Spelunking the Universe
Archive for February, 2009
Fascinating Facebook
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Seeing as I’m swamped with crap to do today (because every professor feels they are your only professor) I would like to posit a bit of information today that caught my eye in the New York Times.
Facebook has over 175 million active users, Of the two hundred and twenty one official countries in the world, this internet social networking site has more people using it than 216 of them! That’s 97.7% of the worlds countries each having a smaller population than a single website. You could likely have the lower 100 hundred nations fit snugly into Facebook and still have room.
So yes, tomorrow I’ll be back in force most likely since I’ll be into the weekend. For now let this leave you awe struck 
. I might come back to this with excel and make it even more interesting.
Coming up this week: Freedometer re-thought and corrected. I noticed some glaring flaws in its design (when I should have been sleeping).
The wonders of the zHome
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
The zHome is easily one of the most interesting things I’ve read about in the last few years. It’s a project in my own particular state that has been harshly effected by the economy. Once funded this project will produce homes that actually produce more energy than they consume. Through the use of solar paneling each home in the 10 home townhouse setup will use as much energy as it needs and the rest will be sent out on the grid (to power other structures). It’ll also use multiple systems so that the water use is roughly 60% lower than the average American home. This is nice especially considering in my lifetime alone I’ve watched Washington, a state known for its rain, have some pretty noticeable water scares with their reservoirs being exceptionally low.
Likewise the materials in the home are either non-toxic and environment friendly or they are recycled non-toxic and environment friendly (nice options). In fact the only negative I can see from this project is the support its receiving, projects like these should be supported with every ounce this country has. If all new homes were built with these kind of specs we could see a complete revolution on the way the world works around us, this is not a thing of the future, it is technology available now that can only get better.
It bothers me that we are wasting money on the automotive industry (that honestly has half ass-d any attempt to revolutionize their merchandise) and not pouring it into projects like this. Hopefully for those that visit here they’ll read up on these wonderful (and very pleasant on the eye) homes and tell their friends. The more people who know the better chance that projects like these will go somewhere instead of being dropped for ‘clean coal’ funding and other complete malarky.
Further information can be found at: zHome Website
Thanks for visiting and have a great day.
The Human Body – A Collaborative Project
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Today is more of a thought experiment than anything else. I just felt it would be interesting to discuss the human body. Whenever we think of ourselves generally we see ourselves as singular beings, metaphysics aside, generally you look at a person and say “Them” or something of that nature. However in actuality your body is one huge collaborative project, a collection of somewhere between 50 and 100 trillion cells. Each working (hopefully) in symbiosis with all the other cells around it. Even our cells are made up of smaller matter that at one point or another decided (I say that jokingly) that it would hang out with the other matter that now make up the cells.
As I said in the last post when I look at people I tend to think of Jelly fish. Now I know some people might be wondering why, is it because people seem to enjoy outbursts of possibly fatal nature whenever they come into contact with other organisms (mean-world hypothesis ;D), is it because we react most noticeably to the simplest of stimuli, or is it the outside appearance of no actual brain articulating our movements and survival? While all three of these might be fun possible answers it ties in more with what a Jelly fish is. If my memory serves me correctly, be it from animal planet or one of the numerous books that have found their way into my hands over the years, jelly fish are not necessarily one animal. They have collections of other animals on them, now not to say that hamsters are chilling inside the dome of a jelly fish, but very small organisms use these miraculous organisms as a shelter or sorts. In at least one case a jelly fish uses plants to generate nourishment from photo synthesis, in effect what looks like a single organism is in actuality a colony of wonderfully coexisting organisms, albeit its a killing machine, but it’s a beautiful one.
Humans come off to me as much of the same. Our brains aren’t single chunks of matter but collaborative projects of some 100 billion neurons (I don’t think anyone’s ever actually counted, it’s an estimate) each working in kind with its surrounding neurons to create a very efficient command center. It pays to note that while each part of the human works in conjunction with the parts around it it’s not always a safe one, when blood enters the brain it causes severe damage because it causes Neurons to basically fill with an element, I want to say NA (salt) but I don’t recall exactly, until the cells burst. Likewise when a neuron bursts it has a chance of killing the neurons around it which can have dire consequences to the human. It’s one of the many reasons I don’t think humans are ‘intelligently designed’ anyone who designs a cell that receives nourishment from another cell that if they come into contact will obliterate one or both is silly and hardly intelligent. It’s why I don’t try to use electro magnetic coils to power my PC, I like everything functioning.
