Critical Thinking About Your Health

Great article in the NYT this morning about using critical thinking when reading about medical studies called Searching for Clarity: A Primer On Medical Studies.  It reveals why you keep reading things in the paper or crappy health magazines like Prevention that change from month to month, year to year.  Eggs are bad for you, eggs are good.  Beta Carotene is good, no sorry, it's bad. Gluscosamine and Chondroitin are good for joints.  No sorry, they don't do anything for you.

The reason is that there has to be a whole lot of evidence pointing in one direction, and then you still need a double-blinded clinical trial to really know what works.  Sometimes those trials confirm the evidence.  Sometimes, as with the beta carotene, they don't.

The three big things to consider: It's important to compare the same things.  The bigger the group studied, the better the results. The third is something called Bayes' theorem.  From the article:

But if one clinical trial tests something that is plausible, with a lot of supporting evidence to back it up, and another tests something implausible, the trial testing a plausible hypothesis is more credible even if the two studies are similar in size, design and results.

That one even messes up the scientists, so it's worth checking out.

In the Hallway

The library management class lasts most of the day some Saturdays from 9-3.  But our online professor of instructional technology dropped in to make a few comments and hand back some papers (old school, I know!) then asked me to come talk to him in the hall.

Was I in trouble?  Had I been too much of a dick on the discussion boards?

Nope.  He told me he was impressed with my critical thinking and analysis in our last assignment and had I considered pursuing Ph.D level work in the field?

I'm hoping here that I thanked him and chatted with him in some approximation of normal English, because in my mind I was seeing the top of my head blow off.

Not one to jump into anything too blindly, I asked the library management professor for their take after class.  Realistic and thoughtful advice that will serve me well as I ponder my options.

So I don't know that I'm pursuing doctoral studies in the immediate future, but man oh man what a motivator (and yes, ego boost) as I continue my studies.

CFI

(via PZ)

Lot's of linky posts lately because of grad school you know!

LHC

This is sad, but something to think about.  It's a link to a post by Phil Plait.  He talks about the need for critical thinking skills and links to an article about a girl from India who has committed suicide because she feared the world would end when they turned on the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider, one of the cooler things we, as humans, have done.  The thing was turned on two days ago and we're still here.  Here's Phil:

"I’m a parent. I sometimes think the most important thing I can do for my daughter is love her, keep her healthy, protect her. But in all of those, there is an overarching responsibility for me to teach her how to live in the real world. And that means showing her how to think. Not what to think, but how.

Question authority. Be skeptical of claims. Ask for evidence. Apply good logic. Avoid bad logic. Analyze the results. Look for bias.

And doubt. Doubt doubt doubt. It’s one of the greatest strengths of the human mind, and perhaps the least used of all."

To learn more about the amazing work of the LHC, Brian Greene has the goods here.  There's also this cool, funny, and accessible 15 minute video from "rock star physicist" Brian Cox talking about it, "the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted."

It's nothing to fear.  It's something to be proud of.

The Intenational Year of Astronomy

At the Skeptrack at Dragon*Con after hearing Phil Plait's talk and wandering through the vast event, I came across a table dedicated to The International Year of Astronomy.  Check out their site.  They want to impress upon us the advantages we have gained by studying astronomy and one of their big goals is to get everyone to just look at something out there through a telescope in 2009.  A fun and worthy idea!

Of course hanging around the table had nothing to do with it being manned by Phil Plait himself!  Noooo.

Of course it did!  I asked him about his recent promotion to President of the JREF.  I'd heard he and James Randi interviewed about it and one of his ideas is to get more involved with curriculum development in the schools to teach science, skepticism and critical thinking.  He's a great guy, so friendly and open and affable.  It was an honor to meet him, let alone his taking the time to lay out some of his plans.  Be on the lookout on the JREF site in the next year or two. He'll be wanting input from educators!

