Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk

Worst science reporting ever.

2009-10-06T14:26:00.002-04:00

Be sure to click through to read the story. Remember, science reporting gets really bad, and this is the worst ever science reporting.
Worst science
Originally uploaded by perca fluviatilis.

More on Issue 2

2009-10-02T13:42:00.004-04:00

My colleague Ben and a woman from the Ohio Farm Bureau have raised some interesting points about issue 2. I'd like to respond to them publicly because in order to clarify some misconceptions.

The Oversight Board Would Be Undemocratic

Ben points out (on Facebook) that in general, oversight boards are a good thing, and a board that overseas farm animal welfare could be good for animals. While this is true in general, it is not the kind of board we are looking at here. The goal of this board is explicitly to keep decision making about animal welfare in the hands of the agriculture industry, and not in the hands of voters, by making a change in the state constitution.

The vote Yes campaign is being run by Ohioans for Livestock Care. The flyer I have from them begins "Ohio farmers know best how to care for their flocks and herds." This tagline is repeated at in an announcement on the Ohio Farm Bureau website about a Yes on 2 rally. The content of the ballot issue is perfectly in line with this goal. Eleven out of the thirteen members of the commission would come from within some aspect of agriculture (farmers, farming organizations, deans from agricultural schools, etc.) There be one person representing consumers and one representing animal welfare, but the animal welfare representative cannot come from national organizations of animal activists. This last point is crucial, because the real aim of this ballot issue is to block efforts by the Humane Society of the US. (More on them soon.)

Now wait, you might ask, don't farmers know how best to treat their animals? Why shouldn't the oversight board be dominated by the farmers themselves. Well, well obviously farmers have first hand knowledge of the lives of their animals, but they do not have an interest in the welfare of those animals. Their interest is in maximizing profit, and this means raising veal, chickens and brooding sows in boxes so small the animal can't turn around. In order for everyone's interests to be honored, decisions made about animal welfare have to be made democratically, and include people who can speak for the animals.

Ballot Issue 2 is an amendment to the state constitution. It is fundamentally about taking power away from the legislature, power that it now has under the constitution, and giving it to industry.

The Oversight Board is Aimed at Blocking a Good Legislation.

Everyone involved in this debate admits that the driving force behind the issue is a recent California law that animals be kept in pens large enough to "to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely." The law was passed as a ballot initiative in California and was backed by the Humane Society of the US. Afterwards, the HSUS met with Ohio lawmakers to discuss bringing a version of it here. The lawmakers response was to immediately put issue 2 on the ballot, so that they would have the power to enact any such laws.

The California law effectively eliminates three industry practices. First of all it would eliminate veal crates. People who eat veal like the pale tender meat that comes from anemic calves. Starting in the 1950s, farmers have learned that they can produce a lot of this sort of meat by keeping calves in pens where they are unable to turn around, groom themselves, or lie down while extending their legs and feeding them a liquid diet of milk powder, vitamins and growth hormones. The only justification for doing this is the consumer's preference for pale, tender, anemic meat. Second, the law eliminates battery cages for egg laying hens. To maximize profit, hens are again raised in stacks of wire mesh cages, with each bird having an area about the size of a piece of paper to move around in. Again the only motive here is profit. The third practice, crates for brooding sows, is a little different. Pregnant pigs are generally kept in gestation crates because they are extremely ornery and likely to fight

once the big gives birth, they are kept in farrowing crates like these, so the piglets can nurse while the mother remains immobile

here the worry is that the nursing pig would roll over on her young, or perhaps eat them. To my knowledge, though, there is no actual evidence that this happens. Furthermore, there is no evidence that any crazy behavior by the pig isn't actually brought by other aspects of their environment, like poor diet, lack of access to the outside, etc. Certainly in the wild, the pigs must be able to raise some of their offspring to adulthood. So again, we are left with little justification for treatment that creates incredible suffering.