But when we get down to it, the human body is this amazingly convincing collection of microscopic matter. While there is remarkably little in between certain organs who do well with their fluids, and other parts of the body that would fall apart if that fluid contacted them, it does seem to function properly more often than not (wouldn’t have billions of people if it didn’t). It pays to remember that whenever we do things we aren’t just deciding wether we as a collection of thoughts and actions survive, but every single cell in our being. In a sort of odd sense every time a person dies a form of genocide has unraveled, where trillions of organisms die off in a matter of hours (or days if the weather is just right). So as with the Jellyfish, what looks like a single organism, is actually a colony of wonderfully coexisting organisms, albeit its a killing machine, but it’s a beautiful one.
Who knows, maybe the next time you see a guy on the bus talking to himself he’s really just trying to give his cells a pep talk. I’ve read that sound can stimulate the growth of a plant, if that happens to actually be true, perhaps sound makes your cells all giddy in some manner or another. But don’t ask me to bank on that hypothesis because I’d rather not go down in flames like a US Corporation 
. (Oooh political burn)
Hindsight Bias, Everyone knew this would happen.
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Another remarkable aspect of cognitive faculties is their ability to convince us that we are certain of something that in reality was (or may still be) incredibly uncertain. This phenomenal effect is so convincing that in many cases we are absolutely positively sure that it isn’t happening. We just know that what we think now isn’t an illusion or manipulated by outside sources, we tend to forget that if our brain is tricked we are going to be unaware that it was. One particular form of these biases that can have a remarkable impact on our lives, especially debates of previous events, is the Hindsight Bias. To use my favorite resource for quick and dirty information Hindsight Bias is defined as follows:
Hindsight bias is the inclination to see events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place. Hindsight bias has been demonstrated experimentally in a variety of settings, including politics, games and medicine. In psychological experiments of hindsight bias, subjects also tend to remember their predictions of future events as having been stronger than they actually were, in those cases where those predictions turn out correct.
One explanation of the bias is the availability heuristic: the event that did occur is more salient in one’s mind than the possible outcomes that did not.
- Wikipedia
One of my favorite lines that is formed from this bias is that of “Oh man I should have seen that coming.” A person has an event that was no more likely than a another event transpire (or the difference is negligible) and yet they feel in retrospect (aka hindsight) that it was blatantly obvious that event would have transpired. When watching a horror movie we scold people who have died for not thinking about the obvious nature of their situation even though there could have been a multitude of ways it would have ended. It just so happens that the way it does end is the way that comes most strongly to the mind in hindsight.
This seems like a reasonable way to examine the past as well, events that have occurred in the past have proven that it is possible that they occur (obviously). Causally this gives them priority over ‘possible’ events that have not yet transpired. Why fear what has never been when you can much easier fear what has and at least prepare for its next occurrence (rhetorical).
Hindsight bias is also one of the many crippling tools in gambling. When playing a game where there is always the same chance of winning to losing people will feel that after X loses they are bound to win. A game as simple as ‘heads or tails’ could have people sitting around for hours waiting for a half dozen heads in a row to place 20 million dollars on tails. The remarkable thing is that regardless of what ends up happening they’ll respond with a relatively similar answer. “I knew that was going to happen.” If it is tails then they’ll probably say it in a much happier fashion and perhaps try the gamble again an hour later and lose it all, at which time they’ll respond similar to how they would have had it been 7 heads in a row the first time. “Damn. It obviously favors heads.” It’s powerful because much like confirmation bias we ignore the possibility of a contradictory outcome. We (usually) do not actively search for information to contradict what we believe is the likely (or perhaps only) outcome to a situation, to do so is to open up a can of worms, to possibly spark high levels of skepticism in all facets of life.
