Author: benaug

Connecting the dots

First off, am I the only one who after hearing “connect the dots” thinks, “la, la la”?  I forgot that this was from Pee Wee Herman .

This week, several of the readings were about rethinking/revamping how we teach students in today’s society where everyone is connected via the internet and the job requirements are shifting, stressing the importance of producing innovators.  This got me thinking about what innovation has looked like in the fields of wildlife science and ecological statistics and where they overlap.  In wildlife science, innovation has been driven by technology.  In the 70’s someone put a VHF beacon in a collar and attached it to an animal so they could follow it around.  Then everyone started doing it.  GPS technology made it’s way into the larger animal tracking collars in the late 1990’s and the size of GPS collars has been decreasing and the performance has been increasing ever since due to innovators in the smart phone industry.

In wildlife science, mark recapture models are the dominant method for estimating population sizes.  You catch animals, tag them, release them, and then try to catch them again.  Through this process, you can estimate the detection probability which can be combined with the number you actually caught to estimate the population size.  We used to have to physically capture the animals.  This is a lot of work and generally sucks for the animals involved (although with baited traps, some animals inevitably become “trap-happy”, judging the bait to be worth it).  The discovery of microsatellite markers in DNA opened the door to doing mark recapture using genetic samples such as those found in hair follicles or scat samples.  Instead of having to capture a bunch of bears, we now only have to capture a bunch of their hairs.  How do we do this?  Biologists innovated the hair snare.  Put barbed wire around some trees and put a doughnut in the middle.  Bears can’t resist.

 

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What about wolverines?  I bet they get really pissed off when caught in a trap.  Biologists came up with this contraption and put a piece of chicken on the top.

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You can also get DNA from scat samples.  Animal poop.  Do you just go out looking for poop?  No!  You train a dog to find them for you (and not eat them).  There are now several scat dog services you can hire to go capture animal scats for you.

About the same time genetics was making its way into mark recapture, people started putting up motion sensitive cameras in systematic arrays.  Camera traps.  It turns out many animals have unique patterns on their coats which can be used to identify them when caught later.  Like tigers.  In order to fully identify an animal with a camera trap, you need to capture both sides simultaneously.  Otherwise, you don’t know which left side photos go with each right side photo.  So the smart thing to do is to put two cameras at each site pointed at each other, right?  This has been the conventional wisdom for 20 years, but… no!  I’m developing mark recapture models that allow you to probabilistically link left and right sides based on the spatial location where they were captured.  Spatial partial identity models.  It turns out that hybrid grid designs consisting of both single and double camera stations (that most biologists would tell you are stupid) can estimate the number of animals with the most precision because you can cover more ground with your cameras and catch more animals.  I’m planning on expanding the same ideas to use partial genotype samples in hair snare and scat surveys that are currently being discarded.

So there are two types of innovations here, one technology driven and the other, driven by innovation in statistical models.  Did those innovating biologists have any natural propensity to be innovators?  I don’t really think so.  It seems like technology is the limiting factor and everyone in the field knows what to do with the new technology once it arrives and it’s a race to see who can do it first.  The area where the most innovation is currently getting ready to occur is in the use of drones to survey wildlife.  It’s pretty obvious what to do with a drone to survey wildlife.  You do the same thing you were doing with airplanes only better and safer.  You put VHF antennae on them and go find the animals.  You put thermal cameras on them and do transect surveys.  There are probably instances of more non-straight forward innovation in wildlife, but none come to mind.

Where innovation seems less inevitable is in the development of statistical methodology to analyze data collected in new ways.  But even here, there is a widespread sense of where the field is going and people are frequently “scooped” by others who beat you to publication.  Although maybe statisticians are just natural innovators.  I believe this is largely true.  I don’t think this has to do with their background in the humanities–I think it comes from their training in how to structure reality with probabilistic abstractions.  And programming.  Programming is problem solving and abstract thinking and innovation is rewarded.  I’d recommend programming over the humanities if the goal is to create innovators.

