vox--2019-06-26--The problem with tech people who want to solve problems

According to a witty saying usually attributed to Albert Einstein, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”  And when engineers try to solve a problem, says MIT’s Joi Ito, they often veer over that line.  “Tech people tend to want to just solve the problem,” Ito said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. “But the problem with the problem is it’s not like previous problems, where you just solve it. You actually have to keep asking the question, ‘Is this even the right question?’ And this is why it’s much more difficult.”  Ito has presided over MIT’s famous “antidisciplinary” research laboratory, the Media Lab, for the last eight years. Originally founded in an era of techno-utopianism, the MIT Media Lab now finds itself responding to the ways technology and engineering culture are accelerating and creating problems like climate change, inequality, and obesity.  “You know that little girl in The Exorcist? That’s what the internet feels like to me,” Ito said. “You have this little girl and you think she’s going to become this wonderful kid and then she gets possessed and starts becoming this demon. And we have to exorcize her and we have to kind of bring her back.”  Although some in the tech world may believe we’re living in a simulation, Ito told Swisher, that’s only because they’re looking at the world as an equation to be optimized and not the messy place that it is.  “A lot of decisions that we make about how we feel about civil rights or gay marriage, whatever it is, those aren’t decisions that are optimizations,” he said. “Those are these cultural transformations that occur in society. And I think what’s missing right now in the conversation in AI is that that’s kind of the point of life, in my own personal opinion.”  You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn.  Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Joi.  Kara Swisher: Hi, I’m Kara Swisher, editor-at-large at Recode. You may know me as the author of an existential play narrated by the 20th letter of the alphabet, it’s called “Am I T?” But in my spare time I talk tech, and you’re listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network.  Today in the red chair is one of my favorite people I’ve known for a long time, Joi Ito. He’s the director of the MIT Media Lab, which is separate from MIT itself, which is a university. He’s also an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the editor of an upcoming essay collection called Resisting Reduction: Designing Our Complex Future With Machines.  Joichi Ito: Can I amend your introduction a little bit?  Because it is part of MIT.  Yes, it is. Yes, it is. But it operates in its own, the Media Lab...  It’s a peculiar part of MIT. And that’s what I meant to say. So why don’t you explain that? Explain what the MIT Media Lab is and how ... I want to talk about your getting to it, how you got to it, but explain what it is so people can get ...  So the Media Lab is a weird part of MIT because normally you have labs which do the research and you have academic programs that do the degrees and the tenure and things. They’re usually at tension, like church and state. And the media lab is both an academic program, the program of media, arts, and sciences as well as a lab. It was created over 30 years ago by the then-president of MIT Jerry Wiesner, Nicholas Negroponte, and a few founding faculty. Jerry Wiesner sort of finally called it the “Department of None of the Above.” Seymour Papert, who was an educator, was one of the founders, and he had this idea called constructionism, which is learning through doing. So we often say learning through construction rather than instruction.  The reason we were able to get the lab and the academic program together is instead of learning in classes we learn through doing projects. So the projects are funded by a consortium of over 80 companies.  And it’s a very tight link between businesses, and making things that can be made, essentially, that can be used and deployed.  That’s right. All of the students have to build the thing they’re talking about. And because it’s so interdisciplinary, we use the term antidisciplinary, the building of the thing is the way you sort of explain what it is you’re doing because it’s hard to explain it when you have three different disciplines trying to work together. And then also, MIT was traditionally more of a government-funded institution and the Media Lab kind of pioneered this consortium model of corporate funding. We’re corporate funded, but the other part about the Media Lab is we don’t do what they tell us to do. We’re sort of the ...  The company is the funder...  Yeah, we’re kind of a hedge against being wrong, so we often discover things that ... We do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.  And you’re there to do ... The reason they invest in you is because they want to be on the cutting edge of whatever’s next, right? With kind of crazy wacky ideas, versus stuff they don’t want to do for tomorrow. Maybe it’s 20 years out.  And sometimes we tell them things they don’t want to hear. In the early days of high definition in Japan, the Media Lab said, “You’re doing it all wrong. It’s going to be progressive digital. It’s not going to be this analog thing.” And they were very unhappy, but we turned out to be right.  These days, I think a lot of times it’s not even about technology. We have Hollywood companies that are members, but when they did the SOPA-PIPA bill, which was this anti-copyright bill, we formally went against it. These days I think more and more ... I mean, I think the Media Lab was very techno-utopian when it first started but I think there’s a huge chunk of the Media Lab that’s critical of technology these days. So we’re often criticizing the companies that support us.  All right, so explain your journey, because I think that’s how I would explain you. You’ve been very tech forward — and at the same time you’ve always been someone very early who’s been talking about the downsides and upsides. I remember that from when we met 20 years ago. I think almost 20 years ago. Because Louie was ... You met me after I had my baby, so ... I always time things based on him. But talk a little bit about your journey of where you started and how you got to this job.  I joined a little over eight years ago. And this is when they were doing a search. Initially Nicholas Negroponte, who was the founding director, and actually Megan, reached out to me, and they were doing a service ...  Megan Smith. This is my ex-wife.  Megan Smith, yes. Yeah. And I was on a bus and she said, “Hey, would you want to be director of the Media Lab?” I said, “Yes,” but then they looked at my resume which says that I didn’t even get an undergraduate degree and they said, “Well, this probably isn’t going to work.” So they went through a whole process for months, and I guess they went through lots of candidates, but they didn’t find one that worked. So they scraped the bottom of the barrel and picked up my resume and said, “Come in for some interviews.”  Let’s talk about your bottom-of-the-barrel resume, then. Talk about your journey of where you went to as an entrepreneur.  I went to college twice. I went to Tufts and I went to University of Chicago. I was interested in computer networking.  You grew up in ...  I was born in Japan, grew up in Michigan, went back to Japan for junior high, and then came to the United States for college. This is sort of early ’80s, so this is when computer networking was just starting, when the internet just started. I was interested in communities and in music and in networks. And there just weren’t programs like that.  And the other thing that was interesting is, this is the early days of the internet, so if you went online and chatted a sysadmin and you said you were some kid from Japan, they’d give you access to everything. And if you emailed professors they would reply. So I found that I could meet just about anybody I knew to meet on the internet and I could sort of kluge together my own education.  In fact there weren’t very many classes about online communities and things like that. So I dropped out of college and I just started doing startups, internet startups. I started doing a lot of internet governance, too. So I did things like ICANN and Creative Commons. So I was really interested in the sort of nonprofit structure of how the internet and communities came together.  And why? Why was that?  I’ve always been interested in parties and communities and just subcultures. When I dropped out of University of Chicago, I became a disc jockey in a nightclub. And the reason I dropped out was I realized that there was kind of a monoculture at the university, at least in the department that I was in. And then when I was going to the nightclubs, this is early ’80s when AIDS was kind of rampant, and at the nightclub, you had skinheads and drug dealers and drag queens, and everybody was coming together around this crisis. I realized that this working-class community was much more loving and much more sophisticated in the way that, the community dynamics were resilient than what I was learning in school.  I felt like I needed to understand how communities worked in order to understand things. And then I realized that a lot of the stuff that was going on in these communities ... And also just being a DJ. You change the music and you change the way the community behaves. So I was trying to map my experiences in the nightclub onto what was going to happen online. And then I saw things ... I was still pretty optimistic at the time, but I’ve always been kind of trying to figure out that intersection.  And when it got online, you thought that was even more people that you could reach out to and communicate with.  Yeah. And in fact, when I was in high school in Tokyo and I was 16, people didn’t know I was a kid. I remember when I was I think 15, I went to — this is before the internet, but this is the source and these online services — I went to a wedding and we had people who had met for the first time showing up. And the best man had met for the first time. So I thought in the early days of online communities that this was going to change the world and if we could just connect everybody else we’d have world peace or something like that.  Utopian, the techno utopian idea. I remember when I met you, you had all kinds of ideas. You were the first person who really did talk about this idea of online communities. You introduced me, I remember when I was in Japan, to a company called ImaHima, if you remember.  Which was “I am here,” right? That’s what it means?  No, “I am free.” Or, “I have free time now.”  I remember it blowing my mind. I remember thinking there were two. There was Six Apart and ImaHima and they were, one was I am here, which was it would locate people who you could hang out with. Right?  Yeah. And it was also for jobs. So it was like the first kind of gig economy site that was around.  Yeah. It had a lot of concepts of “I am here, I want to have a beer in this part of Tokyo, do you want to meet me?” And it wasn’t just friends. It was just anybody.  It was suspending belief that you can meet anybody just anywhere. There was a lot of trust to it. And then Six Apart was that you can be linked to anybody, which was really interesting. It was in Cambridge. Amazon ended up buying it, which was interesting. I think it was Amazon. Or one of them. Or was it Mark Pincus? Or Reid Hoffman?  Six Apart — well, Reid and I invested, and Six Apart was in San Francisco, but I can’t even remember the name of the company that bought it!  But anyway, these were two massive concepts of what was about to come. It precursored Facebook, to Tinder, to everything that was going to happen. But this was the idea of community and connection and using computers to do so. And linking people by their groups and stuff like that. So that was the concept.  In your early days, you were an investor, right? You went around ... You were kind of a gadfly in a lot of ways. You wrote a lot?  In the early days, I was actually an entrepreneur so I helped set up PSI Net in Japan, and I did InfoSeek in Japan.  This was an early internet service provider.  Yeah. And when blogging came out was around when I started pivoting a little bit towards investing, so I invested in Flickr, and later Twitter. I was mostly interested in social media. I unfortunately passed on YouTube and didn’t get into Facebook.  It was interesting because when blogging started, if you remember, a lot of it was that you had all these unemployed smart engineers who had a lot to say. And they just wrote their own software. Even the founders of Six Apart had been laid off and they said, “Well, we’re going to do our own thing.” Right after the bubble, so it’s like early 2000s, I had raised a fund and I started investing in Silicon Valley. So the gadfly part of it was that there really weren’t ...  I didn’t mean that in an insulting way. You were an idea person more than most investors.  But also, it wasn’t very crowded. All the carpetbaggers were gone because they thought the party was over. And there were very few investors. Ev was there, a bunch of us were hanging out. You were there. And we just started blogging. I remember when I ... It was the early days of Google, too. So bloggers got the best search results. I remember writing a silly blog post saying, “Is Diet Coke Bad For You?” And when you searched for “Diet Coke,” it was the first result. Or when I quit drinking for a while, I wrote a blog post that said, “I quit drinking,” and when you search for “quit drinking,” it was the first result. And what was funny was that in the comments, people started sharing all their things. The comment section of my blog became a support group for people who needed to quit drinking, really.  