Dragon*Con This Weekend

I'll be there, mostly hanging around the Science and Skeptic Tracks. Phil Plait will be there as well as some Skepchicks and Dr. Michael Shermer. Even some of the SGU guys. If nothing else, go downtown Saturday morning at 10am and check out the always enjoyable Dragon*Con Parade. It's something to see.

(image via Dragon*Con gallery admin.)

Everything Is Coming Up Elitism!

Fellow Elitist Bastards!

Has it only been a month since my last post for the Carnival of Elitist Bastards? How time does fly. Elitism has been flourishing, mateys! Its even proving the progress in race relations in our country. Everywhere I poke around on the web these days, I find fellow elitists! From Merlin Mann at 43folders: "Embrace the disingenuous charge of elitism (or, as I prefer to call it, maturity) by not pretending that everyone is equally 'special' to you. Remind the people who matter to you that you’re always available for them, then tell them how to do that, including specific instructions (n.b. this is important for relatives who think the internet is just eBay, urban myths, and Joel Osteen). Get a friends-only email address. Get a friends-only GrandCentral number. Do whatever it takes to provide a backchannel for your super-secret network."

Thanks Merlin! (And what elitists your parents must have been to give you such a funny name!)

The election, of course, is elitist central. We have an old white millionaire who doesn't know how many houses he owns and a Harvard-educated smoothie duking it out. Roger Cohen from the NYT has some more on this: Obama's from Main St., Ain't He? Even Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer gets into the elitist act on this subject. (He's probably just trying to catch up with PZ, though.) Bastard.

But it's education I'm interested in, being an elitist teacher and all. Jane Artabasy at the Teaching Excellence Network agrees: "Teachers are inherently a skeptical lot, not a natural base for the Kool-Aid culture of 21st century electioneering, with its cynical, smarmy manipulation of language. As a start, how about the most recent 'word du jour:' elitism? Only an intellectually bankrupt political system would dare to twist such a perfectly good noun into a pejorative, a negative, a mortal stigma. Webster’s defines elite as 'the choice or most carefully selected part of a group...' Sounds to me like the perfect baseline description of a president."

Thank you! She links to this post by a teacher of gifted students who tells us why gifted students hate school:

"Here it is, in brief: Gifted students hate school because school is a sucking quagmire of mediocrity."

and continues with:

"Okay, I know this hardly qualifies as an original thought, but perhaps my personal experiences can enlighten the issue a little bit: the mediocrity begins in society, but it seems to be concentrated, like B.O. in a cabbie’s upholstery, in schools of education."

But she sees teachers a bit differently than Ms. Artabasy: "The influential 1983 report A Nation at Risk, whose findings have not substantially changed since its publication, found that too many teachers are 'drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.' Those same students become teachers, so rather than your kids or my kids being taught by the best and brightest (or at least the solidly competent), they’re being taught in too many cases by people who essentially weren’t very good at school." Yes, she says, there are indeed smart, skeptical, inspiring teachers (like Ms. Artabasy), but unfortunately they can tend to be the exception and not the rule. What to do about this?

See you in a month. I'm sure the election mania will be at a fever pitch. Keep using your critical thinking faculties, my fellow elitist bastards, and perhaps we can begin working on turning the tide of this ingrained mediocrity. I'm open to suggestions. (I know, not very bastardly of me, but we need to start somewhere.)

Links for Your Lunchbreak

Teaching full time AND doing graduate work. Whew. I won't quit blogging, but I may end up doing more posts like this with more links in them.

First up, Just think: it's important (from the Sydney Morning Herald via Norm):

"The result is kids who are critical thinkers and informed citizens. It's a big call to say the world would be a better place if everyone was taught philosophy young, but what you'd certainly get is a more informed and critical population, which can only be a good thing. This is incentive enough to see philosophy subject taught in other states."