The Personal Attacks

I originally got on to this issue because someone from the Ohio Farm Bureau left some flyers in support of Issue 2 at our office, along with a basket of fresh bell peppers. I sent around an email to the rest of the department about the issue, and shortly thereafter, the woman from the Farm Bureau wrote me back. The first thing she did in her email is attack the Humane Society of the United States, including sending a flyer about them produced by the food industry organization the Center for Consumer Freedom.¹

Some of her complaints are reasonable. The name of the organization misleadingly implies that they run local animal shelters, when in fact most of their work is activism on the issue of farm animal welfare. Other attacks were false, including that the HSUS seeks to end all animal agriculture. From their policy statement: "The HSUS supports those farmers and ranchers who give proper care to their animals, act in accordance with the basic ethic of compassion to sentient creatures under their control, and practice and promote humane and environmentally sustainable agriculture." Still other complaints made by the woman from the Farm Bureau and the Center for Consumer Freedom are things I can't evaluate, like accusations that HSUS mismanaged charitable donations and has a spokesman for a terrorist organization on its board of executives.

Well, as a teacher of critical thinking, I am duty bound to remind you of the existence of the ad hominem fallacy. The moral character of the HSUS is simply not relevant to whether Issue 2 is a good constitutional amendment.² Bad people can argue for good causes and good people can argue for bad causes.

Annoyingly, it looks like I'm going to be writing more on this in the future. Next up: finding my copy of Bernie Rollin's Farm Animal Welfare and researching the European laws on gestation & farrowing crates.

^1. For the record, she sent me the flyer to correct an erroneous statistic about HSUS fundraising she had given in her first email. She didn't repeat the accusation of terrorism herself.

² Although it is worth noting that The New York Times describes the HSUS as the "least radical" of all the animal rights groups.

Ohioans: Vote NO on Issue 2.

2009-10-01T17:33:00.003-04:00

Issue 2 would create an industry dominated "animal care" council to set standards for farm animals in Ohio. The goal is to head off the state from passing anything like California's Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act (which banned veal crates, gestation cages, and battery cages) by taking the power to regulate farm animal treatment away from the voters.

Now this is how to educate.

2009-09-29T22:57:00.001-04:00

The way he recommends you address other people, and the way he addresses the viewer. This is high end shit.

"He'd send in the army"

2009-09-08T16:07:00.001-04:00

Via Jim H on facebook.

Stanley Kaplan and the legacy of gaming standardized tests

2009-08-29T11:33:00.003-04:00

Christopher Caldwell has a piece in the Financial Times titled "The Opposite of Education" about the lasting effects of Kaplan test preparation. The most prominent change in the post-Kaplan era is the awareness of motivated students of how to game game standardized tests.

Kaplan’s insight was to figure out that there was an idiom to multiple-choice tests. Choices tend to be offered in predictable ways. For instance, if a problem about ratios has the answers (a) 2/3, (b) 4/5, (c) 6/7, (d) 3/2, the right answer is probably A or D, with one of them meant to “catch” a test-taker who has reversed the terms. His study guides are full of wisdom about the prose styles of test-composers, such as: “If guessing, a good rule of thumb is: the longest choice is often the correct one.” Kaplan insisted he was a respecter of subject matter. But figuring out the “tricks” of testing would give you a leg up, whether you had mastered the subject matter or not.

The advice works. The trick about choosing the longest answer, in particular, works well unless you have a test writer who is aware of the problem, and purposely puts in wordy incorrect answers. The problem comes up because the test writer knows that the correct answer is something very specific, and needs to explained precisely. The incorrect answers, on the other hand, are just things you make up and don't need to have much content. If you are in a hurry, it is easy to skimp on the effort needed to create plausible wrong answers.

The whole thing is really an arms race, and unfortunately, too many teachers never make the effort to write good multiple choice questions. The practice questions that come with the online supplement of my ethics textbook can all be beaten using the "longest answer" rule. This kind of laziness leads a lot of teachers to assume that multiple choice testing is a tool for fake education and decide not to use them at all. This is unfortunate, because in the real world, we all have situations where we need to evaluate large numbers of students en masse, and a good multiple choice test is a valuable tool in those situations.

Another interesting thing about the Kaplan techniques is that some of them are farther removed from content than others. The ratio rule, for instance, does have some bearing on content. Students who use it are aware of the fact that swapping numbers is a common mistake in this sort of problem. I tell my students explicitly about this sort of Kaplan-technique as a way of getting them closer to the content while seeming to only be teaching to the test. I tell them to know what the common mistakes are for the kind of problem you are working on, and look for the answers that seem to be testing for this common mistake.