And then one of my friends created a website called We Quit Drinking, which became sort of an online AA, and it was this whole community of people who were supporting each other, sort of pseudonymously sharing journals. And then the FAQ, it says, “The origin of this site was this guy who quit drinking and wrote about it. We all found each other.” And so I, still to this day, although now with this podcast I’m out again, I now occasionally drink, but I don’t blog about it because I don’t want to sort of shatter this genesis story.  You’re like the founder of bitcoin. We found you again! We’re very disappointed.  But you were investing, you were doing all kinds of things, and again, were prominently talking about the concepts of what was happening. How did you look at the internet then? Because I want to sort of talk a little bit about how it is now, and then what you’re doing, obviously, at the Media Lab.  I was concerned about certain things. Like I was very concerned about privacy. You’ll be proud of me. I won the lifetime achievement award yesterday from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.  I’m getting to that age when I’m getting lifetime achievement awards. So I was concerned about things like privacy, but I was generally optimistic. I remember in 2000 and ... I’m trying to remember the year now, 2004 or so. A bunch of us who were just talking on the blogs thought about this idea. We called it emergent democracy. So I wrote this paper together with a bunch of other people called “Emergent Democracy.”  And this was sort of before Arab Spring. We had this idea that instead of just mainstream media and polling, we could have conversations online, and that we could talk directly to government and that there would be a future public sphere and that democracy was going to change. We thought it was going to change for the better.  When Arab Spring started, we said here it comes. I remember going to Tunisia like a week after the revolution, kind of as CEO of Creative Commons at the time, just sort of celebrating the social media’s rise. So those were the good times.  Right. Right. So you were the head of Creative Commons, which ... explain to people what that is.  Yeah, so Creative Commons was created by Lawrence Lessig and a bunch of other really smart people before I joined. It was this idea that with the internet, you had the ability to share content and build on the work of others, but because of a lot of the copyright restrictions that big media companies in Hollywood were putting on, even though people wanted to share, the technology was preventing it. So the idea of creative commons was to mark your work with the permissions you wanted to grant. So you can use this as much as you want as long as you provide attribution. And to build that into the code so that people could share freely.  Creative Commons is now more widely used on Flickr and all these places you can tag your work. So this is an organization that coordinated an international effort to create the licenses.  So you’re doing that, and then doing investing, entrepreneur. How did you decide you wanted to run MIT? This was ...  What were you doing previous just before it? You were writing ...  I had a place in Dubai. I was still investing. I was running around the world investing. I was going around the world literally twice.  You had a place in Dubai?  Yeah, yeah. An apartment in Dubai. So this is a good example. I went to Bahrain and I was so confused. I didn’t understand anything. I said, “I have to understand this part of the world.” So I got a place and just started hanging out. So for me, and this is similar to the Media Lab, my sister’s an academic and until recently when I said something was “academic” it was meant as a pejorative. And so when they asked if I was interested, my answer to just about anything like that is, “Sure, I’m interested.” So I went to visit. And when I visited I realized this is really different from what I thought of as academia. It was through that first meeting that I realized that this was possibly a really interesting place for me to hang out.  Mm-hmm. So you have been there. So you’ve been there eight years. We’re going to talk a little bit about what’s going on at the Media Lab in the next section. When you joined ... What is the difference between when you joined and now? How do you look at that?  I don’t want to take responsibility for the changes, really. I think that the Media Lab had wanted to do a lot of things and I have facilitated them. I think one of them is really that it was created in an explosion of techno-utopianism, and the students and a lot of the faculty, not all of them, have wanted the Media Lab to become more reflective and to think about what did social consequences and bringing social sciences in, things like that. So that’s one.  I’ve grown in ... so a lot of it was just blocking and tackling some of the issues around accounting and dealing with members. It’s doubled in size and things like that. But we also — and this wasn’t me. I mean, the previous director had started to go into life sciences, but I’d say a pretty healthy chunk, maybe 30 or more percent — or more than that, maybe 40 percent — of the projects have something to do with life sciences. We’ve launched a space initiative. We’ve created a digital currency initiative. We’ve created a bunch of different things like that.  And we, I think, probably integrated it more into MIT than it was before. I think it’s also personality because Nicholas came from MIT so he sort of made the identity of the Media Lab “not MIT.” Whereas I came from the outside and I saw all these really wonderful people and resources inside of MIT, so I’ve been sort of pushing the Media Lab back closer to MIT, I think.  Give us a little overview of what’s going on at the Media Lab because media has always been ... you know, I’m trying to go and I went there, again, 20 years ago, the stuff they were talking about has now been commercialized. Everyone’s a billionaire from running it and everything else.  But some of the ideas didn’t happen. A lot of them ... I remember haptic touch was one that everyone thought was going to be big. Last time I was there there was a lot of self-driving cars. There was an accordion fold-up car. Like, there were robots that self-care things. It’s, sort of, an explosion of just very creative ideas and what the professors and students want to do. Explain what’s going on there now. What do you think is the most exciting stuff?  Yeah, I think first, I just ... I’ll say that the key for the Media Lab is to always try to do the stuff that other people wouldn’t do.  And, if other people start doing it, we stop it.  Stop doing it. Right.  So, we were really into wearables in the ’80s and we’re [doing] less and less of it. And so, when we do a search, we’re always looking for, often for, things that we haven’t yet thought. The really interesting stuff that I think we’re going to do is stuff that we haven’t really thought of yet.  So, it’s ... I think I’ll point that out, I think, let’s see. So, in the life sciences, for instance, Kevin Esvelt, who’s one of the inventors of CRISPR gene drive which is the technology that allows an edited gene to be inherited by all of the offspring so that you can use it for doing things like fighting Zika or trying to create mice that are resistant to ticks, or things like that. But it also has a lot of risks because you’re, you know, editing whole populations of genes. What could go wrong?  And so, a lot of his efforts have been in trying to figure out how to do community consent, building safety systems and things like that. And that’s something, for instance, that couldn’t really happen in a traditional genetics lab because a lot of it is social. So, he’s, he joined after I joined. We’re doing, you know, conformable decoders and implantables. So instead of wearables, these are things like, that power themselves by the beating of the heart or ...  Explain what that would do?  These are devices that go inside your body.  Implant? What is it? Implantable decoders?  Well, the name of her group is, Canan’s group, is conformable decoders.  Yes, so these are things like a pacemaker powered by something that goes around your heart, or something ... your brain is actually really hard to implant things in. I mean, we’ve wanted to do it for a long time, but they don’t ... yeah, it’s tricky. And then, we have people who are working on how to power these things, how to get signal out of these things. And so a lot of the work is also around the interfaces between, sort of, the human body and electronics.  Is it to make people robots, or to add things to improve the human body via machines?  I think if you go the history of the Media Lab, it’s always been somewhere around the interface between humans and machines, and then it was a lot of the early social media and internet stuff came from the Media Lab. It was networks and society, and more recently it’s data and AI in society. But there’s always something about human beings and technology. And in the life sciences, it’s often around the interface between the inside of your body and machines, or Hugh Herr’s group, biomechatronics.  Yeah. And, he has, we have a thing called the Center for Extreme Bionics. We like to take words ...  As in, like, The Bionic Man?  It is, it is, it is. We ... words are really important.  Yes, they are. I like “bionics.”  And sometimes people throw away words and then we revive them. It’s really about robotic prostheses. How do you communicate with these prostheses? It’s interesting because there are cases where if you have a bad ankle and you’re constantly having surgery, actually amputating it and replacing with a robotic prosthesis will increase your quality of life. It’s just these ... and somewhat taboo. And so, some of these things are about poking at things that are taboo that might actually make you better.  But to answer your question, I think generally, everybody’s working on trying to make the human condition better. But I think “better” is a really tricky word. It’s better for who, at what time scale?  And, I think every faculty member has a slightly different view, but I think that we’re more and more asking the question, “Are we solving the right problem?” And I think one of the problems with just straight engineering is you sort of assume that the person who gave you the problem knows what the problem is and your job is just to solve it. And I think that ...  Which is what you get when you have an engineering point of view. “Let’s just solve it.”  Not any of the repercussions or what you did to get there or anything else.  Yeah, and there is kind of science and engineering about understanding things like system dynamics and things like that, but the framing of why you’re doing this and for who ... I mean, so questioning is usually the artist and scientist, and the designers and the engineers are the ones that usually try to just kind of make it, create the utility. At the Media Lab, what we’re trying to do is bring all of those together: arts, science, engineering, and design, on a good day.  Which is sort of like Apple, or there are some companies that did that.  Yeah. All right. Talk about some more stuff you’re doing there. So, biomechanics?  Biomechatronics. That must sound good to a big company. “We’re giving money to mechatronics.”  We have Ed Boyden, who is doing synthetic neurobiology. So, he’s trying to understand all the different ways to understand the brain and perturb the brain to tackle some ... because the brain’s really complicated.  And it’s connected to a bunch of things, and I think that we have a very simplistic view of how the brain works. Medicine is really about, kind of, trial and error, and not ... there isn’t as much understanding of underlying mechanisms as you think.  I mean, a lot of the pills that you’d take, when it says mechanism of action, it says “unknown.” And so a lot of what Ed is trying to do is understand the brain, because most of the diseases that we have these days is, now we live longer and longer, are diseases that involve the brain. And so that’s a whole group, and in that group, it’s not just neuroscience; we have AI, we’ve got robotics, we’ve got nano tech and it’s a very integrated group. We have 25 groups and each one is very, very different. I won’t go through the whole list.  That’s amazing. How do you decide which ones to pick?  So, it’s really the faculty search process. I remember there was a faculty search process that the founder, Nicholas, was running, and we called it the Professor of Other; the candidate had to be proficient in at least two orthogonal fields and be antidisciplinary. But we were looking for this faculty member and we had a faculty meeting and we had this candidate everybody loved, and in typical of Nicholas form, he said, “That’s not ‘other,’ that’s ‘another.’” He’s like, “No.”  I think what really is a key thing about the Media Lab which I love is that we really do embrace the other. We are always trying to bring in things that make us uncomfortable, things that we don’t understand sometimes. And I think that’s what’s very different from a traditional academic department, where you’re sort of extending but mostly going into areas that are either adjacent to or connected somehow to the thing that you’re doing.  