Personally, I think cruises sound boring. Except maybe one to the Galapagos Islands with a bunch of awesome scientists like Phil. How cool is that? You'd get to hear inspiring and toughtful talks like this one from PZ which he posts as Fragments of a Shipboard Talk. A small taste:

"The similarities between life here and on the mainland were the product of a simple explanation: they were related. Animals and plants from mainland South America had colonized the islands shortly after they'd formed. Accounting for the differences was the clever, tricky part. That species might change over time was not a new idea — among others, Lamarck had postulated that in the 18th century — but Darwin's new contribution was that he provided a mechanism, an explanation for HOW that change occurred. It was a mechanism that required no guidance, divine or otherwise, and that used a brutal sorting, rather than planning to generate new forms.

That mechanism is what made him famous. Natural selection is such a clear, simple idea that biologists around the world were wacking themselves in the forehead when they read his book, saying, "Of course! Why didn't I think of that!" He laid out the facts as everybody already knew them, with simple and irrefutible logic leading to an undeniable conclusion."

My Adventures In Blogworld

I'm starting graduate school to become a School Library Media Specialist (although I much prefer the old "librarian" tag) and was considering shelving the blog. Then I start getting comments from people like Doug Johnson, Nancy Flanagan, Mathew Needleman, L. from the lovely Jacket Whys, george w., an inspiring one from Dana Hunter, many inspiring ones from Mary Lee, and even one from the man himself, Dr. Stephen Krashen! And everyone else on my "Linky Love" list of folks who link to me or help me out with comments.


If that wasn't cool enough Ms-Teacher handed my off a blog award and put me on a link of teacher tips today: check it out, there's some good stuff there.



Merlin, an awesome blogger himself, has a post up today on what makes a blog good and it's so goofy and personal that it is inspiring to me. I often worry that I don't have a proper "niche". I'm not a 'kidlitosphere' blog, but I sometimes write about kids books (and everything else I'm reading). I'm not a 'classroom blog' but I will sometimes write about things going on at school. I don't consider this a skeptical blog' but critical thinking informs everything I'm about and I can't help applying it to everything else: education, reading, teaching, learning, getting stuff done.


Lately, though, all of my biggest obsessions are kind of coming together because of this new career path I'm taking. A school librarian is all about reading and critical thinking. They're obviously concerned about what goes on in classrooms and in education. They encourage skeptical thinking. They like to play around with the cutting edge of technology and help students and teachers embrace these new tools. They're obviously concerned about First Amendment issues. They have a lot to get done and are always looking for tips and tricks to help themselves and others. They are me, I am them. We are the ninjas in the library.


Thank you all and stay tuned. It may get sporadic and jump around like grease on a hot griddle, but I'll stay here and I can't wait to hear more from all of you.

Dr. Shermer on Anecdotal Evidence

Once again, the good doctor hits the nail right on the head.

Amanda Peet Is Awesome

Check out this more detailed post from Phil. There you can view the video interview in which she fights the anti-vaccination silliness. Of course some of those anti-vaccine dunderheads took her to task, so she wrote this awesome letter. We need more like her.

Proud Bastard

My first entry into the waters of ye Carnival of Elitist Bastards was this post on being a proud elite.

Now I'm proud to be a bastard. My Lovely Spouse was dismayed when I first joined this particular Carnival because of the name. I'd made a promise as an educator not to put anything too nutty in my blog so I didn't get fired or freak out my student's parents or what not. So signing up to proclaim myself an elitist bastard seemed a bit against that grain.

I beg to differ.

The whole point of our public education system is not to get good test scores. It is not so that our students can go out and get good jobs. It's not even to "create life-long learners," even though that's a big part of it.

The point of our public education system is to make better citizens.

The fight against anti-intellectualism is a big part of that and it's worth being a bastard about. Susan Jacoby gives the example of a questioner not caring about whether or not his mechanic can locate Iraq on a map. He just want the mechanic to be able to fix his car. What the questioner fails to realize is that the mechanic is also a voter. All voters ought to be able to find Iraq on a map, among other things.

We all, each one of us, need to fight against this anti-intellectualism which is the real elitism. What we are fighting for is different.

As PZ Myers said in a recent bloggingheads interview: "We can be accused of being elitist but I think when you get right down to it we're the opposite of elitist because we're saying there are all these good kids...that we shouldn't write off. We want them [children of creationists] to be members of our society--contributing members of our scientific community."

