Outsourcing our Thinking to Algorithms and Those Who Engi...

...even as an algorithm mindlessly implements its procedures – and even as it learns to see new patterns in the data – it reflects the minds of its creators, the motives of its trainers. Amazon and Netflix use algorithms to make recommendations about books and films. (One-third of purchases on Amazon come from these recommendations.) These algorithms seek to understand our tastes, and the tastes of like-minded consumers of culture. Yet the algorithms make fundamentally different recommend...

 Effects of Good Teachers on Student Outcomes

These findings would suggest that the difference in achievement gains between having a 25th percentile teacher (a not so effective teacher) and a 75th percentile teacher (an effective teacher) is over one-third of a standard deviation (0.35) in reading and almost half a standard deviation (0.48) in mathematics. Similarly, the difference in achievement gains between having a 50th percentile teacher (an average teacher) and a 90th percentile teacher (a very effective teacher) is about one-third...

 College-Graduates have a Lower Unemployment Rate

We looked at the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which calculates the national unemployment rate as well as unemployment rates for various subgroups. Those subgroups include Americans of four specific educational attainment levels. They are: less than a high school diploma; a high school diploma but no college; some college experience but no college diploma; and a college diploma. For those with less than a high school diploma, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 13.8 pe...

 Life Before Science

As recorded in the stone carvings of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the history of worid society begins with humanity at large knowing nothing of physics. chemistry, or biology. Humans recognized but few safe edibles. Humans had witnessed many lethal poisonings by superficially attractive items plucked from the mysterious scenery. Infection was rampant. Average survival was in the neighborhood of twenty-two years, or about one-third of the once-in-a-rare-while-demonstrated, biblically mentioned "thre...

 When Does Human Life Begin

Careful and reproducible observations and measurements in the bbiosciences have similarly forced us to repeatedly refine our traditional ideas about what life itself is and when it begins. Is a human being first a life when it emerges from the birth canal? Does it have any legal rights is as a person before then? Or is it a life at the stage of development where > it is able to survive independently outside of the womb even if it is removed from there early, as can happen naturally with pr...

 Focus When Being Inundated with BS

Langmuir is the most convincing lecturer that I have ever heard. I have heard him talk to an audience of chemists when I knew they did not understand more than one-third of what he was saying; but they thought they did. It's very easy to be swept off one's feet by Langmuir. You remember in [Kipling's novel] Kim that the water jar was broken and Lurgan Sahib was trying to hypnotise Kim into seeing it whole again. Kim saved himself by saying the multiplication table [so] I have heard Langmuir l...