It’s much easier in the end to simply assume that all past events were obviously going to happen. However it is important to stress that just because this wonderful little quirk exists we should not assume that nothing is likely. If you leap from a 50 story building there is a near certainty that without aid you will die, if you light yourself afire and jump into a pool full of gasoline you will likely not survive, if you date a super model and are hoping for a thoughtful relationship you…alright that last one might of been a bit mean.
To defeat (or at least weaken) this effect it pays to (when possible) examine all possible outcomes of an event, there is no obvious result of a coin toss (specifically either side compared to its opposite) and there is no certain result to the roll of a die (cheating aside). It is important that we recognize these biases exist and try our best to not be overcome by them, otherwise we end up being terrible journalists, economists, historians, or basically any profession that involves interaction with other people or worse still positions of influence. As I’ve told my girlfriend, the brain is a whore for stimulation. We as the unusually quirky software must make sure that our hardware doesn’t go off and get us killed for its own jolts of yum yums.
That last bit inspired me, I think tomorrows discussion will be on the unusual nature of our construction (or I think I should say architecture). Humans remind me a bunch of jelly fish…or really any other living organism, but I’ll save this train of thought for tomorrow.
PS. For those that didn’t catch it, Jamie Berger himself commented on my DRM post a while back. You can find his comments here. I appreciate all input and his was no exception .
Confirmation Bias – The Silent Killer
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I’ve seen the phrase “The Silent Killer” multiple times in the last week or so and figured it would be a catchy tag phrase for the discussion of Confirmation Bias. For those visiting that don’t know bluntly what this is it is defined as follows:
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and to avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or as a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis.
Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence challenging a preconceived idea but not to evidence supporting it.[1]
- Wikipedia
I couldn’t have said it better myself so I didn’t (obviously). This does feel like a natural adaptation used to help alleviate the fear of the unknown. Recently I discussed the phenomena of Experimental Neurosis and forgot to mention something very important (I think). Namely the more difficult it is to differentiate the worse the condition can, and usually will, be. When presented with a situation in which you have absolutely no dissertation of options, namely the complete unknown, you will find the Neurotic responses to be at the utmost extreme. This is in part why animals fear the dark, the brain cannot decipher wether or not the situation is positive or negative, wether it will return them with a appetitive or aversive stimuli. For any organism hoping to further its genetic code not knowing these bits of information is never helpful.
Now this is where I feel Confirmation Bias (at least in part) comes into play. When presented with a piece of knowledge that the organism has basically affirmed as completely true (namely there is no case where it is untrue) they will work exceedingly hard to make certain that the information taken in confirms these beliefs. Once you question something that is held as certainty, it starts a snowball effect of what else might be untrue, this creates a massive list of unknowns and for some people (and I’m sure higher level organisms like Dolphins and Apes) can be a crippling incident. To avoid this possible crash and further the life span (and subsequently the chance to reproduce) the organism merely omits or manipulates information that contradicts its beliefs in order to further them and continue on a consistent and unchallenged life (albeit erroneous).
There are some interesting places where Confirmation Bias is most evident (at least from my experiences). The mean-world hypothesis is in short a theory that all people are naturally violent or otherwise mean by nature. This is supported by evidence in the news that talks about rapes, murders, and robberies. However a person believing this hypothesis would (and does if my behavioral neuroscience book was being honest) show very little stimulation from news reports about a little girl riding a pony for the fair and would be very stimulated by reports of a car jacking. Now we can look at this two ways, in the interest of defeating confirmation bias, one is that possibly they are correct and the reason they are more interested in the car jacking is their natural predisposition to violence, or one could argue that because they believe they should have such a predisposition that their brain automatically omits or limits information intake that contradicts their view of the world.
Similarly we can look at an Olympic Athlete who believes that God is what makes them win. You will notice in many cases when the Athlete fails they will say something akin to “I have failed” or “My faith wasn’t strong enough.” Whenever they win they’ll say something like “God helped me win.” or “It was my faith that helped me push through.” I know when I was younger I watched a man who was in multiple Olympic events (swimming if I’m not mistaken) who in one event blamed themselves for not getting the gold and in another thanked God for being there to help them win the gold. I was dumbfounded by God’s tardiness considering the nature of the being.