 

Critical Pedagogy

This week’s readings shed light on my bewilderment with the previous reading “Evidence-based logic and the abandonment of non-assessable learning outcomes by Donna Riley.  In my post on that paper, I argued that the author does not understand what logical positivism is and falsely associated it with evidence-based practice.  She mentioned alternative epistemologies, but provided no examples.  I suspected we were wading into postmodernism waters, but after this week’s readings, I think we’re in danger of drowning.  At the core, this weeks readings and Critical Pedagogy make valid points.  Institutional power can be reinforced through a “banking model” of pedagogy and many recommendations by Paulo Freire should help counter the power structure and even lead to better learning outcomes for the students.  I don’t really have any complaints about the Freire readings other than the fact that they were painfully repetitive–I think the entire message could be condensed into 3-4 paragraphs!

Now on to Critical Pedagogy by Joe Kincheloe.  Let’s start with logical positivism–roughly, the idea that only statements that can be logically or empirically verified can be cognitively meaningful.  In a book edited by Joe Kincheloe, logical positivism is used as a boogeyman referred to with frequent pejoratives (seriously, look at the list!) that is oppressing their methods of Critical Pedagogy.  Only in the second to last chapter is logical positivism actually defined.  The problem is that logical positivism has been dead since the 1960s because it was realized that logical positivism cannot be justified based on the rules of logical positivism and it has nothing to do with their critique of evidence-based methods which can be justified on several positions in the Philosophy of Science.  In the previous link, logical positivism would fit within the “Naive Realism” camp (but isn’t exactly the same) and postmodernist are mostly in the “Relativism” camp, but may retreat into the instrumentalist camp when pressed.  However, some don’t.  Smart people actually believe things like “the validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by the factual evidence” or “the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge”.  All you really need to justify trusting the results of evidence-based practice is a Reliabilist epistemology and recognizing that social factors do have some influence on our scientific theories doesn’t invalidate the Scientific Method or introduce the need for “other ways of knowing” or “alternative epistemologies”.

Kincheloe argues for other modes of knowledge.  What exactly does he mean?  First, let’s define knowledge: well-justified true belief.  That’s a reasonable, if not 100% philosophically defensible, definition.  Kincheloe lays out several proposed forms of knowledge.  First is normative knowledge, which “concerns what should be”.  This is by no reasonable definition “knowledge”, it is a moral theory or your values.  Second is empirical knowledge–knowledge from data or observations  derived from the senses– which Kincheloe thinks you should at least be acquainted with.  How much weight it should be given relative to other “forms of knowing” is unclear.  Third is political knowledge.  This isn’t really defined, but it “focuses on the power-related aspects of teacher education and teaching”.  How you acquire this without data and observations from your senses is beyond me.  Fourth is ontological knowledge.  Again, not defined, but “has to do with what it means to be a teacher”.  Fifth is experiential knowledge which “involves information and insight about practice”.  OK, I think we’re talking about knowledge about different categories of things, not different types of knowledge or ways of knowing.  Sixth is reflective-synthetic knowledge-“bringing all of your knowledges of teaching together so they can be employed in the critical pedagogical act”.  Putting knowledge about different things together is a new type of knowledge?

Kincheloe further argues that some knowledge forms have been previously excluded.  Some are just areas of study such as African American studies, but others seem to imply they provide alternative ways of knowing, such as psychoanalysis and indigenous knowledges.  Psychoanalysis and many forms of indigenous knowledge (e.g. acupuncture, chinese herbal medicine) have been demonstrated to be pseudoscience when evaluated by the imperialist western Scientific method.  In what sense does something that is false constitute knowledge?  Further, how does the “epistemic plurality” of Critical Pedagogy not leave the door open to all sorts of dangerous psuedoscience and conspiracy theories?

I do think the core ideas of Critical Pedagogy have merit–I just think they would be much more compelling and understandable if they were not dressed up in postmodernism which Noam Chomsky once described as a combination of over-inflated polysyllabic truisms and nonsense.  If you’re bored, here is a postmodernist random essay generator if you want to check it out.  Refresh for a new essay!

