic stress history
Group 2: Low current stress and high chronic stress history
Group 3: High current stress and low chronic stress history
Group 4: High current stress and high chronic stress history
The obvious hypothesis to test would be that Group 1 would perform best academically, and Group 4 would perform the worst. But the real interesting results would be in comparing and contrasting Groups 2 and 3. At the very least, I would think that these groups might perform equally bad academically, and fall somewhere between the performance measures of Groups 1 and 4. But it is also possible that Group 2 may have enough cortisol-related brain anomalies that their performance would be worse than that of Group 3.
At any rate, if the results of such a study were able to demonstrate clear effects of current stress and chronic stress, the next step would be to see if we could relate the detrimental effects of chronic stress to specific brain damage. Behaviorally, we could test hippocampal functioning with spatial navigation tasks. It might also be possible to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study hippocampal activity in non-stressed and chronically stressed students. There are also a number of pharmacological manipulations that involve the enhancement or blockage of certain hippocampus-related functions. If chronically stressed and non-stressed students responded differently to these pharmacological manipulations, that would provide further evidence of hippocampal damage due to chronic stress.
Once a relationship is established, of course, we’d need to see if we could start coming up with interventions to help the children exposed to chronic stressors. At a minimum, I would think that families would need to be educated on what constitutes “stress”, and how stress can affect the lives of their kids.
MITs renewed focus on A.I., and IBMs kitty brains
Dec 11th
There’s been a lot of news lately in the world of artificial intelligence.
First up, was the news from IBM Research. Last month they reported that they had constructed a cortical simulator built upon the IBM Blue Gene supercomputing architecture. According to IBM, this cortical simulation is able to run at near-real-time, and possesses the power to simulate the activity in a cat cortex. Exciting news, to be sure.
However, a few weeks later Henry Markam, an IBM Blue Brain project director, publicly issued a nasty letter calling the whole cat-brain achievement a “PR stunt”. The choicest quote from Markham’s letter is this one:
This is light years away from a cat brain, not even close to an ants brain in complexity. It is highly unethical of (Dharmendra) Modha to mislead the public in making people believe they have actually simulated a cat’s brain. Absolutely shocking.
Wow. For their part, IBM has stood by their original announcement. But it’s important to note that this little family quarrel amongst IBM researchers is indicative of a much deeper level of discord that goes way beyond IBM. Markham was originally trained as a neuroscientist, while the team leader who is taking much credit for this work, Dharmendra Modha, is a computer scientist. Neuroscientists and computer scientists are going to have different approaches and different expectations for working on the problem of brain simulations. Computer scientists like Modha are going to look at their estimates of the raw computing power of a mammalian brain, and use those estimates to decide how much horsepower they need to simulate that raw computing power in silico. Once they’re able to hit those horsepower numbers, they can declare a sort of victory. Meanwhile, neuroscientists such as Markham are used to studying, in minute detail, the complex underpinnings of relatively simple functions and behaviors. To them, it is impossible to assert that a cat cortex has been “simulated”, because such a statement implies a very deep level of understanding of what it is the cortex does and how it works, something we currently don’t know.
As a result, both Modha and Markham are right: Modha can declare victory from his perspective because of the fact that, by his own standards, he has managed to “simulate” a cat cortex. But Markham is also correct, in that we haven’t even begun to simulate the real underpinnings of neural activity that give rise to even the simplest forms of behavior.
I’ve met Dr. Modha and have chatted with him a few times regarding his work. He’s a nice guy, and very sharp. What was clear to me, though, is that he definitely sees neuroscience as nothing more than a support tool for his work. We neuroscientists should simply provide data to the computer scientists, and not worry about how those data are being used. I think that most neuroscientists would prefer to see this work proceed in a much different fashion. Rather than work on simulating a mammalian brain, we should have begun by completely simulating the nervous systems of invertebrates, including planaria, cockroaches, and flies. Understanding the way these simpler organisms behave would go a long way toward helping to understand how more complex animals behave.
Maybe we should go down even further: Why not start by simulating the entire activity of a single neuron? We know much now about how neurons work, how they control and regulate their electrical charges, activation pathways, neurotransmitter production, gate control mechanisms, and much more. Neurons are enormously complex cells, and there’s reason to believe that at least some core behaviors (e.g. Pavlovian conditioning) may be found at the neural or molecular layer. We may not be able to fully understand how our brains work until we understand exactly how the complexity of a neuron contributes to those inner workings.
Meanwhile, in another story, it was recently reported that MIT is launching what they’re calling the Mind Machine Project (MMP). MMP is to be a $5 million effort aimed at “fixing” the mistakes of some 40 years of AI work. A collection of experts will be working together to create new, intelligent machines that they hope will live up to the dream and hype of AI that existed back when it was first born. Back then (the 1960s), there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that there would indeed be a HAL 9000 computer by the year 2001. I fear that the MIT workers will be committing the same sins as their brethren at IBM. They’ll likely focus on top-down approaches to various problems such as “cognition”.
