06.22.07
Posted in Education, People, Column Ideas
at 8:09 am
by Dave Badtke
Comparing some 60,000 IQ tests taken by male Norwegian military siblings, Norwegian researcher Petter Kristensen claims, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle (also in the NY Times), that the debate over the intelligence of the oldest in a family is over:
On average, the eldest child’s IQ is a measly 2.3 points higher than the second. But researchers say the difference is enough to give the first child a better chance — about 13 percent higher – of getting into the top college.
The researchers, whose work appeared today in the online issue of Science, analyzed IQ scores of 250,000 men starting mandatory military service in Norway. They found a significant difference in IQ scores in 60,000 pairs of siblings, making it the largest study to confirm that birth order affects intelligence, ending nearly a century of debate, said lead author Petter Kristensen, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oslo.
Even though the researchers looked only at men, Kristensen said previous studies say women are similarly affected by their birth rank in the family.
Maybe. Certainly if you’re the oldest in your family, this is confirmation of what you always knew, but if you’re not, it’s faulty research.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa in 1968, I was a Jean Piaget fan. In one of my classes crowded with elementary students sitting closely together, squeezed into the small classroom with arms and legs wrapped around each other, all listening intently to my lessons, I would perform little Piaget experiments to see whether Piaget’s Switzerland results applied in Palala. One that I remember involved an understanding of volume in which water from a squat vessel is poured into a tall thin vessel. When I asked my students which had more water, the squat or tall vessel, they knew that both contained the same.
“Duh,” these little kids seemed to say. “You just poured the same water from one into the other. Of course they’re the same.”
According to Piaget, at their age they shouldn’t have understood this conservation principle that older children, at least Swiss children at the time, had trouble with. My students were different from Piaget’s, it seemed, and while I continued to be interested in Piaget’s theories, I didn’t give them as much weight: Certainly a child’s understanding of the world changes as he develops, but that change is a complex mix of nature and nurture.
So perhaps younger siblings can have hope if they’re not Norwegian, which reminds me of the marvelous Norwegian movie Elling, in which IQ plays a complex, comical role.
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06.08.07
Posted in Column Ideas, Science
at 10:09 am
by Dave Badtke
The Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) of northwestern Brazil speak a language that is challenging linguistic theories. John Colapinto in the April 16 issue of The New Yorker writes that linguist Dan Everett, one of the first to learn the difficult Pirahã language, has concluded that Pirahã seems to lack some of the irreducible language elements that linguists have come to expect. In “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” Everett notes the “extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture,” which are reflected in their language:
The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for ‘all,’ ‘each,’ ‘every,’ ‘most,’ or ‘few’ — terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. [For a discussion of their number concepts, see the NPR Talk of the Nation program.] Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (”the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (”The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). (Colapinto 120)
The lack of recursion is particularly vexing because, as Colapinto points out, “Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human capability.”
When I first listened to Pirahã speech at a religious site — interestingly, Everett started out as a Christian missionary who became a scientist because of his language abilities and exposure to the Pirahã — I had the impression that there were fewer sounds than one might expect, but I didn’t think that their speech sounded like singing as Everett has suggested. On the other hand, this recording was made for religious purposes, so perhaps the speaker was reading a script.
But then after listening to the excellent NPR piece on Everett, I was more fascinated. In addition to a brief discussion of the linguistic theories and the controversy Everett has stirred up, you hear the Pirahã speaking. Intriguing doesn’t begin to describe the nature of the exchanges. And then Everett demonstrates the flexibility of their language by saying a sentence, whistling it, and finally by humming the sentence. It’s amazing that these three forms convey the same information. And yes, indeed, the language does sound more like singing than speaking.
For more also see Dan Everett’s website at Illinois State.
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05.15.07
Posted in Education, Column Ideas
at 10:43 am
by Dave Badtke
There’s only one class left in the semester, my 370 students have taken their Composition Mastery Exam — which the entire faculty will grade on Thursday — and the Spring 2007 semester marathon is almost over. And while I submitted my text requests for the fall semester, I’m still looking for new texts and stories for my English 1 & 4 students. But the problem in doing this is always the same: the vast majority of my students do not read for pleasure. And they also struggle to read their assignments, which for them are decidedly not pleasurable.
