What seven and five are...

Over on one of his blogs I didn't know he had, David Hogg spoke this morning about the problem of calculating without thinking.  David speculated that one of the missing pieces in our children's education, specifically math education, was that of common sense --  that we subvert a goal of thinking in favor of rote memorization; of testing oriented teaching; of decontextualized teaching of math. His inquiry was distinctly ungendered, but this piece of our children's education is unavoidable for me.

I have had a growing unease with my 8y old boy's math education. As I watch him work through third grade math I have begun to notice a distinct disinterest. My speculation has been focused on the extraordinarily slow pacing of his lessons, but I am unable to extract a clear reason from him. One piece of his math work that I have found interesting has been a focus on personal, written explanation. He is forced to take apart some of the harder problems, encode them into sentences, and, after doing so, reuse this written framework to create new problems (with new solutions). Perhaps this synchronization of writing and math is a good step towards thinking during calculation.

On the other hand, I still agree that our kids would benefit from developing a mental narrative about education that is more closely akin to David's main point:  that in their classrooms they would be rewarded by openly questioning illogical or simply unnatural contextualizations.  How to instill such an approach is hopefully easier than speculating on how to make the classroom welcoming to it.

So I will leave this idea of calculation with thinking with my own speculation about my children: I also have two girls, 4 and 2, and I wonder about their impending introduction to math. I often think that I will be beyond overjoyed by a parent teacher conference that someday suggests that one of my girls' most beloved (audio) books has inspired "calculation with thinking." That one of the seeds planted in their heads is a ringing desire to openly question their education's context in the voice of a little redheaded girl. That they will hear Pippi's open conflict with her brief math education to call bullshit on the learning vectors they are given.

I'll take my chances reproducing a version of the relevant, translated (copyrighted) text here:

"Pippi, can you tell me what seven and five are?"

Pippi, astonished and dismayed, looked at her and said, "Well, if you don't know that yourself, you needn't think I'm going to tell you."

All the children stared in horror at Pippi, and the teacher explained that one couldn't answer that way in school.

"I beg your pardon," said Pippi contritely. "I didn't know that. I won't do it again."

"No, let us hope not," said the teacher. "And now I will tell you that seven and five are twelve."

"See that!" said Pippi. You knew it yourself. Why are you asking then?"

The teacher decided to act as if nothing unusual were happening and went on with her examination.

"Well now, Pippi, how much do you think eight and four are?"

"Oh, about sixty-seven," hazarded Pippi.

"Of course not," said the teacher. "Eight and four are twelve."

"Well now, really, my dear little woman," said Pippi, "that is carrying things too far. You just said that seven and five are twelve. There should be some rhyme and reason to things even in school. Furthermore, if you are so childishly interested in that foolishness, why don't you sit down in a corner by yourself and do arithmetic and leave us alone so we can play tag?"

The teacher decided there was no point in trying to teach Pippi any more arithmetic. She began to ask the other children the arithmetic questions.

"Can Tommy answer this one?" she asked. "If Lisa has seven apples and Axel has nine apples, how many apples do they have together?"

"Yes, you tell, Tommy," Pippi interrupted, "and tell me too, if Lisa gets a stomach-ache and Axel gets more stomach-ache, whose fault is it and where did they get hold of the apples in the first place?"

The teacher tried to pretend that she hadn't heard and turned to Annika. "Now, Annika, here's an example for you: Gustav was with his schoolmates on a picnic. He had a quarter when he started out and seven cents when he got home. How much did he spend?"

"Yes, indeed," said Pippi, "and I also want to know why he was so extravagant, and if it was pop he bought, and if he washed his ears properly before he left home."

The teacher decided to give up arithmetic altogether.

Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?

Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?
Tracy K. Smith


1.
After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure


That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?


Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired


And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.

Don't You Wonder, Sometimes? by Tracy K. Smith : The Poetry Foundation

Muppet Trolling (a comments & tweets post)

Last night I took my two older children to the local library to watch the "The Muppets (2011)."  The fact that this movie receives a 95% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes only proves that kids in this age range do not (yet) vote online. For while I was sitting in the corner cracking up at the regurgitated skits from my youth, the kids in the audience sat in singular silence.  