So, what is that to you right now? What’s something that makes you uncomfortable that’s being developed at the lab?  Well, I think for me, the privacy — the surveillance capitalism conversation.  This is Shoshana Zuboff at Harvard.  As Shoshanna’s book ... yeah. I mean, the Media Lab, I’d say, plays a big role in her book. You know? She calls out a lot of the work at the Media Lab as the tools of the trade of surveillance capitalism. And I think that thinking about our role in the world that she describes and thinking about how ...  Explain what Shoshana’s saying. She’s saying that capitalism is built to track us and sell us and sell to us.  Yeah, yeah. I think she’s basically saying that the capitalist system that converged with the Silicon Valley big tech companies that realized that taking user information and behavior and turning that into money was the currency of the day. And all of the technology for collecting information, understanding the information, tracking that information, are the tools of the trade. And a lot of that was developed at the Media Lab.  I think it’s an interesting book. I do think there are some things that I ... for instance, when I was fighting the copyright battles, the constant thing was ... So there’s rivalrous goods and non-rivalrous goods. If somebody steals your car, you don’t have it anymore. But if somebody takes your picture from Flickr, you still have it. And so, one of, I think, the problems with her book is she treats data as if it were a rival good, like oil. It’s different. I mean, some of the key points she points out I think are okay, but some of the ...  You get to keep it even if someone takes it.  Yeah, and it’s not exactly surveillance. I mean, “surveillance” is something that is a very loaded word that has a very ...  Well, I think that’s why she used it.  Yeah. But, I guess my point is that the word surveillance is usually used by law enforcement, and it’s used to catch bad people, in the eyes of the surveillor. Whereas, I think the surveillance capitalists today, I would say, are not using the data to catch these people and put them in jail. They’re using it to do stuff to you that, that may ...  Sell you cornflakes, or whatever. Behavioral or otherwise.  Yeah. And again, I think it’s a really important conversation to have, and this is, sort of, a longer conversation, but I also think, like, Cambridge Analytica, their sales pitch sounded a lot scarier than ... When you actually look at the data, it’s not nearly as effective. And so, one of the other meta questions is so how effective are these ads in making you buy cornflakes. And, I think, again, it’s probably more effective than the average person thinks, but I don’t think it’s nearly as effective as some people sell it.  Well, I think people are especially warned by sci-fi that they see, and everything else that they’ve had over the course of their lives, it will be. You can iterate it out to the end and if it gets good, it gets really scary.  Yeah, and I think my hypothesis is that it gets scary in a different way because I think people are more complicated and I don’t think machines can solve the complexity of human beings as easily as the technology people might think. I think we’re going to have intervention pretty soon.  And again, books like that help the intervention happen, but I don’t think that ... I think that a lot of people who really believe in machines feel that the machines will get so smart that all of the messy complexity of human existence will no longer be a problem. I think that’s impossible. So I think that the worst-case scenario isn’t as scary, but I also think the best-case scenario isn’t as optimistic.  Optimistic. All right. Finishing up on MIT, what would you like to be putting in there now? You know, you’ve been there eight years. What’s an area you would really like to see work on?  So, since I got there, I got there as an administrator, but over time they made me a professor of practice and I started teaching. I’m taking students now. So, my own area of research is based on what I’ve observed being there. It’s really on understanding automated decision-making in criminal justice, or trying to understand the way that academic publishing, tenure, and funding creates silos and creates the way that science and knowledge get created, and to try and turn it on its head.  What I’m trying to do is take what we’ve learned at the Media Lab and to try to push it out, to fix some of the problems that I see. And also, bring things like social sciences and history and other things that didn’t feel applied enough to the Media Lab into the Media Lab, because I think that’s really, really important. So that’s what I’m teaching, that’s what I’m working on.  And, the idea of automated ... explain automated decision making for people that don’t know that.  Yeah. So, for example, right now we have these risk scores that we use in criminal justice for setting bail, sentencing, and probation.  If they’re going to do it again.  Yes. Basically what it does is it predicts how likely you are to recommit a crime. But, for example, they use rearrests as a proxy for your likelihood to recommit a crime, and it turns out that rearrests have a lot more to do with policing practice than the inherent criminality of the individual. What it does is it tends to reinforce social biases.  So, if you look at data ... For instance, there’s a famous study that shows that in Oakland, when you do a health study, everybody across Oakland does drugs. But when you look at the police data, only poor neighborhoods do drugs because all they’re looking at are drugs arrests, and they only arrest people where they go. But when you look at the police data and you put it into the algorithm, the algorithm thinks that only poor people do drugs.  Right? So what happens with these risk scores, it reinforces the bias, it also takes the agency ... so, it says, “No, no, no. We’re just trying to predict the criminality of the pool people, and we’ll just make policing more efficient and make jails more efficient.” Instead of saying, “Wait. Is there something we can change in the system?”  Automated decision making, the problem is the judge gets this risk score, and some of the risk scores ... like, the difference between like a five or six might be a few percentage points, but that’s, but they say, “Oh. It’s a six. We should sentence this person to a longer time in prison or not give them bail.” What happens is it’s taking ... And again, the argument is that humans are biased and these things are less biased, but the problem is that the data is biased.  It’s dirty data, and even if it’s perfectly accurate ...  So, society’s dirty. And so, what you’re doing is you’re reinforcing, sort of, backward-looking status quo. It doesn’t allow us to be progressive.  So, you’re trying to figure out how to stop that, which is really hard.  Well, it’s legally hard. There was a Reuters article about Amazon using its historical data to create an HR engine that just wanted to hire white men. Well, the engineers will say, “Oh. Well, we should just ... Okay. Got it. That’s bad. So, let’s just create a constant to give increased scores for women and minorities.” Well, it turns out Title VII, which is antidiscrimination, a part of the Civil Right Act, says that over the years now, because of all this lobbying, affirmative action is illegal. It’s illegal to put your thumb on the scale.  So today we can still push for diversity by having the HR person lean towards minorities, but the problem is, if your data says we want to hire white people, it’s illegal to put your thumb on the scale. So what we’re seeing now is the law doesn’t protect us, the code isn’t projecting us, and all of these issues are just suddenly becoming ... And, they’re just ... and the problem is you need to understand both the law and technology.  We’re here with Joi Ito, he’s the director of the MIT Media Lab. He’s someone I’ve known a long time and is always talking about interesting things, as usual. But this book, Resisting Reduction: Designing Our Complex Future With Machines, you were just talking about this idea of the ability to intersect humans with tech, with law, with other things. Talk about this book. What was your thinking of wanting to do these essays?  What was happening is, as I was starting to get involved in this conversation about the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence ... I teach a course that’s cross listed between MIT and the Harvard Law School called “The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence.” And what I realized was that a lot of the engineers who work in AI felt that you could reduce the whole world to a function, and that life, human life, was just optimizing and that the world could be simulated in a computer. And that if we could just ... and that world ... life was just a game that you could win.  Right. There are a lot of sites like this. There were tons of them.  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, but the ... they feel, though, a lot of them feel that the world can just be reduced to a very simple formula, so therefore then if you could create an AI that was smart enough, it would figure out how to win at life, and that we would either lose or this would save the world. And to me ...  This is like that Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. Pre-crime.  Exactly, yup. The thing is that ... and again, this is almost religious because I think that there are people who have the kind of thinking where they look at their life as a game. Where they say, “Okay. I’m optimizing for money, and this, and how many minutes do I have to do this.” So, for them ... I tweeted out the other day, “Those people who think that we live in a computer simulation are the kinds of people who are most likely to be simulations.”  Wait, explain the computer simulation ... people like Elon, I think Tony Hsieh, lots of people think we live ... this is a game.  Well, yeah. A lot of people approach life like an engineering problem. For them, I could imagine that they could see their whole life being in a computer. But there are a lot of people, and I think they sort of sort out if you go into the humanities or the east coast, there are a lot of people who don’t think like a computer. They live life through experience and only things that happen actually matter.  I think what’s interesting is that a lot of decisions that we make about how we feel about civil rights or gay marriage, whatever it is, those aren’t decisions that are optimizations. Those are these cultural transformations that occur in society. And I think what’s missing right now in the conversation in AI is that, first of all, I think that that’s kind of the point of life, in my own personal opinion. But also, you take things like the notion of fairness. There’s a conference called FATML: Fairness, Accountability, Transparency [in Machine Learning]. I think it’s just kind of FAT* now.  But a lot of the papers that you see by the engineers say, “We’ll just define fairness as accuracy,” or something like that. And this is what I call reductionist, because fairness is really complex, and it’s always contextual. So, the risk ... and so reduction is important. Reduction is Newton’s laws. Reduction is what allows the engineering that created the Industrial Revolution and brought us all this stuff.  But my concern is the stuff that we have, which is efficiency, productivity ... but that’s the stuff that makes us obese. That’s the stuff that creates climate change. That’s the stuff that ... The efficiency that creates income inequality sometimes. And this is an old thing. I’m not the first person to say this, but the problems that we have today are caused by the tools that we created, but I think there’s a lot of people who believe that more efficiency and more productivity will fix everything.  And so this is sort of an almost religious kind of difference. And I think right now there’s a lot of power in the hands of the reductionists. And I would put economists and sort of neoclassic economics sort of in this, which is just reducing everything to just measuring GDP.  So, you’re saying they think they have it figured out.  As they have now found. Your point is being proven right now. Look at YouTube shifting back and forth on these things. They can’t figure any of it out, because it’s messy. And in fact, I was talking to a pretty big tech person and they were very frustrated with what was going on with all the platforms and I said, “Oh, life is messy.” They’re not ones and zeroes, I guess.  That’s right. That’s a very Kara Swisher way of saying what I was trying to say, which is life is messy. And that if you ignore that, it’s going to get worse. And the reason that it’s a collection of essays, which I was excited, so I wrote this little manifesto-like thing ...  Called “Resisting Reduction.” And then it triggered a whole bunch of responses from Silicon Valley and all over the place. So then we decided to collect these essays and put them together into a collection. So, I have a group of indigenous people. I have somebody who does the philosophy of science. It’s a really interesting response to ...  So take the side of the reductionists. What is good about that? Because it’s been pushed at us a lot that we’ll get you cars that work, we’ll get you this that works, we’ll get you full communications. None of it has turned out the way they predicted.  