Social Justice Education to Social Justice Activism

The issues of diversity and social justice are connected to so many things I care about in life that I’ve found it difficult to narrow the topic down to what can fit in a single blog post.  First, as a liberal, I value everyone’s right to be treated equally and want to correct any real injustices that we identify to create a fair playing field for all.  I don’t value diversity for diversity’s sake, but I do value it in the contexts that it has benefits for society and in promoting equality.  Second, I’m a member of the skeptic/atheist communities (the 2 overlap considerably) and social justice activism has created a schism in our movement during the past 2 years.  Free speech and rigorous debate have long been valued in the community, but so has social justice, specifically the injustices caused by religions and religious communities, but also just general liberal values as we are mostly Humanists.  We have historically criticized injustices within religious communities, striving to counter ideas, not attack individuals.  Most on the Left saw this as important work, especially when we were challenging conservative Christianity in our own country on issues like homosexuality, sexism, and their theocratic tendencies. But about 2 years ago, Islam suddenly became off-limits and anyone criticizing Islam or Muslim norms was now labeled an Islamaphobe.  What happened?  It is probably a confluence of several trends, including the rise of victimhood culture, but I think the logic is that Muslims are an oppressed group therefore we cannot criticize their ideas, which is paternalistic and feeds in to the bigotry of low expectations.  Never mind that women, homosexuals, and apostates in many Islamic societies are among the most oppressed people, any criticism of Islam or Islamist regimes only fuels bigotry towards Muslims so they get a free pass.  Social justice is also causing a schism around the issue of feminism within the atheist/skeptic community with everyone agreeing on the goal of gender equality but with a subset engaging in what I think is misguided and dishonest social justice activism.

Again, I’m all for social justice–it’s the tactics of activists that I think are counterproductive.  In a democratic society or on a college campus, there is a tension between freedom of speech and physical and emotional safety.  In our democracy, freedom of speech is more or less absolute.  We allow speech as long as it does not lead directly to violence, defamation, or harassment.  On a college campus, we value freedom of speech, but we also get to decide who gets a platform to promote their ideas on campus.  There is obviously a line of acceptability of ideas below which we would not want to give someone a platform to speak.  For example, we wouldn’t invite a child rapist to come explain their position.  But this line is subjective.  How do we negotiate this?  Ideally, we do so as a community.  Since there is a wide range of opinions on a college campus, I think we want to set a bar that allows the opinions of the majority of residents to have the right for their views to be given a platform.  We may not agree with these views, but college is supposed to be a place where we are exposed to ideas that challenge us, perhaps make us uncomfortable, even angry.  We then should counter ideas we don’t agree with with better ideas.  This is how you change minds and expose yourself to other positions so that you can change your mind if you happen to be wrong about something.  Or if you’re not comfortable hearing challenging ideas, you don’t show up.

College student justice activists largely are not doing this.  They are deeming only ideas firmly within their social justice agenda worthy of being given a platform and de-platforming (192 in 2013), physically blocking, and disrupting the events of speakers they don’t agree with.  Dissent is silenced by using labels like bigot, sexist, and homophobe, things liberals really don’t want to be labeled, at the drop of a hat.  Even social justice activists aren’t safe–one misstep and you’re labeled and deplatformed.  This is the opposite of a safe space!

So I’m curious if there is a link between social justice education and the sorry state of social justice activism.  Arao and Clemens define a safe space to be ‘an environment in which everyone feels comfortable expressing themselves and participating fully, without fear of attack, ridicule, or denial of experience’’.  This sounds like a very reasonable way to conduct the classroom, but I’m interested in some of the specifics.  I’ve never been in a classroom with formal safe space guidelines so I have a few questions.

1.  What counts as an attack or ridicule?  I would argue this should be limited to a personal attack e.g. a racial or sexist slur.  But social justice advocates have a more broad definition of an attack including the criticism of certain types of ideas, such as one’s religion and cultural practices (if you’re a minority, this is fair game if you’re not), tenets of feminist, gender, or race theory, and the law, to name a few.  It is true that criticizing one’s firmly held beliefs can often feel like a personal attack but in a democratic society, we need to draw a firm line between attacking people and criticizing their ideas and people need to get used to having their ideas criticized and being able to handle it.  So, I think it is a problem to lump the criticism of ideas in with personal attacks.  Is this occurring in the classroom or is it mission creep after they leave the classroom?  Arao and Clemens define an attack as an instance of extreme disrespect.  People often feel extremely disrespected when you question their firmly held beliefs.  But I’m glad to see that they recognize this distinction in their brave space concept.