This experience gave me two thoughts. The first was about the movie's implicit joke -- that its intended audience were the adults. Consider the obvious: there were 0 identifiable kid characters; the timeline was about the Muppet generation 30 years hence; the audience for the "telethon" were overwhelmingly adults (most looking like they were on the back end of a beloved date night where going to Muppets theatre somehow trumps other more intimate acts).

This movie experience also reminded me of my never published post on science, trolls, and social media. Have you ever seen a Muppet Troll?

http://senorgif.memebase.com/2011/08/04/funny-gifs-statler-and-waldorf-muppet-trolls/

A while back a Muppet Troll got past the moderators at astrobetter on a  post entitled, "What's our Greatest Weakness," which asked what could be changed to improve the culture of astronomy.  Quite naturally this post precipitated a wide ranging comment stream, covering topics from the overproduction of PhDs to software skill to the work/life problems that come from the extant academic pipeline.  Late in the stream the troll struck at the apparent willingness of so many astronomers to take the time to read and respond to this post.

statlerandwardoff:  "People blog and think the social media is the end-all, but you know what? That comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

It was a Saturday afternoon, most of the kids were napping, and this kind of thing gets my blood up. So I submitted a reply...writing as Fozzie Bear...which naturally alerted the moderator that something was amiss.   Although the original troll was taken down, and my trollish reply was not permitted, I considered the prose worth keeping and posting somewhere else. Why? Because I hear the troll's sentiment expressed over and over again in real and virtual spaces whenever we try and/or convince scientists to talk about cultural change.

Talking about cultural change is hard. We might try to tackle the problem by focusing on generational divides, such as those reflected in either the intended audience of the Muppets or in the choice of two old white dudes as trolls. Certainly, abstractions of generational divides along side other variables like gender expression might let us understand cultural tensions a bit better: consider the two posts on the Committee on the Study of Women in Astronomy blog about "Women versus Women" that clearly pivot on generational (and gendered) divides.    

Nevertheless, assuming only "age" as a means to unpack the troll's sentiment is, I think, probably going to fail to make accurate predictions about how folks at different stages of their careers feel about defining what constitutes "doing science." I make this hypothesis by asserting that the academy is currently built upon a guild model for training.  A guild has a training model that resists adaptation in part by allowing, in this case, notions of scientific value to be imbued to subsequent generations without adaptation or test. The trainee or apprentice is insulated from testing the bounds of scientific value by knowing that maintaining the status quo will lead them to a higher place in the guild structure. 

I will save working through the concept of the academic guild for another post. Instead I simply wanted to point out that we may not safely assume that either the troll or his message reflect an older generation with antiquated values about "doing science."   Instead I will simply end with my never published astrobetter Fozzie Bear comment, shared with the hope that perhaps some of my silly replies will provide useful retorts for myself or others.  Consider the format of this post as a riff on Shouts & Murmurs from the New Yorker. Except in the blogosphere, maybe it should be called "Comments & Tweets".

Comments and tweets about doing whatever it is that doing science is:

Statler and Wardoff:  "People blog and think the social media is the end-all, but you know what? That comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Dr. Honeydew: "People write papers and think that communicating their science is the end-all, but you know what? That LaTeXing and formating and figure-making all comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Rowlf the Dog:  "People collect data and think that managing and preserving that data are the end-all, but you know what? That work with metadata and standards comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Beaker: "Meep meh meh eh meep meh meep meep oh meep meep, erp meep meh meep? That meep meh meeping comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Kermit: "People have spouses and even children and think that social relationships are the end-all, but you know what? That procreating and living come out of time that one could actually be doing science."