And again, for me ...  Yeah. And I am and sometimes am still, and was, one of them. And I felt like if we connected everybody together ...  That’s how I feel. I was one of them.  ... we would have world peace. It just turned out to be more complicated.  And you know, it’s kind of an old movie now, but you know The Exorcist?  You know that little girl in The Exorcist? That’s what the internet feels like to me. I had this little girl and now ...  Explain that. Take that one out. Draw that one out.  Because you have this little girl and you think she’s going to become this wonderful kid and then she gets possessed and starts becoming this demon.  And we have to exorcize her and we have to kind of bring her back. I’m actually long-term optimistic.  Who gets to do that? You know what happened to the priest in that one.  I know. He had to jump out the window, right?  Several. Several priests went down.  I actually feel kind of responsible for having been involved in some of this. I don’t feel innocent. And I feel that having been part of all of this, I have to do something about it. So, I’m not like a third-party observer in this. I think, though, that ... I do think that the changes that we make have to be technically well-informed, because I think that uninformed laws, whether they’re gun control laws or privacy laws ...  Which I wrote about this week. That’s what I wrote about in the Times this week. That’s exactly what I was saying.  You’re going to whiffle on it.  It’s interesting, because everybody’s like, “Oh, you’re being pro tech.” I’m like, “No, I’m saying we’ve got to be informed or else we’re screwed even worse than we are now with no laws,” that kind of thing.  And they have to be proactively forward versus looking backwards, because it’s hard to not understand where you need to go if don’t understand where you’re going.  That’s right. I think GDPR is well-intentioned. It’s better than nothing. But it completely doesn’t hit the target yet. I think that the tech people have to get involved. I do think this public interest technologist idea, kind of like we had public interest lawyers, getting tech people more involved in coming up with how we move forward.  The problem is also, tech people tend to want to just solve the problem. But the problem with the problem is it’s not like previous problems, where you just solve it. You actually have to keep asking the question, “Is this even the right question?” And this is why it’s much more difficult. I think it’s actually, to be honest, it’s a value shift. I think it’s about the younger generation, your kids, being disgusted with us, being so disgusted that they don’t want to work for that company.  They don’t want to get on a private plane. They don’t want more stuff. And I think the problem is we’ve just started measuring our success with how much stuff we have. “How could he be smart? He’s not rich.” That kind of notion. And I think that the next generation’s at least in some part ...  It’s an interesting concept, because this idea, reduction is actually an excellent word when I think about it because they do, they always have answers. And I’m always wary of people who always have answers to things. And one of the things that has happened is, because they reinforce each other in the society they’re in, they’re in violent agreement with each other, you know what I mean? And then they feel victimized if you start to go at them.  And what’s interesting to me is there’s a lot of people like you, like me, Roger McNamee, who are in, who are like, “Wait a minute.” They know the inside and are saying, “You guys have to stop, because you don’t understand what you’re doing.” And to the outsider saying, we look like attackers when we’re not attackers.  Someone the other day was like, “Why do you hate Facebook so much?” I said, “I don’t hate it. I love it. That’s the problem.” I don’t love Facebook particularly, but you know what I mean, the concept. And so, what’s really interesting is how do you educate these people who reduce into a new way, how do you think about that?  First of all, it’s really hard ...  You’re saying resisting it, so resisting it and then what?  Because reduction is important to get anything done. You have to reduce a recipe to a recipe to give it to somebody, so reduction is important. But it’s resisting over-reduction. It’s the old “make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.” But it’s hard. I was just yesterday arguing with one of my friends in Silicon Valley about the role of advertising. In that community, since it’s so powerful, since it’s so reinforced by success, it’s almost impossible to have that conversation.  Explain that argument to me. Explain what happened. You were arguing. They said, the advertising business by its nature is going to create these mutated situations.  Yeah. And also this idea that things like fairness just can’t be reduced to a formula, and moved on. And that it’s messy. And the problem is that they’ve just been told over and over again that, “Oh, you’ll never be able to do this,” and then you can. So, when you go to Marc Andreessen’s office, it’s “Software will eat the world.” Because everybody kept saying, “Oh, you can’t do that in software. Only humans can do that.” And then they do it. So the experience of being in Silicon Valley over the last few decades is everybody kept saying you couldn’t do it and then they can do it. There’s really this interesting thing of, “There they go again, just telling us we can’t do it, but we can.”  Although being dragged in front of Congress and stuff like that, that wakes you up a little bit. But it’s difficult. I think the solution is not going to be to go into Silicon Valley and convince them through argument. I think it really is about coming up with a different narrative outside.  I do think, though, that there is definitely a movement. You see the “tech won’t build it” movement, which is the employees saying, “We don’t want our companies doing this.” You see consumers starting to say, “I like Lyft because of this.” So, I think values will change, even in Silicon Valley. And it’s interesting, when you look at the companies, the senior people are more oblivious of this than the younger people or the people who are more in the system. And so I think it’s going to change kind of bottom-up and I think it’s going to change from things like the Parkland kids who wake up and tell people what they think.  It is interesting. Defensiveness is fascinating. The defensiveness is just one of my ... I can’t believe the richest and most powerful people in the world are victims. I just won’t listen to them talk about themselves like that. But they tend to do that as a group. Not everybody. A lot of people, it’s interesting, we’re having a panel at Code this year called “Inside Out,” the people who have left, all of a sudden are becoming quite critical in a way because now they’re like, “Wait a minute.”  It’s sort of a born-again kind of thing. It’s more like, “Oh, I see the damage. I understand the damage.” And it’s a really interesting question whether it sticks or we do get these draconian rules from Congress or whoever, or abroad, the GDPR, or something happens somewhere where we get too much of a correction to it all, so that you don’t get the innovation that they desire.  Yeah. And I guess the one thing I will say, though, is that there are a bunch of people who are making a business out of fear-mongering. And I do think that, for example, I recently wrote in Wired, there are great places online for kids to learn. And overreacting to the scary stories about kids having trouble online I think could destroy these public spaces that helped me learn when I was a kid. We don’t shut down churches and schools just because kids have problems, and they probably have more problems in churches than they do online.  I don’t think we should be shutting these things down. I don’t think that we should be shutting even Facebook down. I think what we need to do is go in and make them better, just like we try to get institutions to be better. And I do worry that there’s kind of a whole generation of people who flipped out to the outside and now kind of go around sort of making money scaring people, which I think is also-  Should I be nicer, Joi? I don’t think so. I think I’m being appropriately ...  I think you should poke, but the problem is that you overshoot. One of the worst laws that was ever created, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was created the year after WarGames, it makes it a felony to breach a terms of service. When Julia Angwin shows that you can buy ads for “Jew hater” on Facebook, she’s probably a felon for doing that. And that’s stupid. And that’s because lawmakers overreacted to some dumb movie that scared the pants off of them. So that’s what I’m worried about.  Right. I want to finish up, last thing. When you say “our complex future with machines,” right now, what is our future with machines?  We already have a complex relationship with machines.  Yeah. And Norbert Wiener, who was an MIT mathematician in 1950, wrote a book called Human Use of Human Beings. And he said that organizations are machines of flesh and blood. We already have machines, they’re called corporations. And our future is just supercharging what we already have. We can’t even control companies. To me, it’s like putting jetpacks and blindfolds on and just supercharging in whatever direction we’re headed.  So what I think we need to do is we need to get our house in order before we put these jetpacks on. And it reminds me, I was just talking to my historian friends, and ’67 was 58 race riots across America. Fifty years ago, we had Vietnam protests on MIT campus. There’s a lot of similarities. And I think one of the concerns that I have is that we have a horrible relationship with ourselves right now and then adding more power to it isn’t going to help.  So, the complex ... It really is a complex system. And regulating complex systems — our bodies are complex systems, the earth is a complex system where we’re somehow able to keep our body temperature relatively stable. And it’s not because there’s somebody in charge. It’s because we have a resilient, complex, adaptive system. And I think that’s like having a very good culture and very good norms.  I think we need to create a society that is self-regulating and isn’t so centralized, and I think that, again, I think ... I keep going back to culture. This goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation. I think it’s a lot like how to build strong, resilient communities and it’s less like trying to engineer a program.  What do you think is key to that?  I think what we’ve done is we have subordinated the humanities. If you go to, especially the places like MIT, you’ve got ... the engineers have all the power, all the money, and everything looks like an engineering problem. And we’ve made liberal arts sort of this sideshow. I think that we need the historians, the social scientists, the anthropologists, the qualitative people involved in setting ... asking the questions. Why are we here? What are we doing?  Mark Cuban just did an interview like this, I was sort of shocked by it.  And that’s, I think, the key. And it’s not just about ... And the problem is, again, vocational education is great, but again, economists are part of that thing, which is ... the reason you’re here isn’t to work. The reason you’re here is to live and ask questions and enjoy. So I think universities shouldn’t just be to get jobs. That should be something that’s important. But that’s like just cranking out widgets for the factory.  That’s a famous saying, do you live to work or work to live?  There you go.  Those are the things that I think we really need to do. I think there’s a new version of the hippie movement that’s going to happen where people are going to say, “You know what? I don’t want to play that game anymore. I’m playing a different game. And the game that I’m playing and the thing that I’m solving for is something really different than what you want me to solve for.” And I think it’s going to be a kind of values rebellion. I think it’s already started.  Sounds fantastic. I can’t wait. I’m hoping to be part of it.  Last question, what is the most ... You always have the most interesting technology idea. What do you think is the craziest thing that you would like to see?  What are you like, “This would be so cool”? Or something you’ve seen or you’re doing at Media Lab that’s really ...  I don’t think of it as a specific technology, but one of the things that we’re working on or we see is a democratization of space. We’re seeing the cost of shooting up a satellite becoming the cost of a personal computer, thousands of dollars. Which has good things and bad things, but there are a lot of parallels.  Space trash. Billboards in space. But it’s really similar to the early days of the internet, where we had this government system that became commercialized and we had good things and bad things. So, what I want to see is I want to get space right in the way we got the internet wrong. Whether it’s institution ...  Space right in the way ... That’s nice. That would be great.  Because I think we might screw it up like we screwed up the internet.  I’m sure we will. I’m sure we will, Joi. Anyway, this is great. Thank you for coming on the show.  Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.