When we look at the issue of racism in people one quick instance of confirmation bias comes from the fact that in certain studies they find that when shown a picture of a person and given two buzzers, one for shoot and one for question, when the person see’s someone of a different race they more often hit shoot. It is said by some groups pushing to eliminate racism (a topic for another day I’m sure) that this is obviously examples of how strong racism is in our country. However one could just as well argue, and perhaps even provide much stronger evidence for, the functions of the human brain. Organisms rebuild memories from fragments filling in the blanks as they go, while I don’t remember the process anymore this is why music is so easy to remember, the structure of music makes it extremely difficult (in some cases almost impossible) to put the incorrect fragment in because it screws up the entire rhyme, syllable, and timing scheme (and other musical schemes that I don’t even know about or am misnaming).
When we look at the case of the ‘shoot the different race’ study we notice that in building a response for someone of a similar race there are far less pieces to put into place. Immediately the organism can skip passed the similarities and move onto response. However in the case of differing races you would not (or I’d think should not) immediately assume anything about it, a shaved gorilla with good posture could very well be standing in front of you, your response to something that can crush you in its incredibly powerful arms would be far different than a fellow human being. Likewise there is a very small window when dealing with a suspect who is holding something, making the wrong judgement or a judgement that is too slow is what gets officers killed (well…the criminal helps quite a bit).
Now I am not one to say which is the truest of situations, however I will say this. There are studies that show that infants up to a certain point can differentiate between the faces of basically any animal with pretty good accuracy. Where we might in our adult life see the same monkey in two pictures they’ll know that they are two different monkeys. Our brains however begin to specialize and optimize processes so that at a certain point we can much quicker than an infant differentiate between two human faces but lose the ability to do so to the chimps. It is this specialization that might play a strong part in the issue of race. It may be the natural inclination of the brain to not only specialize humans but also certain races (likely the particular organisms race).
The most enjoyable thing about writing about Confirmation Bias is that at any point you can chalk up a point to it. The thing to remember is that it is a very powerful tool and it requires that we always look at all sides of something. I’d say both sides but that is another great problem with examination, humans adore dichotomies and yet so few truly (<– keyword) exist in the natural world. The next time you are discussing with a friend or stranger a topic you strongly believe in, think about how else you could explain your belief it can do nothing but make you a better person I promise.
Happy Valentines Day
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
While I feel it’s a little cheap updating with a simple congratulations I feel that holidays should be spent enjoying yourself (and being lazy ;D).
If nothing else blame the American Spirit, she fights hard for her right to live easy. Or something inspirational like that.
I’ll try and make tomorrow’s update something entertaining to make up for this .
Happy Valentines Day to All (even the single folks).
The Illusion of Freedom
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
There appears to me to be a great bit of confusion when looking into the term of freedom. Something I feel that should be addressed for future discussion. There will be certainly some subjectivity however I hope that it will be treated as objective as it can be . I will certainly try my best to keep it as objective as I can (which in itself is somewhat impossible given the conversation).
This is a good visual example of what I’m about to explain. Think of the above image as describing the freedom of choice between two options given their outcome (assuming you know it). In particular while I’m not a fan of digging into religious discussions (mainly because it tends to get bitter even if you don’t want it to) but I feel a particular ‘choice’ is very useful for illustrating my point.
For a choice to be free it must not, in the case of a fully and properly functional organism, contradict the very nature of self preservation. A praying mantis male may sacrifice its own being but it does so in an act to feed it female and to press on the likelihood that it’s seed/genes (and in essence its very being) will pass on. In many cases the actions an organism does that appear to contradict it’s natural inclination for survival are indeed actions that are required for such. Drinking from a stream that has a predator in them is a necessity where the danger of the predator does not outweigh the danger of dying of thirst.
This is where the image comes into play. It works in a negative correlation (or sorts), the further you move in either direction (to the left towards option A or to the right for option B) the less likely the opposing option becomes. If you enter the red range of the Freedometer you have essentially left the realm of freedom. It’s not necessarily that once you pass 50% you are no longer free in all cases, I’m using the simplest example to help explain my point with the least amount of thought (so you can use your extra resources to expand the concept).