The Swedish Chef: "Peuple-a spend teeme-a cuukeeng und ieteeng und theenk thet celureec inteke-a zee ind ell be-a ell boot, yuoo knoo vhet? Seteesffying thet beseec hoomun need cumes oooot ooff teeme-a thet oone-a cuoold ectooelly be-a dueeng sceeence-a." (see also Google, Bork)

Elmo: "People sleep and think that suspended sensory activity is the end-all, but you know what? That dreaming and resting time comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Cookie Monster:  "Me eat cookies and think that, graargh, large doses of cookies be the end-all, but you know what? That cookie eating time comes out of time that one could actually be eating MORE cookies. OM-NOM-NOM-NOM..."

Wocka wocka wocka!

on open science and anonymous peer review

I recently participated in a Facebook discussion about the Scientific American article by Mary Carmichael: All Together Now: Scientists Take Peer Review Public  The discussion took place behind the doors of a closed FB group and was posed next to the question: "So is this Open Science?" 

Is public peer review open science?  I found myself drawn to the question of who constitutes the public audience and whether or not the "public" (whoever they might be) passively observed or actively participated in the publication review.  I was somewhat surprised that the gist of the subsequent comments focused on the role that anonymity plays in peer review; the question of who is this public was addressed only to express concern that an active audience would provide something other than the civil, "evidence based" review provided by anonymous peers moderated by activist editors. 

I've come to realize that its probably a bit hard to think about the ramifications of open public peer review because one giant issue consumes everyones thinking.  The core argument for anonymity is pretty simple:  anonymity insulates the scientific culture from the friction (aka 'static')  produced in open debate.  The argument moves serially to assert that anonymity is necessary to protect junior scientists from retribution by senior authors, whether that retribution be by exclusion or through subsequently negative peer review behind the closed doors of job evaluations or well, behind the anonymity of peer review.  This reasoning has certainly been repeated elsewhere, probably like the passing of an oral history, and most recently observed by me in the comments (e.g.) on Peter Coles post / poll about peer review. 

Holy cow. Look, I have no idea if the stupid mistakes I've made as an open peer reviewer are viewed that much worse by the offended authors than the stupid mistakes I've made in my papers. What I do know is that the intellectual contributions I've made to papers as its anonymous reviewer have yielded exactly ZERO career benefit compared to the papers I've written. 

Anyway if you've been able to listen to me past the whine then you've come to the point of my post, which is that I wanted to reproduce some of my FB comments here.  I'm asserting that the issue is not about absolutist (or even pragmatic) approaches to the current culture (where apparently retribution is an assumed behavior) but about changing the culture...

This argument is about culture and cultural norms. Cultures rarely change overnight so we can't very well ask that we drop anonymous peer review in favor of something else for some of the very reasons that you mention -- the current culture does not support it.

Open science is about acting to change current cultural norms and create new ones. These people [in the SA article] are acting this way for this reason; they aren't asking you to do so. They are acting to change the current culture where a senior scientist can destroy [behind closed doors] another scientist over valid disagreements, where overloaded editors are incapable of scientifically brokering referee/author debates, where reviewers get zero attribution for hours or days of effort put into peer reviewing of a paper, and where arbitrary actions by gatekeeper journals sculpt science in an unaccountable way. There are other things that they are trying to change that we haven't even mentioned: a culture that does not value or recognize public engagement through education and public outreach, a culture where data are wasted due to negative or unclear results..

And create new ones: time and time again "communities" have shown themselves capable of crafting expected norms of behavior and this is exactly what happens in science blog comments and forums. The "new articles comments" get winnowed away by a community that does not accept them.

Open science isn't trying to recreate the journal system either although they each believe in improving science through peer action. The journal system is what it is albeit one that exists entirely on the backs of unpaid, uncredited reviewers. Open science is proposing to create new systems (on the backs of unpaid, uncredited actors) that may also improve scientific communication and collaboration. The fact that the "rest of us" can see into the process is another important but also distinct goal.

wiki how?

tried to write a wikiHow article for an astronomy software tutorial.  check back to see if that can work.

also spent a decent fraction of my time looking into archiving wiki content through mirroring, XML source dumps (damn you Trac), etc.