The cause for this non-reading state would seem to be that they have too much else they can do. More than that, there seems to be so little silence in their lives, required to have a conversation with an author, which seems like a good topic for this week’s column: Reading and silence.
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05.02.07
Posted in Column Ideas
at 2:51 pm
by Dave Badtke
Governor Rick Perry of Texas signed a law on Monday that makes it easier to conceal guns and advocated allowing gun owners to carry guns anywhere they want – schools, churches, could he possibly mean courts as well? — so that the kind of tragedy at Virginia Tech could be avoided. (Yep, he means courthouses as well. Read the link above to the Dallas News.)
I thought at first that this must be a prank when I heard it on NPR. Can any sane individual actually believe that giving everyone a gun — sane, momentarily insane, insane, frequently insane, unpredictable, occasionally nuts — would make such a tragedy less likely or prevent it from happening? Here, it would seem, that birthday probability algorithm might help us see more clearly.
You know this one. In any given room, the number of people who have a birthday on the same day is much higher than we would expect since there are 365 days in the year. So intuitively we’d expect that the probability that someone has the same birthday we do is 1/365 if we ignore leap years, which is a very small probability. So if there are say 23 people in the room, you might expect intuitively that the probability that there are two people with the same birthday to be 23 * (1/365) or about 6%. This, at any rate, is what we feel in our gut. But in fact, the probability that in a room of 23 at least two people will have the same birthday is about 50%.
To get to this correct, non-intuitive answer, you need to consider first the probability that you have the birthday you do. That’s 1. The probability that the next person has a different birthday from you is then 364/365. And the probability that the third person has a different birthday from you and the second person is 363/365. Continuing this on and multiplying out the numbers, the probability that two people in a room of 23 don’t have the same birthday is:
(365/365)*(364/365)* . . . *(342/365) = 0.4927 or ~50%
Since this is the probability that no two people in a room of 23 have the same birthday, the probability that two do have the same birthday is just 1 - .5 or also 50%.
Might we not use the same logic to determine the probability that someone in a room will shoot someone else if everyone is armed? Instead of a birthday, we would need to figure out the probability that a person with a gun, which would now be everyone in the room, would be in a mental state sufficiently angry such that if he came into contact with another sufficiently angry person that a heated exchange would lead to gunfire. Might we not use the same number as the number of days in the year to make the calculation easy?
In other words, let’s assume that there are 365 discreet mental states, one of which is an insane state that would lead to someone feeling as though he wants to kill someone else. If we then ask what the probability is that at least two people are in the same mental state, which would probably precipitate a confrontation, then we have the birthday problem again, where S in the number of mental states and n is the number of people in the room:
1-P(S) = (S!/S**n/(S-n)!)*(1/S)
= S!/S**(n+1)/(S-n)!
We multiply by 1/S since this is the probability that the mental state these two or more people are in is the evil, angry state, capable of leading to a shooting. For the case that there are 365 mental states and 60 people in the same space, for example, close enough to one another to have contact, then the probability that two will be in the same mental state is 99%, virtually certain.
This means that there is then a 1/365 or ~0.27% probability that shots will be fired. While this is a small probability, would you get into a car if this were the probabiliy that you’d be injured or into an airplane if this were the probability the plane would crash? When it’s life threatening, a 1/365 probability is damn high.
In addition, I’ve used 365 mental states when in fact my guess is that there are many fewer mental states, which means that even in a small group, say 20 or 30, the probability that two are in the same mental state is virtually certain. And then if you factor in the kind of mental focusing that takes place when alcohol or drugs are involved at a sporting event or concert, the probability would quickly become large that at least two would be in the same nasty mental state. And if everyone had a gun, the probability would be high that someone would get shot.
Even in the wild wild west, if we’re to believe our Westerns, the sheriff knew better than to let cowboys pack guns when they were in town.
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