In essence if you place a gazelle in the situation where it must drink or it will die, the odds of dying while drinking are outweighed, if they were not outweighed it would not do what it does. This is why some animals do indeed starve or dehydrate (I imagine there is a better term) to death, the odds of them being eaten far exceed the odds of them dying at the current moment. It’s a sad state of affairs.
If you are presented with a ‘simple choice’ one with two outcomes. You either believe in a single an entity, or you spend the eternity damned to a torturous nothingness. You are no longer provided a free choice, you are given an ultimatum. It is a choice only in the most literal of terms, but it is not free. In the case of an ultimatum you are placed in the extreme red zones, a point in which no properly thinking and functioning beings would choose the other option. Whenever you are placed in a position in which one of the options is not an option that the organism would choose it is no longer a choice and the illusion of freedom is the only freedom that is truly present.
I am not sure if this has made anything more clear, but at the very least I’d hope that the next time someone reads about a ‘free choice’ that they remember the Freedometer and remember that at a certain point even a choice is not a choice.
Indeterminism
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Dipping back into the wonderful world of Determinism we have a slightly different take on the idea. We’ll begin by defining Indeterminism:
Indeterminism: Not every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.
Now you might be saying “Well that’s obvious Captain Jack.” To which I’d remind you I’m not Jack, regardless we’ll continue. The next important thing to know is what it means for something to be undetermined.
e is undetermined =df e is not completely determined by previous conditions.
This is important because it leads us into what becomes of Indeterminism. It’s a fascinating philosophy because as with other philosophies it gets taken to some very unusual extremes. One such extreme is called “simple determinism” which looks as follows:
Simple Indeterminism
1) There are some undetermined actions.
2) People act freely whenever they perform undetermined actions.
3) People are morally responsible for their own undetermined actions.
At first glance this appeared to be a pretty reasonable setup. The first tenet says that there are ‘some’ undetermined actions. It is difficult to say that something never happens, so its safe to say that there are ‘some’ undetermined actions. Likewise it comes out to feeling common sense when you look back on your life. Some events did not move along because of the flowing of the wind or the force of gravity.
Likewise tenet two is making a general statement that seems difficult to argue with. A person is acting freely when they are performing an action that is undetermined. In essence they had options A) and B) (at the very least) and decided to go with one or the other. That choice was their freedom in action.
Finally the third tenet states that when you act freely you are morally responsible. The idea being that if you choose to murder someone then you are responsible for that activity. However there is a large loophole that this particular version of Indeterminism has and it has to do with the global nature of the third tenet. A seizure is indeed an undetermined action, during that particular moment before the seizure you had the event you desired and the possibility of a seizure. However if you killed someone while having seizures many would be hard pressed to file charges against you. There are more complicated examples but this simple situation puts us in the place of either denouncing Simple Indeterminism or deciding that indeed a seizure victim is fully responsible for the repercussions of their seizure.
If we were to make some minor modifications to Simple Indeterminism we could clean up most situations.
Rico’s Indeterminism
1) There are some undetermined actions.
2) People act freely whenever they perform undetermined and desired actions.
3) People are morally responsible for their own undetermined and desired actions.
The introduction of desired to the pre mentioned “undetermined” situations fixes the issue of involuntary problems. In this case when presented with (for simplicities sake) two options if you choose to do one but you are unable because of uncontrollable variables (IE. Seizures or similar situations) then the resulting act is not something you are morally responsible to.
Now this philosophy has the possibility for abuse but only in the judgement of the person by other persons. If we are to accept morality as something of a natural law (which it isn’t but bear with me) then the person IS morally responsible it’s just that they are attempting to mask the fact that they are. Likewise the action of lying about it being their desired action is also another situation of being responsible.
Morality is certainly a discussion for another day, however when taken into context of the idea of Indeterminism I feel it’s somewhat self explanatory. Likewise I’m relatively hard pressed to think of a situation where your desired action is not one you are morally responsible for or even one that isn’t an act of freedom. However anyone feeling frisky can take a shot at providing a situation where you are acting out in a desired fashion and are not morally responsible (or even should not be).