dailyheraldchicago--2019-12-07--How a St. Charles teacher is instilling love for math in young students

Lynn Pittner's favorite technique for teaching math begins with two simple questions: "What do we notice? What do we wonder?"  What do we notice about the number of animals at the zoo, or the amount of candy dispensed from a machine when we feed it a quarter? What do we wonder about the cost or the ingredients or the process of making a chocolate sucker?  The students shout out their observations and make some estimates. And then they set about finding their own solutions to the problem at hand, using whichever strategies work best for them: place values, the arrow way, an open number line, the chip model.  "There's a lot of individuality because all children are on a continuum," said Pittner, who is in her sixth year as a math specialist at Davis Primary School in St. Charles.  "They learn a lot, they have fun, and they're applying what they've learned in class to a real-life situation."  The activities, called math tasks, have been crucial in helping her kindergartners through second-graders become "flexible thinkers" and develop a conceptual understanding of math early on, she said.  But parents, colleagues and administrators say Pittner's teaching methods -- not to mention her love and enthusiasm for the subject -- ignite a passion in them, too.  That's a key reason why Pittner is leaving "enormous shoes to fill" when she retires at the end of this academic year, first-grade teacher Rachel McCulloch said.  "She brings new life and has just revitalized math in this whole building as something that we want to teach," she said. "The kids have changed the way they think about math, too. They're not scared of it like they used to be. She really did make an enormous shift."  Throughout Pittner's robust career, whatever grade level she's teaching at the time becomes her new favorite.  First, it was sixth grade in downstate Rantoul before she took some time off to raise her children. Then, when she became an educator for the academically talented math program in St. Charles Unit District 303, she became enthralled by the intelligence and energy of her intermediate-level students.  After getting her master's degree in math education, Pittner's next move was teaching eighth grade -- a fascinating time in students' lives, she said, because "they're children but want to be adults. And they have a great sense of humor."  Her husband's job eventually moved them out to California, where she continued teaching middle school math. But after about six years, she said, she felt ready to return home to Illinois.  Amid those discussions, a close friend asked, "If you had your dream, what would you do next in your career?"  Pittner wanted to go back to the beginning.  In the same way children learn to read, she wanted to experience how they begin to understand numbers. She wanted to become a math coach of sorts for early elementary students, to help them develop number sense.  Not that a job like that existed, she and her friend said, laughing. Not for children that young.  Six months later, by sheer coincidence, Pittner learned of a new position District 303 would be trying out in three schools: a math specialist. She applied and got the job at Davis, which offers only kindergarten through second grade.  Guess which age group she fell in love with next?  "I absolutely love these little ones that come to school ready and willing to learn," she said. "Their enthusiasm for learning is unbelievable."  Being a primary school, Davis staff members have always focused heavily on literacy, a subject with which they're very comfortable, Principal Denise Liechty said. Then, about five years ago, Pittner came into the picture with a contagious zeal for math and a depth of knowledge that allowed her to build foundational skills for both students and educators.  "Now my teachers are equally excited about math," Liechty said.  When she started her new position, Pittner sensed that teachers in the building were "hungry for a change." Eager to collaborate, they embraced every new method she introduced, she said, and they even took summer classes with her to strengthen their techniques.  Eventually, Pittner's role morphed into an ever-changing mix of classroom visits and small group sessions and faculty meetings, all while acting as a resource to the teachers. The math specialist positions are now in all schools, she added.  "We were just trying to make a shift in the pedagogy of teachers in the classrooms," Pittner said. "I think we were all pleasantly surprised that when children are given a big math problem that requires them to apply their learning, they're extremely motivated."  Getting the parents on board can make all the difference.  The methods taught at Davis offer an entirely new way of learning math, compared to the standard algorithm taught to most adults, she said. "We all learned math without context."  To help parents better understand the curriculum, Pittner provides demonstrations at parent-teacher conferences, sends home activities for students during breaks, and works with other specialists in the district to host math nights.  After one adult math lesson with Pittner, parent Sarah Mowat said, she and her husband walked away feeling like experts.  "She's magical ... and very good at boosting confidence," said Mowat, whose two daughters attend Davis. "I don't think I realized until I was the parent of a kindergartner what a difference a teacher can make in their lives."  Years ago, while teaching academically talented math at Wild Rose Elementary, Pittner walked into the classroom one day holding a chocolate sucker.  "I want to make these and sell them," she told her students, initiating a round of questioning similar to "What do we notice? What do we wonder?"  After figuring out how many suckers they could make with a half-pound of chocolate -- and at what cost -- the kids asked if they could turn their lesson into a real business. They gathered at Pittner's house on a Saturday afternoon and made 500 suckers, which they sold to their classmates after settling on a price.  That real-life math problem was recounted years later as a former student's "fondest memory" of the advanced math program. A Benet Academy student at the time with plans to study aerospace engineering at Purdue University, he sent a letter thanking Pittner for the "very positive impact" she had on his life.  "You gave me my love for math and science that has led me to pursue a career that involves the two," the student's letter says. "You created and fostered my passion for numbers that continues to grow today."  That level of enthusiasm and rigor remains ingrained in Pittner's teaching style, colleagues say, as does her compassion and ability to build relationships.  Almost every morning at 7 a.m., Pittner pops into the principal's office and says, "Got a minute?" before diving into the details of a new math concept she wants to try, or celebrating a great piece of student work, or applauding a teacher's strategy.  "She's one that can see the math in anything and will find the oddest of tools and circumstances to utilize for getting kids engaged in math," Liechty said. "She always sees what they can do, and then catapults her instruction so they are taking it to the next level."  Pittner is an advocate for students, a cheerleader for teachers and a "ray of sunshine in our building," kindergarten teacher Megan Oster says. She'll work patiently and productively with kids and staff members alike for as long as it takes to solve a problem.  And, most importantly, she makes members of the Davis community believe in their abilities.  "In our building, we don't just do math," Pittner says. "We're mathematicians."  Education: Bachelor's degree in education from Illinois State University; master's degree in math education from National-Louis University  Past teaching jobs: Seventh-grade math teacher at Central Middle School, Riverside, California; eighth-grade math teacher at Haines Middle School, St. Charles; academically talented math coordinator for District 303; academically talented math teacher for District 303; sixth-grade teacher at Maplewood School, Rantoul  Honors: 2011-12 Central Middle School Teacher of the Year in Riverside, California; 2007 Kane County Middle School Teacher of the Year  Other experience: Co-authored "Understanding Middle School Math" with Arthur Hyde, Susan Friedlaner and Cheryl Heck; previously provided professional development for Heinemann Publishing  When it comes to teaching math, Lynn Pittner has plenty of methods for helping young children develop a conceptual understanding of the subject. As a math specialist at Davis Primary School in St. Charles for more than five years, she has spread her passion and enthusiasm for math throughout the building, colleagues say.  But there's far more to being a great teacher than having a wealth of knowledge. Here are some words of advice Pittner offers to other teachers: • Build relationships with your students. Love each and every one. • Make sure your students know you care. • Have high expectations for your students. ALL students will succeed. • Never do for students what they can do for themselves. Support them, but productive struggle is important for learning. • Be passionate about learning. Be a lifelong learner.