(We had a job candidate here at LCCC who played a related trick on students. He would say he was going to tell them secrets for ticking your teacher into giving you an A. Then he would offer advice like "Buy a dictionary and bring it to class. Be sure you sit so the teacher can see you have a dictionary. Then when the teacher uses a word you are unsure of, be sure to look it up right in front of him. This will be time consuming, so you will also want to be looking up words from your readings at home.")

The legacy of Kaplan (and its nemesis, the Education Testing Service) is an education system built around teaching to tests. As Caldwell writes

Now that not just children but school systems are rewarded and punished for their performance on tests, public education has been colonised by the Kaplan philosophy. Entire school systems have hired testing companies such as Kaplan to undertake the Monty Python-esque task of teaching teachers to teach students test-taking skills.

The situation is not beyond hope, though. The thing we need to do now is have tests that are worth teaching to. You need to write tests that can't be gamed by techniques completely unrelated to content. You need to write tests that actually measure the knowledge, skills, and values you are concerned with promoting. In the terminology of the industry, you need tests that are valid and reliable. The biggest obstacle to education right now is that too many people have an interest in making sure the test isn't worth teaching to. Administrators and parents of privilege want tests that can be gamed so they can game them. Teachers don't want to take the effort to write good tests or change the way they teach to match a good test. Caldwell laments

So everyone wound up back in the same place. SAT scores still tend to track parental income fairly faithfully. Except that educational advancement now goes not so much to those who know the periodic table or can translate an English passage into Latin, but to those who have learnt to outsmart an educational bureaucracy

This is true, but at this point an educational bureaucracy is inevitable. We just need to create one that is harder to outsmart

Reasoning with children

2009-08-29T09:02:00.002-04:00

Molly: "That's not just Halloween costume, that's an advertisement. If you wear that, you will be turning yourself into a walking advertisement for Hanna Montana."

Caroline: "But you're going to let Joey wear the Wolverine costume, and that's just an advertisement for Wolverine."

[Look, a counter example! Its reflective equilibrium!]

Molly: Yes, but it is not an advertisement for something I hate.

[Revising the rule in light of the counter example.]

Molly: Also, I'm not as excited about the Wolverine costume as I was about the Princess Dragon Ninja costume that wasn't an advertisement at all.

[Adding nuance to the rule to make the whole thing more plausible.]

Does Socrates use the Chewbacca defense?

2009-08-28T13:19:00.002-04:00

I use this all the time in Critical Thinking and Introduction to Philosophy courses (Discussion question: does Socrates use the Chewbacca defense?). But I couldn't find it last time I needed to grab it in class, so I'm putting this up my future reference.

new twitter feed: shitmydadsays

2009-08-28T12:17:00.002-04:00

I just signed up for twitter so I can get this guy's feed, where he writes down the things is 73 year old father tells him. Example: "You need to flush the toilet more than once...No, YOU, YOU specifically need to. You know what, use a different toilet. This is my toilet."

Elderly people are concerned that "The government will take over medicare"

2009-08-12T18:04:00.004-04:00

A HuffPo columnist notes that most of the people disrupting town hall meetings are over 65. They are also very very confused about the current state of healthcare and what is being proposed. One demand that seniors repeatedly make is that the government shouldn't "take over" Medicare. You'd think seniors would be aware that Medicare is already a government run program, but I guess not. Bob Cesca, the HuffPo columnist notes that one person shouted "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" at Rep. Robert Ingles. The LA Times reports that someone contacted Rep Jim Tanner saying, "I'm happy with Medicare, don't let the government take it over."

So where is this wacky talking point coming from? Republican activists with the assistance of the major news networks Arthur Laffer, economics advisor to Ronald Regan and a leading figure in libertarian economic thought, went on CNN and said "If you like the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government." No one on CNN challenged him.

OMG! 9353! CREATURE FEATURE!

2009-07-28T11:56:00.001-04:00

Via Colin M on Facebook.

Song number two

2009-07-28T00:32:00.003-04:00

"Song number one is not a fuck you song" --Fugazi

But if you are going to sing a fuck you song, this is the one.