Mean, Median, and Mode.
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
As people who have been keeping up with these daily updates know. I would like to become a teacher. However there are some things I think require some dramatic overhauling, mainly because we are at an unusual cross roads where I feel misinformation is causing a dramatic (and ill directed) change in the education system.
For further discussion later I will note that I am strongly opposed to most (if not all) of the premises behind the No-child-left-behind act. The logic behind taking money away from worse off schools and shoveling that money into better off schools until the worse off schools implode is terrible at best. In Seattle quite a few schools closed down because of the policy and the funding cuts and it makes me wonder when you shove 5 school’s worth of children into less than 5 schools how you are not leaving children behind.
However it’s painfully obvious that if you wrote a bill that legalized the beating of babies and called it “The don’t beat babies bill.” people would vote for it for fear of voting otherwise leaving them labeled baby beater.
We’ll leave that there for now and I’ll come back to it on another day. For today I’d like to discuss why all exams should be looked over with the mean, median, and mode or shouldn’t be looked over at all.
In most of my psychology courses the professor would explain how they feel the exam tested well because the average grade was a low B. This sounded cute and fulfilling till you looked at all the possible situations where the mean or average gives you no idea of the ‘average’ performance in a course.
Say you have an exam for simplicities sake that has 10 questions. We’ll assume each class has the same amount of students.
7 – 7 – 7 – 7 – 7
Class Average: 7 (Or 70%)
When we thing of the average grade in a class we think of it like this (or perhaps a more direct 9 – 8 – 7 – 6 – 5 setup). If the average was 7 then everyone got roughly a C and passed the class. That’s fine and dandy in theory however the average really tells us nothing about how the class overall really performed.
10 – 10 – 5 – 5 – 5
Class Average: 7 (Or 70%)
As you can see in this example over half the class failed the exam. If you walked into a course and the professor told you that over half of you would fail would you stay? What if they told you the class average was 70%? It is likely that the latter would trick you into assuming the course was doable when for all intensive purposes the people passing appear (when looking at the performance of the whole) to have the knowledge necessary to pass regardless of how the professor or the book educates them.
I’ve noticed in courses with much larger numbers of students you’ll have a small group that performs exceptionally well and a vast majority that perform at just below par or quite far below par. This offsets to some ‘theoretically’ comfortable average and when seen by other faculty or staff the average alone gives the allusion of proper examination and instructional procedures.
Likewise I feel that the next source of information is by itself relatively worthless. The median essentially tells us nothing about the performance of a class. I’ll again provide two examples that return the same result but are dramatically different. The median for those curious is the middle number when all numbers are placed in numerical order (IE. from least to greatest or vice versa). In the case of an even number you generally would take whatever is in between the two. If you meet at the middle with 7 and 6 the median would be 6.5 else if you met with 6 and 6 you’d end with 6.
10 10 7 1 1
Class Median: 7 (or 70%)
This seems appropriate for what the median does by itself. Indeed when you lined up the grades of all the students in your class the median grade was 70%. This is a pretty respectable performance, however you still have just barely under 50% of your course failing, 40% to be exact. This again is offset by the fact that generally speaking the people who do exceptionally well on an exam that the majority of students do on par or sub par would have performed at such high rankings regardless of the professor or the book.
8 – 8 – 7 – 7 – 3
Class Median: 7 (or 70%)
So the reason this bothers me is that as you can see the performance of these two classes is dramatically different. In the bottom set 80% of the class has passed, likewise the upper performance is not perfect which may hint towards a more accurate examination to teaching style. I’ll come back to why the above example is better than the first (of the median examples) in a short while.
We finally move onto the mode, a mode is the most common digit in a set of digits. For example if you have 3 numbers and two of them are the same then the mode would be whatever that number is. However much like its cousins (or brothers/sisters what have you) the mode is utterly meaningless by itself.
10 – 7 – 7 – 2 – 1
Class Mode: 7 (or 70%)
A 70% is essentially the bare minimum you can receive in a course before you pseudo-pass it. When you pseudo-pass something you receive a ‘passing’ grade however you are strongly requested to retake the course. It’s essentially failing without failing and I know in the one case where it happened to me it was treated as worse than failing (which I found odd).