That's why we have to fight against the creationists and anti-evolutionists and for the First amendment and our Bill of Rights.

During the evolution/creation trial in Dover, Pennsylvania there was a moment that was important. Allow me to quote it at length:

"Q. Let's go to our final line of questions. Mr. Callahan, do you feel that, as a Plaintiff in this case, you've been harmed by the actions of the Dover Area School District and its Board of Directors?

A. Yes.

Q. And can you tell us how you've been harmed?

A. I think it goes to the heart of the complaint. It's a constitutional issue. I'm a tax payer in Dover. I'm a citizen of Dover. I'm a citizen of this country. I think the heart of my complaint, my wife's complaint, is that, this is just thinly veiled religion. There's no question about that in our minds.

If you were to substitute where it says, intelligent design, the word, creationism, which, in my mind, it is, there would be no question that this would be a violation of the First Amendment. I've come to accept the fact that we're in the minority view on this.

You know, I've read the polls. I think, you know, a lot of people feel that this should be, that this should be in, that it doesn't cross the line. There are a lot of people that don't care. But I do care. It crosses my line.

And, you know, I've been -- there have been letters written about the Plaintiffs. We've been called atheists, which we're not. I don't think that matters to the Court, but we're not. We're said to be intolerant of other views.

Well, what am I supposed to tolerate? A small encroachment on my First Amendment rights? Well, I'm not going to. I think this is clear what these people have done. And it outrages me."

I'm not going to. That outrage is justifiable.

In our schools we need to value questions and different points of view. We need to value different intelligences and ways of learning and allow deep, thoughtful study of subjects. We need to teach our students Faulkner's advice to "Read, read, read. Read everything."

We need to do these things because citizenship is our goal and we can't afford to be lazy. We need to stand up for what we believe in and go ahead and be bastards if needed.

Carnival of Elitist Bastards Is Up!

Go check it out and support the fight against anti-intellectualism! I mean, that's kinda the whole point of teaching isn't it?

Well, isn't it?

Anyway, Teacherninja is mentioned because of this post.

This Is The Harm

When I go off on the occasional skeptical rant about some nonsense like astrologists or psychics I always get the, "What's the harm?" question.

Here's the harm.

A single mom struggling with all her might to raise her 11-year-old autistic daughter and is called to a meeting in which the principal and vice-principal thought it was appropriate to scare her to death with tales of her daughter's alleged sexual abuse. They'd already called Child Services. Good thing the Child Services folks had cooler heads than these moronic administrators.

Why were they morons? The only evidence came from a psychic.

"The teacher looked and me and said: 'We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of "V." And she said 'yes, I do.' And she said, 'well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'"

That anyone would put this woman through that is the harm.

Whenever you think or hear someone ask, "What's the harm?"

Send them this link.

Proud Elite

I hope you've read this essay by the Susan Jacoby. In it she clarifies the difference between two words Americans seem to think are interchangeable:
"'Elite' and 'elitist' do not, in a dictionary sense, mean the same thing. An elitist is someone who does believe in government by an elite few — an anti-democratic philosophy that has nothing to do with elite achievement. But the terms have become so conflated that Americans have come to consider both elite and elitist synonyms for snobbish."

Well I'm proud to be a supporter of the elite, including Susan Jacoby for her elite achievements in publishing, most recently with The Age of American Unreason. It is an attack on the anti-intellectualism we're seeing today in our country. This book is on my to-read stack, but what with starting my continuing and elite graduate work, it may take me some time to get to it.

I'm not promoting snobbery here, just the fight against anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. I have been doing my part as a teacher and will continue to do my part as a school librarian. It's our job to promote the critical thinking our students will need.

These are desperate times. Teachers who promote anti-science. Hell, Governors who promote anti-science. It's gotten to the point where debates aren't really even debates anymore. It's hard to have a debate with someone who doesn't even have a common set of facts or understand the basics of logic and rationality and critical thinking.