finally, even though a wiki produces pure web content with simple editing tools, complete source packaging, detailed revision control mechanisms (throw in the social web connections if you like that sort of thing) it gonna be a haul to convince...

meta: CMS

spent most of the day adding facets (but little depth) to my knowledge of software like drupal and wordpress.  all attempts to move from the meta to the prototype were unsuccessful.  #vmwarefail

cross-domain following

followed the VAO team meeting with twitter and twiki.  Tobin (Michigan) gave me a run down on his work studying the structure and kinematics of proto-stellar envelopes.

thanks to the conveniences of the CfA webserver and under some redirection from Fay (MSR) i spent some time learning about cross-domain hosting policies for images that appear in flash or silverlight apps.   Fay moved my data to MSR for now as there is no work around to the way my home institution is exposing our URLs.  i added a todo -- uploading my WWT images to an S3 bucket as that appears to be a common way to serve images granting the necessary cross-domain access to SL/Flash.

literate programming cache

a quick post to capture a few new literate programming threads that I will now uncache.

following a dexy thread lead me to to a vimeo.  apparently the code word is artifact.

yes, googling gets me somewhere on stackoverflow.

six months ago I couldn't find anyone weaving with python.

here is some code. here is some more. here is a list. here is a wiki.

where are some users?

must look up why we all love ReST and how long that will last.

more python and peer review

they go together like bread and honey these days.

after a few hours of *bucks and a traffic ticket,  a 2nd referee report, which repeats verbatim much of what was in the initial review, is off.

I am really starting to worry that if I had to follow Hogg's research blog rules then I would have nothing to write about.

The highlight of my day was submitting a bit to our astropython website and doing some brainstorming on ways to increase astropython reader involvement within the confines of the current blog structure. also: what is the best way to accept user contributed code, store it, tag it, share it?

python and peer review

devoted a questionable amount of time issuing posts to or editing invisible parts of astropython.org. yes, the time average postings to astropython are up due to two of us; still there are few commentors and no new contributors.

then i went back to kindergarten -- cutting figures out of (printed) papers to compare with other figures all as part of a being a journal referee. besides making me print something out, this effort typifies for me the actual barrier in the current publishing paradigm -- papers (sans data) as slim advertisements of research -- to meaningful refereeing: if the closest thing to data i have are cut out paper figures then how exactly am I suppose to provide the high quality / blue ribbon value that journals claim peer-review provides for arbitrating scientific progress?

To oppose "actual" I imply the "imaginary" problem of a referee having too much data to review.

Nevertheless, the review is undone, an editor is likely peeved, and my papers, hypothetically much more tightly written, conceptually woven than the one I'm engaged in review, languish.

all along the data-literature vector did our tangents tangle

today was begun with a catchup up meeting for the Seamless astronomy group that ballooned far beyond its scheduled hour.  the breadth of the discussion was intentional for the benefit of Alberto Pepe, a new postdoc arriving to work with Goodman on some or all Seamless facets.   we will see where he plans to dive in, although I'm hoping for a collaborator on my sharing/citation vector.  my discussion hijacks included more hypothesizing on scholarly attribution/credit sourced in readings like this.

i am less then certain that we achieved much beyond demonstrating at least 2 or 3 of the 9 proven tips which make [sure your meetings] fail.

then I decided to solicit a bit of curry on the VAO mailing lists regarding who is the intended audience for the forthcoming user forum.

ps: I'm not Australian.

Q/A

yet again, the meta stomped the data. I can't see when I'll get back to doing some actual research...

the productive part of the day was spent breaking the concept of a user oriented Q/A forum for astronomy into "task" elements for the powers that be to track.   the unproductive part of the day was having to change a password, which entails retraining my digits through repetition.

Working?

Lets try making this blog into a working research diary.  It is possible that it will now be better loved.

Sorry, Evernote but at the least I will have some hope that my text formatting will work.

Browsing RDF

A tim berners-lee tweet about Semantic Web browsers nudged me to revisit my little project comparing different in browser options.