Modes can get far more hokey when you get into larger groups of people. On an exam with 50 possible outcomes you could end up with only one outcome being performed more than once leaving it as the ‘mode’ where really the only thing it has on others is that its merely one larger. The mode is a support function when looking at grading and really means nothing by itself.
7 – 7 – 7 – 7 – 7
Class Mode: 7 (or 70%)
This case is dramatically different from the first case, your entire class passed the test which is a good thing however nobody performed better or worse than anyone else. This tends to show failure on the part of the examiner for either providing misleading study suggestions, poorly worded questions, or some other mistake that is all too common. The main reason for pulling this out again (as it matches up with the very first example) is that it leads into my main point (took a while to get here…perhaps unnecessarily so…but I’m rarely as succinct as I want to be).
The only case in which statistics for a course are acceptable without the full print out is when the mean, median, and mode all are fairly close to one another. If any of them is dramatically different than the other an investigation should be taken. Not necessarily by the FBI but someone should look into the teaching or testing style of the professor/teacher. This is usually a good sign that something is wrong and generally when an entire classroom is effected its not all the students (people aren’t quite that homogenous yet).
A few examples are as follows.
8 – 8 – 8 – 8 – 7
Class Mean: 7.8 (or 78%)
Class Median: 8 (or 80%)
Class Mode: 8 (or 80%)
So in the above case you have a class where everyone passed, we don’t see a case of a ceiling or floor affect (everyone neither got a 10 nor did everyone get a 1), and roughly speaking all three M’s are very close to one another. It is difficult to create a situation where all 3 are the same and you don’t have an accurate idea (without seeing the individual performance of all the students on an excel printout) and I don’t have one handy but I’ll give it a shot. (Update: In retrospect I feel I failed. Feel free to comment if you have a working example).
9 – 7 – 7 – 6 – 3
Class Mean: 6.4 (or 64%)
Class Median: 7 (or 70%)
Class Mode: 7 (or 70%)
I believe in this case we do see a relatively broad range of grades (as high as 90% and as low as 30%) however the overall performance is so poor that it doesn’t matter. These kinds of cases should always spark curiosity in the institutions that they unfold in. Maybe I’m being close minded and there is a grand example of a mean, median, and mode all showing great performance yet most of the class failing but I’m not convinced that is entirely possible (I will not say it isn’t though).
The perfect case is obviously when everyone in the course gets the exact same grade, that’s the point of popping out the lucky 7′s scenario. Ideally I would hope everyone would get ‘lucky’ 8′s or 9′s but it seems odd that we immediately assume that all people are ‘above average’…I would think that if everyone is above average then they are not above average they are average.
These three functions are almost meaningless by themselves, each can in certain (and numerous) situations provide dramatically misleading information supporting all sorts of flimsy or hokey ideals. The use of any of these three functions by themselves when fashioning policies or judging the performance of an entity is likely to end in misinformation and failure. I propose that either professors and teachers produce all three pieces of information or provide none because it has become all too apparent at the very least at Western Washington University, that Mean is being abused worse than the proverbial red headed step child.
The psychology department routinely fails large portions of their students (or D’s them) and yet the average make it appear that people are performing at or slightly above average performance. This is unacceptable and an additional reason I’m not the least bit troubled that the college has lost 35 (possibly more) million dollars.
If you can’t see the flimsy nature of the mean function than you probably cannot see the danger of living dramatically far beyond your means (pun intended and in at least one sense its not even a pun).
For Next time: I’ll likely discuss the idea of Indeterminism.
Determinism
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
As I sit here realizing that it would cost me 100 dollars to recover my corrupt one note files, I feel that (time permitting) that it may at least be good for the topic of determinism (Note: Time was not permitting). Otherwise its an incredibly crushing experience that gives me a very negative view of Microsoft at the moment (which is a shame because Windows 7 had peaked my interest in them). So to anyone out there make backups of your one notes, there is NO way to recover them (as far as I know) without paying some random asshole 100 dollars. May sound hard but charging that much for file recover is preposterous.