Sometimes I have hope. The students I teach are so full of questions and curiosity I know there is a chance. But I have them young. It's when they're in middle school and high school that things seem to go bad. We all need to do our part.

When I read this on the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards home page, I knew I had to contribute:

"Do you read science tomes for pleasure? Avoid Survivor in favor of Nova? "

That is so me. Call me a nerd but the nerds are the ones ruling the world right now. From Steve Jobs to Bill Gates, all the best stuff is coming from the nerds, the elite, the smart people in our society.

That's why I'm a Nerdfighter. (Check out this video! At least we can raise the level of insults.)

That's why I've proudly added the Carnival of Elitist Bastards badge to this blog.

We, as educators, can turn this tide if we work together.

Robert Ingersoll!

Wow, this is a fun, short, breezy read. It's completely brilliant and, unfortunately still quite timely. Robert Ingersoll was a massively popular speaker for his day. Mark Twain and Thomas Edison were big fans of his. He's slipped into obscurity because he didn't write much and his collected speeches are voluminous. This short--130-some pages!--collection is just the ticket for a good overview of some compelling arguments. What a great American!

PodBlack Blog

Say "PodBlack Blog" three times real fast!

But no, it's awesome. Another dedicated educational ninja blogging away at about 20x the rate I do. I think over the summer, since my blogging will obviously slow down due to being a slack summertime sloth, I'll focus on other (and probably better) teacher ninjas that are spreading the word about reading and critical thinking. Maybe I'll even try to interview a few of them.

Kylie over at the PodBlack Blog is my first victim. She just commented on a couple of posts here and here), so I felt compelled to check her out. You could spend hours over there trying to sponge up a small portion of her immense braininess. It's an awesome display of insight and thoughtfulness. Check out her great list of Educational Resources and her tantalizing list of Skeptic Readings which are all required! Get to work, people! (Why do I just love lists like this so much?)

And Kylie, if you're reading this: I'm still teaching ELLs. I'll probably be doing it for at least two more years. I only just got accepted to take my Media Specialist classes and won't even start those until August. Working full time and taking classes, I'll be lucky to be a newly minted school librarian by 2010. But to be sure, I''ll be making sure your Skeptic Readings are an essential part of my collection! (I actually already own a good chunk of them myself...)

Support New Science Show!

The Skeptologists is a new pilot that has just been filmed. Help it get on the air! We obviously need more fun science-based critical thinking. If the Mythbusters and Bill Nye the Science Guy are any clue, this should be awesome. It features some high-powered and entertaining ninjas such as Michael Shermer, Steven Novella, Phil Plait, Yao-Man Chan and many more. To help this project get on the air, send an email to skeptologists@newrule.com and let them know you want to see it. The producers will be sharing these emails with the studios as they shop around for a distribution deal. More and better entertaining science and critical thinking on TV!

Paper or Electronic? Not That Simple...

(photo via here)

If you haven't already, check out this Lifehacker list of the top five Getting Things Done applications. Obviously I'm for number five, but I like number one and would use it if I went back to an all computer based system (and you can put it right on your Google calendar). The commenters of course start bickering over which is best but if you actually read David Allen's book, he never pushes one method over another. It's whatever works for you. I find that a little of both works for me. I use Gmail, of course, and their Gcal which I print out, punch and carry in my Circa Notebook. I call Jott.com when I'm out and it shoots me email reminders. For everything else I use index cards and my Circa.

I like this person and some of her ideas (Diigo is awesome), but if the whole reason you are using electronic media is to save some trees, then please watch this impressive slideshow. At least paper can be recycled.

Again, I'm not advocating for one method. I like both. But we must remember that every decision we make is more complicated than we think.

Are Americans Hostile to Knowldge?

That's the name of this article over at the NYT. It has a link to the painful video of the airheaded singer pictured above who didn't even know Europe is a continent. Yet another reason to supposrt Reading Is Fundamental in the current budget fight.

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”