hitandrun--2019-04-11--Teaching 5- and 6-Year-Olds Serious Basic Math

For several years, my son went to the UCLA Math Circle run by Dr. Olga Radko and Dr. Oleg Gleizer (both mathematics PhDs), whom I’ve gotten to know well. It’s a superb program, which teaches children ages 5 to 17 serious mathematical concepts and mathematical problem-solving, not just drills or algorithms.  Gleizer and Radko now have a second, two-volume, edition of a book based on their work with the math circle, “Breaking Numbers into Parts,” aimed at parents and teachers who want to teach 5- and 6-year-olds (here’s volume 2). The book isn’t written to be read by children, who might not even be able to read well (or to read at all) at that age. But adults can use it very effectively to guide children through concepts such as commutativity, the number line, the properties of odd and even numbers, mathematical operations as a generalizable concept, reflections and symmetries, and more—and, more importantly, to teach children about proofs and about the use of math and logic to solve problems.  If you have young children whom you want to teach about math, definitely get these books.


newsweek--2019-02-06--Honeybees Can Do Basic Math Study Finds

Honeybees Can Do Basic Math, Study Finds

Honeybees can do basic math, according to a study published in the journal Science. An international team, led by researchers from RMIT University in Australia, taught bees to associate certain colors with the concepts of addition and subtraction.  The findings are the latest demonstration of the mathematical ability of bees. The same team of researchers had previously found that honeybees were able to comprehend the mathematical concept of zero, placing them in an elite group of animals, including humans, dolphins, primates and some birds.known, to be capable of the feat,  For their study, the researchers created an experiment in which 14 bees were encouraged to fly into a Y-shaped maze where one route provided a reward of sugar water at the end, while the other contained only a bitter tasting quinine solution. When the bees worked out that it was possible to find food inside the maze, they visited it repeatedly.  At the maze's entrance, the researchers placed a sample visual stimulus consisting of between one and five shapes, which were either yellow (to represent subtraction) or blue (to represent addition).  After the bees saw the sample stimulus, they then flew into a “decision chamber” where two more visual stimuli—much like the sample—were placed at the entrances of the two possible routes. In order to choose the route with the food at the end of it, the bees had to select the “correct” answer.  “If the elements were blue, the bees would need to choose the stimulus option in the decision chamber, which was one element greater than the sample; however, if the elements were yellow, the bees would need to choose the stimulus which contained one less element than the sample number,” the authors wrote in the study.  “The color of the elements, and thus the arithmetic problem to be solved, was randomly assigned per bee for each trial,” in order to ensure that the bees didn’t always just choose one side of the maze.  Initially, the bees made random choices, but over the course of 100 trials they learned that blue meant +1, while yellow meant -1.  The researchers found that overall, they chose the correct option in the decision chamber 60 to 75 percent of the time, leading the team to the conclusion that more animals than previously believed might be capable of numerical cognition.  "These days, we learn as children that a plus symbol means you need to add two or more quantities, while a minus symbol means you subtract," Scarlett Howard, an author of the study from RMIT, said in a statement.  "Our findings show that the complex understanding of math symbols as a language is something that many brains can probably achieve, and helps explain how many human cultures independently developed numeracy skills."  Scientists have long debated whether animals have or are capable of learning complex number skills and a distinction is often made between species that are able to discriminate between quantities (quantical discrimination) and those that can employ numerical cognition (for example, solving addition and subtraction problems).  “While many species are able to use quantical cognition to forage, make decisions and solve problems, it is debated whether any nonhuman or nonprimate animals could reach the level of numerical cognition,” the authors wrote in the study. “Such a capacity would require complex management of quantities in both working memory and longer-term rule-based memory.”  Previous research indicated that vervet monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans, rhesus monkeys, African gray parrots, pigeons and even spiders could understand mathematical operations, such as addition or subtraction. Now bees can join this club as well.  The researchers say that their findings could have implications for the development of artificial intelligence.  "If math doesn't require a massive brain, there might also be new ways for us to incorporate interactions of both long-term rules and working memory into designs to improve rapid AI learning of new problems,” Howard said.


slate--2019-12-05--Ask a Teacher: My Daughter’s Math Class Is Mostly Special Ed Students. Is That Bad?