What they should be doing is working first on building a framework where simple machines can be augmented by more and more complex “layers” or components. This would be much more like the evolution of brains and behaviors on earth. In addition they should start with components of simple behaviors, such as sensation and perception, then move on to simple behaviors such as avoidance, sensitization, and habituation. Any machine that can do behaviors at the level of a worm or cockroach is ready to be used to support more and more complex behaviors.
I hope that the folks at MIT realize this go forth in such a manner. The folks at IBM are much to enamored of their splendid hardware to change course now. But there are a lot of smart folks over there, and I hope that some of them realize that they need to take a different approach with brain and behavior simulation, and listen to a few neuroscientists. Whatever happens, all of this promises to be very exciting to watch, and I continue to wish that I could be part of it.
What is a midlife crisis?
May 18th
After a couple of years of trying to figure out just what the hell is wrong with me, I’ve finally determined that I am going through a midlife crisis. It seems this is the normal course of action for guys my age, to quite suddenly hit a stage in life where you question what you’ve done and what you want to do.
My midlife crisis is rather circumscribed. I’m not wanting to abandon my wife and kids, nor do I feel a great urge to make any expensive purchases or spend any money on improving my physical appearance, I’m quite alright with the whole idea of getting old. My midlife crisis takes the form of the guy who has NO FUCKING CLUE WHATSOEVER what he should do with his life.
I have been blessed with a great many skills and abilities. But there doesn’t seem to be any need or want of any of my particular skills or abilities. My work offers no stimulation of any sort. I have no clue what i want to do, what I need to do, or what I should do. Well, that’s not all quite true: I know for a fact that I need to be a good husband to my loving wife and good father to my kids. And I know that I must do God’s will. Aside from that, I have no clue.
God has been frustratingly silent, and even cruel lately. A couple of months ago I scored an interview for a faculty position at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. It seemed like the perfect job for me. But I went through the grind of the interview and came away not feeling like I had landed the job, and sure enough a week and a half later I get the phone call wishing me the best of luck. [Side Note: I really, really wish that if a job candidate has already been picked, or if the job is going to go to someone else no matter what, that they'd just let you know that up front. Then you could kindly say "Thanks", grab some free drinks and snacks, and leave. I know that's not possible, but still.].
What that experience taught me is 1) I’m not in control, and 2) I don’t have any idea what I want or need to do with my life. I’m glad I didn’t get the job because my gut was telling me that the fit just wasn’t there. But it left me wondering about something: I’ve always assumed that teaching would be my true profession to do God’s will for me, but now I don’t know.
So I’m a bit down about all of this, and also down about some recent health problems I’ve been having. On a grander scale I am at peace with my health problems, but this midlife crisis crap has really got me tied in a knot.
I’ve resolved to just do some reading and see if I can figure out how to make a better me from this experience. That’s about all one can do.
DuelAdapter: Don’t waste your money.
Jan 6th
I just received a DuelAdapter for use with my splendid new Lenovo S10 IdeaPad.
The DuelAdapter (http://www.duel-systemsadapters.com/) is a device that is supposed to allow you to use older PCMCIA cards in the newer ExpressCard slots featured on new laptops such as the Lenovo S10. I have an AT&T cellular modem card that I use on my Lenovo T61p, and wanted to use the same card on my S10.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that the DuelAdapter is incompatible with the Lenovo S10 Ideapad. After I installed the driver software, I plugged the adapter into the S10’s ExpressCard slot and got… a Windows Code 12 error, meaning that either the Windows OS, the BIOS or some combination of both was unable to come up with the resources (memory, interrupts, I/O, etc). necessary to make the damn thing work.
After many hours of upgrading drivers, my BIOS, and googling around and trying everything I could find, I finally gave up. One thing I did learn from googling was that there were many other people who experienced similar problems, on a variety of different hardware platforms, and that the DuelSystems folks were mostly unhelpful. This leads me to believe that the DuelAdapter just isn’t ready for primetime. Unless the DuelSystem’s website explictly states that your computer and PC Card are supported by this product, I’d save myself the trouble and expense.
Christmas Pageant!
Dec 16th
My 7 year old son is taking part in his Christmas pageant this evening at his school. He’s dressed as a little angel and of course looks adorable.
Dealing with aging parents
Dec 15th
It looks like it is time for my wife and I to deal with aging parents. Her dad has COPD, and is slowly deteriorating to the point where he’s having trouble working and taking care of himself.
We’re going to work with my sis-in-law to start planning out what to do. He’s a very proud man and it’s going to be like pulling teeth.
