Interesting article about the cuts to Cleveland police department, which knocked out Community Policing, and may have been a reason why that Castro wasn't caught earlier.
We're going to Cleveland in July. I think I'm going to drag my family around to these new foodie spots.
Apt. 11d 
It it makes anyone feel any better about the unfortunate children in Christian academies, my high school senior daughter couldn’t name the inventor of the airplane. (They don’t do dead white males in today’s NYC schools.) She suggested Amelia Earhart.
I wonder if the high school seniors in Christian academies know that one. Maybe it’s a tie.
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How does she do on the Pew Science test?
http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/
The fact that they don’t do “dead white males” is not really an excuse for not knowing who invented the airplane. That’s not a science question, though.
That quiz is scary. I guess in it’s defense one can argue that none of those lies they’re being taught affect one’s daily life.
I had the same discussion about the pew quiz. The highest rate of success is on a question about ultraviolet rays, which are relevant to people’s lives. The names of parts of an atom are not (though knowing something about electricity does require some knowledge of atoms).
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I haven’t read the links, but a lot of the stuff we’re taught in K-12 science is unavoidably not quite true–it’s just all that is appropriate at that particular age. My husband (who has the equivalent of nearly an undergraduate major in physics) was telling our 8-year-old recently that the Newtonian physics he’s going to be learning in 4th grade at our kids’ Christian classical school isn’t quite true. D was really disappointed.
I’m sure a lot of us come away from our school science thinking that the atom is a sort of mini-solar system with electrons that are hard little balls whizzing around the atomic nucleus. That also isn’t quite so.
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Oops, realized that my previous email suggests that the Pew quiz is scary. It’s not. It’s the 4th grade quiz from Blue Ridge Christian Academy that is scary.
What you learn in science in grad school is not quite true, either, since our knowledge is always evolving. But that’s not at all the same as asking kids to circle “true” to “dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time.” That’s Taming of the Shrew style brainwashing that asks a child to tell you that the sun is really the moon. My only hope is that it doesn’t actually blight the children’s lives.
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I always thought a Christian school would avoid those questions by just not teaching them (after all, one can teach newtonian physics in the 4th grade instead, or energy dynamics, like fourth graders learn).
In Laura’s link, the author points out that the quiz is Snopes verified, since really, everyone would have thought it was satire, otherwise.
1) T/F “The earth is billions of years old”
2) T/F “Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago.”
3) On “What day did God make dinosaurs?”
4) T/F “Dinosaurs lived with people.”
5) “What did people and animals eat in the beginning?”
6) “Which one fits the Behemoth described in Job 49?” (a visual, and the one question that I don’t have a problem with)”
7) T/F “If an animal has sharp teeth, it must mean it is a meat eater.” (not sure about this one, either, since it’s written in a form that would in general require a a false answer, since there must be at least one animal that has sharp teeth but isn’t a meat eater).
Not the Pew test, BTW; I did well on the Pew test, but I would have failed this one, even trying to answer it correctly according to the bible (well, or correctly according to the 4th grade teacher at Blue Ridge).
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I think the Pew science literacy test is scary.
I took the Pew science literacy test and got 13 out of 13. Some of the questions were so easy that they made me embarrassed that they were even being asked. On the other hand, I have to confess that a couple of them I got right just based on remembering an association between the words, rather than having any conceptual understanding. What is ultraviolet light? Heck if I know. Ditto fracking–I have only the haziest notion of what is involved. It’s like I’d be able to answer a multiple choice question IDing Sartre as existentialist, without being able to offer an adequate definition of the word “existentialism.”
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What’s scary about the Pew test.
True, all multiple choice tests have the flaw that they tend to ask for definitions instead of ideas, and only in a very few isolated cases are the definitions/facts representative of the ideas (some math problems come to mind, but even many of those, especially the not hard one’s, can be done in ways that belie an understanding of the deeper ideas — I always find the SAT explanations to be confusing and useless because they often offer rote ways of doing the problem at hand, rather than the concept behind the problem). But, it’s also true for many of those questions that not knowing the answer is informative, even if knowing the answer doesn’t prove any deep knowledge. For example, knowing that sunscreen protects from ultraviolet light (or that that’s its purpose) doesn’t show that you understand UV light (light with a higher frequency than violet light, visible to the eye). And knowing that UV light has a higher frequency than violet doesn’t answer lots of other questions about UV light (for example, why we don’t see it). But, not knowing that sunscreen protects from UV light shows a lack of understanding that’s relevant to folks understanding of light.
(On the other hand, thinking that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, well, to me, that shows an almost schizophrenic break with reality, that I can only excuse so far as I’m comfortable with believing that you hear voices in your head that tell you what to do)
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“On the other hand, thinking that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, well, to me, that shows an almost schizophrenic break with reality, that I can only excuse so far as I’m comfortable with believing that you hear voices in your head that tell you what to do.”
Not really–us fair complected folk have nearly all experienced sunburn, but the age of the earth is something we really do have to take on faith, being most of us totally unqualified to assess it ourselves.