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. In addition to our traditional advice, every Thursday we feature an assortment of teachers from across the country answering your education questions. Have a question for our teachers? Email askateacher@slate.com or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.  I recently attended my fourth grade daughter’s fall conference with her teacher. The year is going great, and the conference was very positive. My daughter loves math and seems to be doing quite well this year. She tested in the 94th percentile in math on her state standardized tests last year, which really boosted her confidence.  For fourth grade they’ve broken the kids out into different math groups, and some kids go to other classrooms for math. All of the groups learn the same material. My daughter does not go to another class for math, and stays with her regular teacher. Her teacher noted that she has really gotten to have a lot of 1-on-1 time with the kids in her math group this year because there are only 17 kids in her group, and she has another teacher in the room to help her. This all sounds great, right?  It turns out the second teacher is one of our learning support services paraprofessionals, and she is in the room because they placed all of the grade’s IEP students in this math group, along with a handful of non-IEP students.  My question is whether this is a common practice? Should I be concerned that my kid who loves math and is trying to excel in that area is in a class with mostly kids who may be struggling and require extra support? Or should I be happy that she’s in a smaller group and perhaps getting more instruction? For what it’s worth, the other math classes have 30 students, whereas my daughter’s has far fewer.  What you’re describing sounds like an inclusion classroom, which is common practice. In fact, I teach inclusion classes!  The success of an inclusion class will depend on a number of factors, such as the preparation and support the teachers receive as well as the ratio of special ed to general ed students. One thing that stood out to me is that you described the class as having a majority of students with disabilities, which is not an ideal inclusion arrangement. At the same time, I’m wondering if your accounting is exact—really, you should not know which students have an IEP and which do not, because that information is confidential in order to protect students’ privacy.  If a majority of the students in the class receive special education services, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are all struggling math students. In fact, some of these students may, like your daughter, excel at math. They may simply need extra time to complete assignments or someone to read word problems aloud, for example. The teacher will not be able to give you information about the other students in the class due to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.  Therefore, you will have to consider how your own daughter is doing. Since she likes her math class and is performing well, I am inclined not to worry. The fact that there are two teachers for 17 students is a definite plus. In addition, inclusion classrooms can have benefits for students with and without disabilities. She may learn more than just math this year.  Enjoy Slate’s Holiday Advice From the Experts series from our beloved advice columnists. Keep your sanity intact this holiday season with Jamilah Lemieux’s self-care tips. Nicole Cliffe presents classic gifts for children of all ages. Teacher Carrie Bauer recommends educational gifts your kids will actually enjoy.  I recently read a response in this column to a parent of a seventh grade student whose teacher regularly gives worksheets with spelling errors on them. Ms. Bauer’s advice was to encourage the student to have patience/let this issue slide. I felt that this advice made sense. Clearly the student already has good spelling skills or they wouldn’t have recognized the errors, and I agree that spelling should not be used as a shaming tool.  This brings me to my dilemma. My daughter is in third grade and was recently diagnosed with dyslexia. As you can imagine, spelling is a significant challenge for her. She requires direct spelling instruction and correct modeling. However, she regularly comes home with things she has copied from the board into her agenda that are spelled incorrectly. When I reviewed the personal dictionary her teacher was creating for her to help her when writing in class, every single word her teacher had added was spelled incorrectly. Even worse, when I work with my daughter at home, or make corrections to spellings her teacher has modeled for her, she gets upset and tells me that since this is how her teacher does it, this is how it should be done. How do I address this? I don’t want to shame the teacher, but one of her responsibilities is teaching my child how to spell, and she the teacher herself obviously struggles in this area.  As we’ve discussed in this column before, a good rule of thumb for parents is, “Always communicate with the teacher first.” But there are exceptions to every rule, and this might be one of them. It’s really hard to tell a teacher tactfully that she’s a bad speller.  “Whatever you choose to do, don’t worry too much. Some of the smartest people I know are atrocious spellers.”  I see three possible ways to move forward: You could schedule a conference with the teacher, share every single thing you think she does right, and then slip in that, because of your daughter’s disability, you’re worried about misspellings on the resources that she brings home. You don’t need to let on that it’s her spelling that’s problematic—just that the “dictionary” is. (Why is a teacher creating a personal dictionary for a third grader anyway? That’s not to say it’s not a good resource. But why is the teacher rather than the third grader writing the words? Maybe you could suggest that either your daughter prints the words “for extra practice” or that she be given a computer-generated copy of them. Printed materials are usually easier to read for people with dyslexia anyway.)  The second option is for you to call the principal and explain the situation exactly as you did: that normally you wouldn’t get involved, but this is an area where your daughter really needs top-notch modeling. Share that you don’t know how to approach the teacher about it without hurting her feelings, and ask if the principal could bring the issue to the teacher’s attention.  Your last option is to deal with the issue at home. Since your daughter doesn’t want to listen to you, defer to artificial intelligence. Require your daughter to type the words into a doc and correct any word with a red squiggly line or look the words up in an online dictionary (good habits to get into for folks who will likely have lifelong struggles with spelling).  Whatever you choose to do, don’t worry too much. Some of the smartest people I know are atrocious spellers. They read fine; they have great critical thinking skills. They just know to run spell check regularly.  My 5-year-old son is what some would call an “independent learner.” He hates for people to see him fail. This was fine when he was learning to ride a bike, and he took it to the other side of the park and taught himself. Or when he went to the backyard and taught himself to pump his legs on the swings. The problem is that now that he’s in kindergarten, there are a lot of things he just won’t be able to teach himself. I have been trying to help him learn to read his sight words and sound out simple words, but he just won’t try. The same goes for writing letters properly. He says he does them “his way,” and he won’t practice the correct way. I’ve bought him workbooks that use arrows to show the correct way to write letters so he can learn on his own, but he is disinterested. We have set up homework charts with the promise of “prizes,” but it has very little effect. How do I help him?  I appreciate your positive framing there. It’s important for your son to learn to be self-motivated and an independent learner. In some ways, it’s healthy to have a fear of failure. I admire his tenacity and his ability to solve problems on his own. After all, he must be troubleshooting while he’s teaching himself to bike ride alone on the other side of the park.  Now that I’ve given your kid some praise, I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a bit. Your son’s fear of others noticing any failure has turned him into the sort of person who would rather do things wrong than receive correction, and it sounds like he refuses any attempt to teach him. He’s not currently able to accept the fact that someone else might know better than him. Yes, he’s 5, and that’s not that egregious for a 5-year-old’s behavior. We usually call it stubbornness. But—and this is something I often have to point out as a preschool special ed teacher—what’s acceptable or even cute at 5 is often not acceptable or cute at 15. I taught a kindergartner once who liked to give hugs to strangers. At 5? Cute. At 15? Downright creepy. Your son would rather struggle on his own than accept learning from someone else. At 5? Impressive and makes for sweet stories. At 15? This could really set him back.  You’re doing the right thing in trying to intervene now. In reality, I’m sure your son falls somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. My first instinct in how to help your son is to address his fear itself. Kids often have a fear of others catching them being wrong—in developmental psychology, it’s often described as a conflict between autonomy and shame (think about potty training as the most obvious version of that conflict). In your son’s case, he’s often using the proclamation of doing it “his way” to protect him from the shame of being told he’s doing it wrong. What you need to do is get at is where the shame is stemming from, rather than correct the autonomy.  When I taught middle school, we often talked about creating “a culture of error”—a fancy way of saying we wanted to encourage kids to make mistakes, because kids learn from mistakes. In fact, some research suggests that kids learn better from working through mistakes to correct them, rather than from simply being told the correct answer without working through it on your own.  What’s the culture of error like at home? Do you make mistakes in front of your son? When you make mistakes, how do you respond? Everyone makes mistakes, but it’s entirely possible that your son doesn’t recognize yours. Try to either purposefully make mistakes, or point out your mistakes to your son, and work through them together. “Oh, no, Mommy put twice as many tomatoes in this recipe. What should we do? Should we double the recipe? Should we scoop some out? What do you think?” etc. It may sound a bit silly, but your son will learn the lesson better the more obvious you make it. Try to find a way to (politely) ask the teacher how she handle mistakes in the classroom? I often made errors in basic arithmetic when demonstrating math to my middle schoolers so that they would notice and call me out on it.  Social stories about making mistakes and learning from others may often help. Social stories are a tool often used to help kids with autism spectrum disorder navigate social situations, but all kids use them (think of Hands Are Not for Hitting, a popular book series in preschools everywhere). Make learning from others and being vulnerable common topics of discussion so your son can normalize that behavior.  Your son will most likely resist some of this. I would be unequivocal in those situations. “I know you said that the word is peg, but it says dog. D-oh-g. Dog. It is OK to make a mistake as long as you can learn from it. We can try it again later.” This whole his way stuff is a way of avoiding the issue. Don’t accept it. You can offer to invent a language with him that follows his spelling rules, but he needs to understand that certain things (math, reading, spelling, etc.) are not going to be his way. Indulging his stubbornness isn’t going to make him a better reader.  We are moving out of state, and our eldest child is in the first grade. Over the next couple of weeks, we have meetings lined up at the elementary schools in the neighborhoods where we are house hunting. Maybe it’s because there’s too many decisions to make in the next six to eight weeks, but I’m coming up short on good questions for the principal. If you were in my position, what would you look for in the new school, and what questions would you ask?  If I were moving to a new state and had the opportunity to choose a school for my kids, my questions for the new school would center around three core principles:  1. What is this school all about?  What do I mean by this? If you were to ask this question of someone in the school where I teach, the answer would amount to something like, “We celebrate the voices of all children. We encourage them to become good citizens through positive reinforcement.”  Another school’s focus might be on high academic achievement or student democracy or STEM or an integration of the arts in all curriculum. It doesn’t really matter what the school is about, but it’s important that the school be about something. When a school has an identity, it gives the kids something to get excited about. When a school has no guiding principles, each school day can start to look like the next. I would be looking for a school with vision and purpose.  Specifically, ask who is designing the curriculum, and when was it last reviewed? My wife once taught in a school where she determined the entire curriculum for her class, which was fine because she’s an excellent teacher who was willing to work long hours at the time, but ideally, you want a school to possess curriculum designed by experts. The math curriculum should have been designed by a mathematician, preferably by a mathematician at a company whose primary mission is to design curriculum. Often, schools and districts are designing their own curriculum, and when this happens, the results are not always good.  3. How do you support struggling students?  Even if your children seem well prepared for school and are unlikely to need support, the day may arrive when one of them needs assistance for academic or social/emotional reasons. I would ask how these kids are supported, and I would demand specifics.  I would not concern yourself too much with the administrators. You can fall in love with a principal only to watch her leave one year later, then suddenly, the whole reason that you’ve chosen the school is out the window. The same goes for the personnel. As someone who has been teaching for 21 years in the same school, and for 18 of those years, in the same classroom, I can assure you that people come and go, but certain core principles of a school are more permanent.  My daughter is a freshman in high school, and she recently got an assignment in life sciences that seems inappropriate. The assignment is for the kids to identify someone in their family who died of cancer, and then students are supposed to research that kind of cancer and create a poster presentation to display for the entire school. This seems like a terrible idea, and an invasion of privacy. Should I talk to the teacher?