I am pretty dismayed at the range. I also have to disagree with the master, as I find it hard to conclude the Tabulator UI is anything except an poor example.  Admittedly, I do not know the extent to which the Tabulator "framework," being a long standing project created by the original krew, is the source that powers these other browsers.

Here is a web album of some screen grabs of my browsing my default RDF test case using different in browser options.

RDF Browsing examples

#astropython

huh, #astropython wasn't used yet.

Tried Twitter -- Learn to spell!

While in search of a social means to talk about astronomy, I tried twitter.

Now I just need to learn to spell.

Pb me onward!

XMM-OM Serendipitous Ultra-violet Source Survey

I was unsuccessfully looking for a VO interface to the Chandra Source Archive in the various VO registries when I found this catalog with the VO Desktop software. I was curious: 6 band photometry; the three UV bands lie within the GALEX NUV. So a little simplisitic messing around to make the plot above is captured as a recipe for UV goodness with the SUSS:

1. Downloaded entire FITS table (750k sources) from within VO Desktop.
   
2. Loaded into TOPCAT. Created color (U-B, etc) columns.
3. Plot is the UV color (189nm - 268nm) as a function of B-V (nearly Johnson; from the XMM-OM). Nice pair of probably luminosity class sequences.
   
4. Plot symbols are rendered using the magnitude errors in the UV bands as auxilliary axis. The symbols become more transparent the larger their errors. Sources with magnitude errors > 0.25 mag are effectively rendered invisible.
   

Masking 2MASS

In TopCat one can easy apply a weight to the pixel values in a scatter plot. In this example, I have a database of 3.5 million 2MASS sources seen toward the Pipe Nebula and I have made sure I retained all the database columns provided by the project, including quality flags, observational details and information regarding cross-matches to optical source catalogs. In the figure above, I have made a simple equatorial plot of all 3.5 million sources; in TopCat one can change the point size and transparency, which I have done to make a surface density plot of the region. The general trend in increasing surface density from the NW corner to the SE corner is in the general direction of decreasing Galactic lattitude. A couple of other features are worth noting: a series of white patches of lower surface density stretching from about (RA,DEC) = 258.0,-27.5 to 265.0,-25.5 correspond to where a dark molecular cloud blots out background stars; other smaller white spots are where sources near very bright stars were excluded from the 2MASS catalog; small dark spots are high spatial concentrations of sources, which in this case are Globular Clusters (I can quickly spot 5 of them). I color coded each pixel by the date of its observation by the 2MASS telescopes (see vertical color bar). What does visualizing this tell us? There are a range of observation dates over a 2-3 year period, the data appear tiled in strips that are narrow in RA and very long in DEC, and there is some kind seam in the data at about DEC=-23.6.



Here I use the positional uncertainty quoted in the database to color the pixels. While the quoted positional accuracy (catalog wide) is of order 0.1" at size scales smaller than this there are some interesting (to me!) stepwise variations in the quoted accuracy.


Finally, there is an interesting column that lists the number of optical sources within 5 arcsec of the 2MASS source. Huh. I can only guess we are seeing somekind of footprint of variations in the sensitivity of the optical data, which appear block wise corresponding to the individual photographic plates. I can understand why the optical-infrared associations change near the edges of the dark cloud. But otherwise the grid like pattern is intriguing. To me, of course

What epoch are we in?

I am doing some workflow experiments using various virtual observatory tools. In one example I downloaded the USNO-B and 2MASS catalogs for a 1 degree region around the young star cluster in NGC 2264.

With TopCat I did a cross-match, and extracted a few interesting quantities and plots. The first plot is the total proper motion vector from USNO-B vs great circle distance between the USNO-B and 2MASS positions on the sky. The color weighting corresponds to the angular separation divided by the total proper motion vector or the net difference in epoch between the two datasets.

Now I just plot the net positional difference versus proper motion in right ascension...

... and declination. Err, both are quoted as epoch 2000, so what is going on here? Naively it seems the epoch of the two datasets are separated by 6-7 years. I know the 2MASS are 1999.9 but what about those USNO-B positions...