By the way, there’s a really funny passage in Sandra Tsing Loh’s Mother on Fire, where she discovers the price differentials on private religious schools. I blogged it here:
http://xantippesblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/mother-on-fire.html
For a taste, here’s my favorite part of the passage:
“Right now, I’m actually seriously considering a Baptist school in Panorama City. That’s right–best friend to the poor? Baptists!
“The school is a mere $3,000 a year, AND they offer not just discounts, but “classes taught from a Biblical perspective.”
“And I’m thinking: How bad can Creationism really be? Or Intelligent Design?
“Having our kids taught evolution is clearly an economic luxury. We have to be realistic. In this day and age, perhaps Darwinism is not a theory our family can actually afford…”
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Sorry, I skipped bj’s question.
The Pew Test is scary because its level is so embarrassingly low. There’s not even any computation in it.
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“Fair complected folk have nearly all experienced sunburn”
But you take it on “faith” that it’s UV light that causes the burning, unless you’ve actually done experiments yourself (which in turn would require a deeper knowledge of scientific principles, like that glass filters UV light, and even, that, is taken on “faith”).
I do understand the idea that thinking that the earth’s age is measured in the 1000’s and that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time might be of less practical utility (and still find interesting that the UV/sunscreen question had the highest percent of correct answers). But, then I wonder how those ideas are reconciled with facts like the origin of coal (from plants, 400 million years ago, some less than a million years old).
The Pew Quiz is a low threshold, and the analysis of it is targeted at showing that many fail even a low threshold test. What I’d like to see analyzed is if there is another science based test that people would do better on — for example questions that are more directly related to the decisions they make in their lives (like wearing sunscreen). A blip in the data that supports that hypothesis is that recent HS graduates score better than older people, suggesting to me that some folks are forgetting the information that feels irrelevant to them (presumably, in favor of information that might be more meaningful, like how to bake a cake or biscuits without a recipe, or how to fix your leaky faucet). I can’t do either of those thins without looking it up, though I have a vast set of facts in my brain that might not be useful to most other people (but have somehow been unable regularly remember the recipe for biscuits).
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“But you take it on “faith” that it’s UV light that causes the burning, unless you’ve actually done experiments yourself…”
We know experimentally that sunlight burns. I don’t think the term “UV” is really doing any extra work for almost anybody. In fact, they might even not know that UV stands for ultraviolet. All most of us know is that UV is something bad and we need sunglasses and sunblock to protect us.
I suspect something similar is going on with a lot of dietary terms. I know that “saturated” is bad and “polyunsaturated” is good and I know which foods contain which, but on a chemical level, I have absolutely no clue what the difference is. What does “hydrogenated” even mean? Likewise, how many people know and use the word “aerobic” or “cardio” without being able to explain what they are? (Obviously, gym bunnies will be able to go on for hours on the subject.) I think this is an underappreciated phenomenon, the way that it is possible to vaguely understand words in context and even use them more or less properly, without actually knowing what they mean.
“A blip in the data that supports that hypothesis is that recent HS graduates score better than older people, suggesting to me that some folks are forgetting the information that feels irrelevant to them.”
That is interesting. I think the curriculum as well as the body of popular science has changed quite a bit. A lot of the stuff in the Pew test wasn’t in my K-11 education at all. Fracking certainly wasn’t and I don’t think UV was discussed at all, and I don’t think that we ever explicitly talked about sources of radiation (although the presence of radioactive substances on the periodic table should be a tip-off). I had North America’s worst high school physics teacher, or at least a very strong contender.
I suspect that advertising is a major source for popular science education.
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At the risk of co-monopolizing the thread this Mother’s Day (sorry, Laura!), here’s another example: probiotics. I’m not going to cheat and look it up, but that’s another example of something that I vaguely understand. It’s good bacteria in stuff like yogurt, right? I suppose that shows some level of understanding, but to be quite honest, I have no idea what makes bacteria good or bad.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/07/09/156381323/confusion-at-the-yogurt-aisle-time-for-probiotics-101
I feel you can’t really underestimate the importance of advertising with regard to popular science stuff, particularly with regard to health, diet and fitness.
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I recommend Science News. http://www.sciencenews.org. It should also be available at your local library.
As far as probiotics, I gather they’re important, but researchers are still researching. The bacterial balance in the digestive system is important: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/health/disgusting-maybe-but-treatment-works-study-finds.html.
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I’m confused by the list of things that aren’t being understood (ultraviolet, poly-unsaturated, saturated, . . . ). Is there a rhetorical point behind the list? Is it that someone can be ignorant and still get answers right on the Pew Quiz (a sentiment I agree with)? Or that people who believe that dinosaurs and humans co-existed are not any more ignorant than anyone else?
Presumably the willingness of one group v the other to learn what is known is a difference — that is you can explain what polyunsaturated means, and then they will know. That is one group is willfully ignorant, while the other is just casually ignorant.