No booe's are e lawd but rob is u lawd

2009-07-24T23:11:00.000-04:00

One of the largest ___ graveyard

2009-07-23T23:40:00.003-04:00

One of the largest ship graveyards: the bay of Nouadhibou

The whole site is full of pictures of abandoned industry. Its amazing.

Via Emily B on facebook

Update: OMG check out the pictures of the boats abandoned in the retreat of the Aral Sea.

For the sake of contrast:

2009-07-22T16:49:00.002-04:00

A couple of years ago, my neighbor locked herself out and figured she could save the locksmith charge if she could get to an unlocked door on her second floor porch. A Cambridge police officer happened by and helped us carry an extension ladder across the street from my garage. He even held the ladder steady while my nimble neighbor ascended to the porch. The police officer never asked two laughing Caucasian women to prove we were not burglars.

The rest of the article, by someone who has dealt with police misconduct cases, discusses in detail about what was screwy in the way Sgt. James Crowley treated Skip Gates

I approve of this website

2009-07-17T09:57:00.001-04:00

There, I Fixed it.

Nom nom nom

2009-07-15T17:40:00.000-04:00

Via Thomas on facebook.

Skeptoid on Locally Grown Produce

2009-07-14T15:17:00.003-04:00

Brian Dunning, the skeptoid, has a post up arguing that locally produced food is not actually better for the environment. His central claim is that getting your food locally doesn't actually reduce the amount of fuel used in shipping, because systems of direct delivery are less efficient than systems with distribution centers. This sounds like a good argument, but it contains a subtle fallacy. Basically, when he shifts from talking about locally vs. internationally produced to talking about direct delivery vs. distribution centers, he changes the topic. Granted, if you look at two complex distribution systems of the same size, the one with distribution centers is going to be more efficient than the one that relies only on direct delivery. But what about a local system that uses distribution centers compared too a global system that uses distribution centers? Dunning assumes that once a system starts using distribution centers, it no longer counts as local. But his own example is of a local system that switched to distribution centers because it was more efficient. The system didn't start importing beef from New Zealand, but Dunning wants us to believe that because one local farmers group switched from direct delivery to distribution centers that it is more efficient to ship food globally. This just doesn't follow.

There are a lot of problems with locally produced food. Peter Singer has a good argument that supporting agriculture in the developing world is just as important as reducing carbon footprint. He also points out that transporting cargo by ship is much much more efficient than transporting by truck. But broad, almost data free, arguments like Dunning's just don't cut it.

In general, calculations of environmental impact are incredibly complex, and the rhetoric of skepticism really doesn't work here. Skeptics and debunkers always frame debates as cases of reason vs. superstition. The tone is "I'm rational, and you're not." But environmental debates are generally not cases of reason vs superstition, but conflicting ways of calculating costs and assessing risks. If one person uses a model that only takes GDP to be a basic good, while another person tries to include, say, the rights and interests of non-human animals, neither side is being irrational. They are using different frame works with different assumptions about value.

Good fences make good neighbors!

2009-07-14T13:49:00.002-04:00

Which is why I'm building a fence across the middle of my neighbors' yard and putting up a security checkpoint in their living room!

The ad. The explanation.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Kale, Chard, and Basil

2009-07-13T18:26:00.001-04:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, Kale, Chard, and Basil
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

A pile of leaves from our garden.

Father's Day 2009

2009-07-06T15:41:00.001-04:00

Father's Day 2009
Originally uploaded by rob helpychalk.

"I colored a band for you because I know you like bands"

Joey

2009-06-28T21:39:00.001-04:00

Joey: A gazzoom is part rabbit part flamingo. It is white and always eating nothing.

Mash-up: Buffy v. Edward Cullen

2009-06-27T16:34:00.001-04:00

via

Joey Picks Up Taglines

2009-06-13T21:33:00.003-04:00

All day Joey has been saying "Creepy? Creepy is my middle name!" I recognized this as a line from Scooby Doo II, which is the kids' new favorite movie.

Then Joey started adding "Look for it at Creepy Dot Com!"

This is not from the movie.

Dancing

2009-06-13T16:17:00.000-04:00

Me: Joey, do you need to use the potty?

Joey: No.

Me: Then why are you dancing around holding your penis?

Joey: Because that is my favorite kind of dance to do.