2.  What counts as a denial of experience?  Obviously, we shouldn’t deny that something someone claimed they experienced never happened.  We can personally be skeptical of it if it sounds extremely implausible, but we should give them the benefit of the doubt.  But can we recognize their experience and then argue that it is not relevant to the question at hand?  I hope so.

OK, I guess I only had 2 questions.  I want to end by talking about perhaps the most important type of diversity on college campus that is currently being largely ignored–viewpoint diversity.  The faculty at American college campuses are overwhelmingly liberal and roughly 96% of the faculty in the social sciences are liberal.  Not only does this situation likely lead to biased research in the social sciences, a largely liberal administration and faculty are more likely to give in to unreasonable student demands such as systematically no platforming conservatives.  Yes, I am a liberal suggesting that we increase the number of conservative faculty on campus–that’s how bad I think the current climate is.  I think it will make for better rounded students more able to cope with the real world once they leave campus.  However, I’m not optimistic this will happen.

Update:  Here is a great video from Maajid Nawaz.  “No idea is above scrutiny, no people are below dignity”.

My Authentic Teaching Self

The readings this week got me thinking about what my authentic teaching self is, what is my teaching voice, and how it should craft it for the course I’m co-teaching next fall.  I have done some limited teaching in the past–3 labs a week for an undergrad introduction to statistics course, but at the time, I just showed up and winged it without carefully thinking about my authentic teaching self.  I feel that my performance was authentic–I was laid back and moderately funny.  I tried to relate statistical concepts to the students in a manner they understood and cared about.  I have no idea if it worked.

The class I’m teaching in the fall will be similar, but at the graduate level.  I’m teaching an introductory class in statistical modelling in the wildlife sciences.  Students will have differing backgrounds in statistics and ecological modelling, but they should be there because they want to be there–this class is not required to graduate.  I think I can take the same laid back, moderately funny approach that came naturally before.  I plan on incorporating a substantial amount of problem-based learning, which will be easy to do in this type of class.  Hopefully it will be better than this incredibly boring blog post.

What’s wrong with evidence-based practice?

First, let’s start with the concept of evidence-based practice in education by looking at the evidence-based medicine (EBM) analog. Riley rightly claims that EBM places randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the gold standard for evidence, but wrongly claims that EBM closes off knowledge related societal or cultural determinants of health. We can and do conduct RCTs to obtain knowledge about these determinants of health, but we often have to look at these more complex phenomena through correlational studies that, while inferior sources of evidence, are fair game in EBM. Correlational studies provide weaker evidence than RCTs, but are strengthened when multiple lines of evidence converge and this approach has produced some of the most important and certain medical knowledge that we have such as the fact that smoking causes lung cancer. The medical field has taken EBM one step further along the axis of scientific rigor to science-based medicine (SBM) where the results of scientific studies are interpreted in a Bayesian manner, incorporating their prior probability derived from the current best scientific theories to inform the posterior from which inference is derived. In practice, an example of this might be that a homeopathy study obtained a positive result, but the prior probability that homeopathy works is essentially zero and so this trial is almost certainly just a false positive result. Riley dismisses evidence-based practice as “inane double speak”, while in fact, it is the most rigorous and reliable means to we have to obtain knowledge. These are the same tactics proponents of alternative medicine use when the science-based medicine community do not accept their claims. Education practice that is not evidence-based is just education practice that has not been proven to work.

Second, let’s talk about epistemology. Riley claims that the epistemology of evidence-based practice is logical positivism. This is incorrect. Logical positivism has been dead since the 1960s. Evidence-based practice is based on the Scientific Method, which takes a Reliablist account of epistemology where adherents are justified in knowing something if it is obtained through a reliable process such as the Scientific Method itself and Scientific skepticism. So what is Riley’s alternative epistemology? She doesn’t say! The closest thing to an alternative epistemology is in the statement that evidence-based practice devalues “epistemic frames upon which the eliminated outcomes are based; global and social context, professional responsibility, and lifelong learning are not fully characterized by empirical and logical positivist ways of knowing”. Why not? What alternative do we have? Am I missing something here or is this post-modernist obfuscation?

I realize these two issues are somewhat tangential to the main concern that things that are hard to test have been removed from learning outcomes, I just find it bizarre how she finds them to be sources of the problem and I can’t sit idly by while the Scientific Method is bashed.