The different wavelengths of radiation (and their names and effects) should be part of a standard HS physics and potentially earth science class and saturated/polyunsaturated fats are taught in a standard HS chemistry class (organic chemistry, but I think that’s covered in HS). Do you think those are things you never knew, or that you have forgotten? I had to look up the specifics of the chemical definition of saturated/unsaturated fats v the general knowledge that saturated fats are usually animal fats and that they are more likely to be solid at room temperature (I certainly knew the chemical structure at some point in the past, though)
Some of your terms (probiotic/cardio) are not science terms but are more in the line of saying “good fats.” Aerobic and anaerobic are scientific terms that mean something specific.
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“The different wavelengths of radiation (and their names and effects) should be part of a standard HS physics and potentially earth science class and saturated/polyunsaturated fats are taught in a standard HS chemistry class (organic chemistry, but I think that’s covered in HS). Do you think those are things you never knew, or that you have forgotten?”
As I’ve mentioned more than once here, my public school was really terrible (I took a good chemistry course but it did not cover organic). My high school physics course covered less physics than my daughter’s 4th grade science class at her private Christian classical school. Sad but true. The course consisted largely of playing with mousetraps to make little cars go. We didn’t get within miles of the sort of stuff you’re talking about.
It may be difficult for you, a science person with a rather fancy degree, to plumb the depths of the ignorance of non-science people or to grasp how bad K-12 science education often is.
“Some of your terms (probiotic/cardio) are not science terms but are more in the line of saying “good fats.” Aerobic and anaerobic are scientific terms that mean something specific.”
I didn’t even know the difference between which terms were scientific and which weren’t. You have to know quite a bit to know which is which.
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I didn’t even know the difference between which terms were scientific and which weren’t. You have to know quite a bit to know which is which.
Do you really think this is the same with thinking dinosaurs and people lived at the same time? There is actually quite a lot of evidence available that shows how unlikely that is (and that the world is much older than the bible would suggest) that is available to most people. To think that people and dinosaurs lived at the same time and the earth is about 6000 years old, at this point, it really does seem that one must be one of stupid, deeply incurious about the world around one’s self, or in the grips of an ideology.
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I do have “fancy” science degrees, but I learned this stuff in an urban public junior high school and a decent but not science focused high school. I do get shocked at the lack of science literacy, And I do want to know what’s going wrong because I can’t imagine not knowing some of this stuff. Pn the other hand, I don’t believe in gotcha quizzes and recognize that there are a broad range of things I don’t know. It’s a tough question to answers what we need to know (and thus teach) in our ever more expansive real of knowledge.
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I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer. At that time, and I assume now, many science teachers would write in with heartrending stories of difficulties teaching evolution in the Bible Belt.
On the other hand, I don’t know that it’s more advanced to “believe” in evolution, but not be able to explain it. I don’t think anything should be taken on faith.
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To think that people and dinosaurs lived at the same time and the earth is about 6000 years old, at this point, it really does seem that one must be one of stupid, deeply incurious about the world around one’s self, or in the grips of an ideology.
I think it’s mostly trolling at this point.
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“Do you really think this is the same with thinking dinosaurs and people lived at the same time?”
Yes, as a matter of fact. Most of our knowledge is a matter of trust, rather than something we actively investigate. Consider, for instance, what you know about your family history or your spouse’s past. How much of it have you independently verified? One doesn’t, unless one is a very active hobbyist or writing a book (or suddenly aware that one is married to a compulsive liar).
I would also add that smart is area-specific and also heavily influenced by ideological orientation. A few months ago, for instance, smart people in Washington (and Paul Krugman, too) were seriously talking about minting a trillion dollar coin to fix the debt ceiling crisis. They were arguing that they could mint a trillion dollar coin without igniting inflation and they used many clever arguments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_dollar_coin
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/be-ready-to-mint-that-coin/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/can-a-giant-platinum-coin-save-our-credit/2011/07/11/gIQA2VAPjI_blog.html
I was talking to my sister (a German-trained business woman with strong family connections to Germany, a country terrified of inflation) during that debacle and the two of us were keening over what a disaster the trillion dollar coin idea was. It would be the economic equivalent of nuking Manhattan. Neither of us has a fancy Washington job or a NYT column, but we understood that immediately. It took weeks for various smart people to drop the idea (and they may have only dropped it in the face of ferocious public opposition to the plan).
Everybody has streaks and patches of stupid, some of them more dangerous than others. One of our family cautionary tales involves some friends of friends of my husband who were physics students. They had a coconut they wanted to open and they thought they’d microwave it, using the the expanding gases to crack open the coconut. Well, they were far more successful than they expected–the coconut exploded and blew off the door of the microwave.
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That’s not stupid. That’s accidental awesome, except for the guy who owned the microwave.
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That might be a tall tale. Check out, “Is It A Good Idea to Microwave a Coconut?”, episode #73 on the YouTube channel, “Microwave Fun.”
So, don’t trust. However, one can’t verify everything.
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This is actually an interesting epistemological question: is it somehow “more ignorant” not to know how old the earth is, even within an order of magnitude, than not to know what ultraviolet light is or what “hydrogenated” means?
Usually, my opinion is that not to know the things I know reflects profound and embarrassing ignorance which disqualifies the ignorant person from participating in any discussion, whereas the things I don’t know are mostly insignificant and irrelevant to the important issues.
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