Matthew Dicks, Katie Holbrook, Cassy Sarnell, and Amy Scott


sottnet--2019-10-03--Beyond Einstein Physicists solve mystery surrounding photon momentum

Beyond Einstein: Physicists solve mystery surrounding photon momentum

The sail of the boat therefore "knows" of the impending accident before the cords tear and steals a bit of the boat's momentum.  Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect: in its most intuitive form, a single atom is irradiated with light. According to Einstein, light consists of particles (photons) that transfer only quantised energy to the electron of the atom. If the photon's energy is sufficient, it knocks the electrons out of the atom.Physicists at Goethe University are now able to answer this question. To do so, they developed and constructed a new spectrometer with previously unattainable resolution.Doctoral student Alexander Hartung became a father twice during the construction of the apparatus. The device, which is three meters long and 2.5 meters high, contains approximately as many parts as an automobile. It sits in the experiment hall of the Physics building on Riedberg Campus, surrounded by an opaque, black tent inside which is an extremely high performing laser.The momentum of these electrons at the time of their appearance is measured with extreme precision in a long tube of the apparatus.The device is a further development of the COLTRIMS (Collision Optical Laser Testing Reaction Interacting Momentum System) principle that was invented in Frankfurt and has meanwhile spread across the world: it consists of ionising individual atoms , or breaking up molecules, and then precisely determining the momentum of the particles.And this is why Hartung built the "super COLTRIMS."When numerous photons from a laser pulse bombard an argon atom, they ionise it. Breaking up the atom partially consumes the photon's energy. The remaining energy is transferred to the released electron."The simplest idea is this: as long as the electron is attached to the nucleus, the momentum is transferred to the heavier particle, i.e., the atom nucleus. As soon as it breaks free, the photon momentum is transferred to the electron," explains Hartung's supervisor, Professor Reinhard Dörner from the Institute for Nuclear Physics. This would be analogous to wind transferring its momentum to the sail of a boat. As long as the sail is firmly attached, the wind's momentum propels the boat forward. The instant the ropes tear, however, the wind's momentum is transferred to the sail alone.The electron not only receives the expected momentum,To explain the result more precisely, Hartung uses the concept of light as an electro-magnetic wave: "We know that the electrons tunnel through a small energy barrier. In doing so, they are pulled away from the nucleus by the strong electric field of the laser, while the magnetic field transfers this additional momentum to the electrons."Hartung used a clever measuring setup for the experiment. To ensure that the small additional momentum of the electron was not caused accidentally by an asymmetry in the apparatus, he had the laser pulse hit the gas from two sides: either from the right or the left, and then from both directions simultaneously, which was the biggest challenge for the measuring technique.


sputnik--2019-12-04--Student Solves Century Old Physics Problem - Reports

A student from The Ecole Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) research institute and university Wassim Dhaouadi has solved this physical problem, according to the Neue Züricher Zeitung.  Using the interferometric method of research, the student discovered an ultrathin layer between the bubble and the liquid, which, contrary to one of the previously proposed theories, does not stick to the tube, but moves extremely slowly. It's just that this speed is so low that changes are not visible to the human eye.  The movement of the bubble itself depends on this layer, and it is its characteristics that affect whether air will rise or not.


collectiveevolution--2019-05-16--Legendary UFO Researcher Nuclear Physicist Stanton Friedman Has Passed Away

Legendary UFO Researcher & Nuclear Physicist Stanton Friedman Has Passed Away

I will start this off by saying that you will not find definitive proof about this subject in this article, but we are going to have a conversation about it and explore many of the claims that have come up over recent years.  To some, that may seem boring, but to us, bringing quality journalism to the space of disclosure and mystery is exactly what is needed to achieve a wider openness to these subjects, which will effectively help humanity expand what we think is truly possible in our reality. All of that is part of the CE Protocol and why we do what we do here at CE.  For years, I have seen images like the one you see below. Landscapes that look photoshopped, showing what appear to be huge advanced technology or space crafts hidden under the ice. The claims are that these images are of UFOs from Antarctica. Aside from those images, we have testimonies from various individuals who share what they state to be inside knowledge and first-hand experience regarding information about Antarctica, what goes on there and what is being hidden.  One such individual is the highly controversial Corey Goode, a man I personally respect and know fairly well. I say that because too often as viewers we forget to humanize those around us, those who bring grounded claims or even ‘out there’ claims. We forget to ask, who is this person? What are they like? Are they authentic? What are they like on a day-to-day basis? How can I relate to them? Are they truly seeking attention, like many claim? Or are they trying to assist humanity?  I have had the pleasure of being able to connect with many individuals on this level and spend enough time with them to get a clear picture of who they are in their hearts vs. what people say about them online. Furthermore, there is an intuition that we all have, which can also be a tool to go alongside examining evidence to get closer to the truth.  That being said, Corey’s claims are some of what, in more recent times, garnered so much interest about Antarctica. Bases under the ice, evidence of Preadamites, a crashed craft from a species that was doing various forms of genetic experiments here. I had some of these conversations with Corey and even recorded one interview about Antarctica which we have on CETV here. I’ve always felt something odd is going on with Antarctica, and any good journalist knows that to get to the truth you have to explore from many sides and also take into consideration the people who take the time to spend their own hard earned money and energy to see what’s going on first hand.  That’s what lead me to Brad Olsen.  A friend of mine was on a trip to Peru with Nassim Heramein, exploring sacred sites and learning fascinating information along the way. On one of the days, long time researcher Brad Olsen joined the group. This gave my friend a chance to connect with Brad, and she later messaged me saying, “This guy is awesome, he has so much knowledge, you should consider chatting with him!”  So I began looking more deeply into what Brad does, and some of what he was recently saying about Antarctica caught my eye. Brad had taken a trip down to Antarctica that he planned for many months. His goal was to find out whatever he could about the incredible claims that had been made about Antarctica, UFOs, secret bases, lost civilizations and so forth.  I had read enough, it was time to interview him! He told me in the interview that when it came to these big claims, he was very excited to find something incredible and bring it, or a story, back as this huge exposure! It was nice to see his excitement and passion for this work!  But what did he find while there? Well, it was not quite what he thought. As you will learn in the video below, there were many interesting and cool findings along the way, and his story at times had me captivated as to what was going to happen next, but confirmation of any crafts beneath the ice was not found.  You might say, “well ya, of course not, it’s all hidden and highly guarded!” And this would likely be true! Except that no one in the area or anyone he spoke to, including those who have been there working for many years, could even point to any directions as to where these anomalies could actually be.  That is important to note because as you’ll know from exploring this research, even the most intense of claims have accredited whistleblowers, some with clear knowledge of what’s going on and where it’s happening. We may not have all the info, but there is enough to continue the exploration.  It’s sort of like the flat Earth conspiracy. The claims are wild and that’s OK, but there is not one single whistleblower, not one solid piece of evidence that suggests there is something to go off of… this is why this claim is not picking up more steam than it already has.  Antarctica, on the other hand, does have a lot more, but perhaps not as much as we’d like yet. Where did this leave me on the question of are there UFOs in Antarctica? I still feel like something is going on. I feel the true history of Antarctica has been hidden from humanity. This is what my intuition and exploration tells me. In no way do I, nor Brad, feel that the mystery is solved or that nothing is truly there, but more so that it’s not at all easy to find nor bring solid knowledge to from a verifiable point of view.  This does not mean people who speak in more detail about it are wrong, or that someone like Corey is misleading people, it simply means we need to continue exploring and trying to uncover this in greater detail should we want further tangible proof.  Below is the full 1 hour interview I did with Brad on CETV. We released it on YouTube as we wanted everyone to get a chance to explore this subject and think more deeply about the need for further investigative journalism in this space.  As you know, with censorship the way it is, and how bad demonetization has become for us here at CE, we need your support in staying alive. Becoming a member of CETV is one of the only options we have left to keep bringing the world conscious media that truly has the power to change ourselves and our world. Please consider joining us and supporting our work. We have tons more interviews like this on CETV including weekly episodes of 3 different original shows. Learn more here.  Humanity is highly curious, and it’s this facet of ourselves that leads us to great evolutions in both our physical infrastructures as well as our consciousness.  This curiosity has led us to explore many incredible things, things that people often do not believe at first. The reality though is that we also live with this interesting thing called culture. Often times, culture, whatever it may be at the time, can shape the way we think, what we believe and how we choose to process information.  Furthermore, we live in a time where humanity very much believes we individually are a mind living in a human body and that’s it. This means that the rigidity of our thinking can often be very intense, as we choose to shut out that which steps outside the known material reality around us. Thus, the need for good information that not only helps to suffice the rigidity of the mind before it becomes more open, but that also pushes the boundaries of what we believe to be possible is hugely important.  In the UFOlogy space, often times huge claims about certain subjects are made and passed around the internet as if they are facts, making people feel stupid for not believing them when in reality we are only at the beginning stages of truly uncovering the topic.  The need for more high-quality investigative journalism in this space is huge. We know the mainstream won’t touch it, so it’s up to the people, but it must be done with care, openness and quality.  If you’re inspired, you can help us do that here.