The grand narrative imperative

Neil Postman asserts that meaning and significance are assured only when our learning fits within a grand narrative that motivates and guides us. I do agree that a grand narrative can help motivate students to learn; however, I think this is not the only route to meaning and significance. To the extent that I can ascertain my true motivations without much bias, I think my learning is motivated by curiosity alone and I find meaning and significance in what I can do with what I’ve learned. I’ll give an example. When working on a particular statistical model, I often wonder what happens when you violate one or more of the assumptions, so I explore this via simulation. The simulations are usually very interesting to me and I may then alter the model to accommodate the assumption violations. I may end up with a new model that is useful for improving inference in ecological studies and thus the management of wildlife species or just general ecological knowledge and I find meaning and significance in this, but that was not the motivation. It was curiosity. I like to break things and then fix them.

Again, I see that a grand narrative can help motivate learning and convey significance, but if Langer’s mindfulness ideas have merit (I think they do), then shouldn’t our narratives be individualized? Can we convince all learners that their grand narrative should be improving the well-being of a global society? Probably not. And what does the well-being of a global society have to do with art history or other seeming unrelated topics? Maybe the narrative does not to be grand and maybe we don’t need just one. Perhaps we can be motivated in different areas by subject-specific micro-narratives. I don’t really know what this even means! Personally, I don’t recall any of my teachers trying to motivate the students with a grand narrative, especially not one of a religious or nationalistic nature. If I had to say what my grand narrative for life is, it is a combination of scientific skepticism, worldview naturalism, and secular humanism.  I would probably need to find another narrative to motivate me to learn art history and find meaning in it!

Does anyone have any thoughts on narratives, the grand narrative recommended by Niel Postman, or alternative narratives? What motivates you to learn and find significance in what you are learning?

A skeptical look at academic blogging

While the theme this week is Connected Learning, the blogs by Scott Rosenberg and Tim Hitchcock are focused on the benefits of blogging, the former making the case for blogging in general and the latter making the case for academic blogging, specifically. As I’m generally a skeptical person, I want to address what I think is an overselling of academic blogging, rather than the blogs on Connected Learning, which I largely agree with.

I’ll start by saying I’m not opposed to the idea that academic blogging is beneficial for some people—I just think these two blogs do not take a critical and nuanced look at the costs and benefits of blogging. A much more nuanced and balanced take, in my opinion, can be found on the Dynamic Ecology blog, in a post entitled Should you start a science blog? Ask yourself these questions.”

This blog goes through the reasons that science blogging may or may not be a good idea for any particular person. To me, the most important point that is not considered in the assigned articles is that of opportunity costs. You could be doing countless other things with your time besides blogging and each of these other activities has an expected benefit to your academic output. You should allocate your time proportional to the expected value of the academic (and non-academic) metrics you care about. Successful blogging is a large time commitment –you need to blog frequently, probably every week, for a long time, perhaps months, before you have likely accumulated more than a few readers.  And then, you must keep it up to keep your readers coming back.  If you don’t enjoy it, are not very self-confident, or are not a fast writer, blogging will take even more of your precious time. If you don’t have much of interest to say, the benefits of blogging will be reduced. The vast majority of blogs never get off the ground and the time spent trying to gain an audience is at least partially a sunk cost. However, some people succeed, and these are probably the self-confident people with interesting things to say who enjoy blogging and are fast writers (more often than not). So I see academic blogging as a gamble with the odds determined by factors such as those I’ve just outlined.

The author of the post, Jeremy Fox, who has been blogging for years sees the best way to benefit from academic blogging is if people who have power over your career, such as an advisor or department head, value your blogging. Otherwise, in general, he thinks blogging isn’t likely to have much of an impact on your career in terms of publication output, getting grants, job prospects, tenure, etc. The main benefits he sees are that he enjoys blogging and can have in-depth conversations with colleagues (as opposed to on Twitter), mentor students, perhaps influence the direction of his field, and educate the public.

Despite my less rosy view of academic blogging, I’ve actually been wrestling with starting a blog for a while now. I would like a place where I can explore ideas in my Ecological Statistician niche with other ecological statisticians and wildlife biologists, but I’m still unsure about the net effect it will have on my career and I have plenty of other things I need to be doing.