So without further delay:
Determinism: Every event that occurs is completely determined by previous conditions.
E is physically necessary =df E is required by the laws of nature.
E is completely determined by previous conditions =df the combination of previous events and the laws of nature makes e physically necessary.
Now this is important information. For those that do not know =df means "if by definition", likewise if you’ve seen it before iff means if and only if. E is simply a variable much like *.
The idea is that our history is a singular line, each event directed by the previous event which is also governed by its previous event traveling all the way back to the big bang (be that for you a cosmic blast or just some deity doing the ole bang solo). In essence it says that all actions have been predetermined by events that happened even before the agents of those actions were alive.
It goes so far for some as to say that because we cannot control our actions (and instead are merely reacting) that we should not be responsible for those actions. It has caused a few thoughts to spark in my head that make it a very sketchy system.
The second is an example of the life of a simple system. In the beginning it’s as simple as a coin toss, then in this particular case it becomes a 3 way outcome. However if we look back historically the actions of this organism would look like the above line because there would be only one outcome to every one of the actions.
Essentially Determinism says that because natural law is unable to make decisions and must act directly with the world around it that living organisms act entirely in the same way. However essentially determinism says the following.
If every single variable in the past happened exactly in the same way the exact same history would transpire.
This explains everything and in the same manner states nothing (a very popular tactic in philosophy). When an organism is born the actions it makes are at the simplest level a coin toss between two possibilities, the response is so quick to the outside viewer that it can be mistaken for a mere reaction to the environment not unlike how the waves move with the turning of the Earth, the gravitation of the moon and other bodies, as well as the shear orgy of shoving between the forces in the sea. In fact random functions like coin tosses aren’t even negated in the universe of determinism. Because if the coin was tossed with the exact same force, from the exact same point, with the exact same wind resistance, the exact same gravitational pull, landing exactly on the same spot on a surface that is in the exact same condition as the first attempt, and all other variables I cannot even fathom being exactly the same then the results would be exactly the same. However this requires a universal knowledge (omniscience I think its called) for it to be a form of understanding that has any purpose in life.
Even the previous example explained by determinism breaks down when rendered on a PC. If you created a simple program to flip a coin (return the result of 0 or 1 with a 50% chance) you would receive results each time that are completely separate from the results of the former. In theory if you were to rewind time you would get a different set of results each time that you did it (assuming you did it 10-20 times). This is because the forces acting upon the results in the digital realm are not a result of the outside world and thusly would not be held down by the rules of determinism.
There are many different forms of determinism, some harsher than the one I’ve described and some weaker. However in all cases it appears that determinism is very weak. Organisms much like Personal Computers take in information, run it through a series of scripts (or a script if its a really small program on a PC >_>), this is a process that nothing else in the universe does (to my knowledge). There is a point where the outside senses of an organism does indeed directly influence it to a point that trumps the looping processes, but that appears to only be in instances of errors. If you place a person in a room that’s twelve times their body temperature you will find a direct influence on their activities (producing a small set of responses), however if you place someone in a room that is .12 percent warmer than their body you will find a multitude of responses. However in either case when you look back it will only look like a straight line.
It is impossible for history to have more than one result when looking back, philosophy aside, it wouldn’t make any form of sense to expect anything else but single incidents in history. One of the simplest forms of logic known as modal logic says (essentially) the following:
If X can exist without Y then X is not identical to Y.
What this essentially says is that you cannot logically exist and not exist at the exact same time. Likewise in history an event cannot happen and not happen. This means that in history even if an event had 90 trillion possible outcomes, there can only be one to have happened, and I feel this is something that even a child grasps. Which is what bothers me about Determinism. It essentially says that since history only happened in one way then all of time has only one possible outcome. This seems like quite a bold statement, it would be like me saying that if I ran a program to flip a coin and it returned heads, that in all cases in the future I’d see heads. It seems foolish to take an obvious property of history and attempt to use it to explain the future.
I’d have dipped more into this but spending 5 hours attempting to recover my notes has all but crushed my writing spirit… Goodnight all . I should be more chipper next update.