Oh, Apple!

Apple had a keynote yesterday. I did not pay attention — I usually wait for products to hit the market, and then wait a year or two for prices to come down before caring much about the latest gadget — but they did something embarrassing. They made a big deal about an app called “Breathe”. It’s a mindfulness app, and they plugged it with a great big quote on the screen.

choprasaying

DEEPAK BULLSHITTING CHOPRA? Apple thinks a Chopraesque silly app for the Apple Watch is worth highlighting in one of their high hype twice-yearly keynotes? Well, that tells me something: that I don’t care what else was announced. It must have been mighty feeble to leave room for Chopra.

And then, it’s a mindfulness app, which has clearly become the pseudoscience fad of the year.

The value of Chopra’s own ideas and recommendations are dubious—to the point that some of his Tweets have been deemed indistinguishable from bullshit. And according to some experts, mindfulness apps are just as questionable. “Science behind mindfulness apps shows most don’t help or work,” tweeted Harvard psychiatrist John Torous, who is also the editor-in-chief of the JMIR Mental Health journal. Torous later told Fast Company that these types of apps are increasingly being investigated by experts. “These companies are very bold in their claims, and very quiet when things don’t work,” he said. “It is premature to say the mindfulness app space is well-validated at this time.”

This is actually a problem with most “mental health” apps, which a study in Nature earlier this year determined can sometimes give improper advice that makes people’s conditions worse. A 2015 study by Institute of Health & Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia looked at 606 mindfulness apps and determined that only 23 actually taught mindfulness techniques. The rest were just timers or reminders—most of them told users to stop what they were doing and breathe.

Yeah, if you’re in the market for an app that will remind you to breathe, maybe you need this thing.

Otherwise, I haven’t seen much to distinguish mindfulness from mindlessness.

One of those days…

I was up half the night with a toothache, so I’m off to the dentist for an emergency fix. I’m lucky — I have dental insurance. I’ve known people who suffered with this kind of thing for months before being able to get in and get taken care of, because America.

Then after that, there’s a vigil on campus for the Orlando victims — 4:30 in the student union. If you’re in the area, you’re welcome to stop by. We’re having this event also because America.

Flattery just awakens me to the greater potential for failure

I get so much hate mail that I’ve become numb to it — I check it out in case there are grounds for amusement in it, and then automatically hit delete. Delete, delete, delete, delete…and sometimes I get lazy and just “select all” and then delete once. And then every once in a great while, I get a nice email, which mainly stirs up feelings of puzzlement. I have to stare at it and try to decipher the words, and all the while I’m wondering whether I’m being trolled or set up, or whether I’m being blasted with sarcasm. I can take the hate in stride nowadays, but pleasant email gives me a sensation akin to a stifled hiccup or sneeze, and it’s a little distressing.

I think there’s probably something wrong with my head after too many years of this. I should probably get therapy, but if I started caring what the assholes said about me it might be fatal.

Anyway, just because it’s unusual, I include the content of the message below.

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I must be a lousy teacher

Because my student evaluation of teaching scores are pretty good. Not the best, but OK. And SETs are terrible ways to assess teaching.

These kinds of evaluations are ubiquitous in the US university system, and they kind of drive me crazy: we’re expected to report the details of these numerical scores in our annual reports, I’ve been in meetings where we drone on about the statistics of these things, and of course everyone is expected to get above average scores on them. Personally, I find them totally useless, have no idea how to get a number 5 to a number 6, and basically ignore (except when making my yearly bureaucratic obeisance) the trivial 5 question numerical, so-called “quantitative” part of the student evaluations. What is far more useful are the short comments students get to make on the form: that actually tells me what parts of the class some students disliked, and what parts they found memorable and useful.

I’m not alone. Others find them useless, for good reasons.

There is one important difference between customer evaluations of commercial and educational service providers. Whereas with commercial providers ratings are unilateral, ratings are mutual in the education system. As well as students evaluating their teachers, instructors evaluate their students – such as by their exam performance. In US studies, these ratings have been found to be positively correlated: students who receive better grades also give more positive evaluations of their instructors. Furthermore, courses whose students earn higher grade point averages also receive more positive average ratings.

Proponents of SETs interpret these correlations as an indication of the validity of these evaluations as a measure of teacher effectiveness: students, they argue, learn more in courses that are taught well – therefore, they receive better grades. But critics argue that SETs assess students’ enjoyment of a course, which does not necessarily reflect the quality of teaching or their acquisition of knowledge. Many students would like to get good grades without having to invest too much time (because that would conflict with their social life or their ability to hold down part-time jobs). Therefore, instructors who require their students to attend classes and do a lot of demanding coursework are at risk of receiving poor ratings. And since poor teaching ratings could have damaging effects at their next salary review, instructors might decide to lower their course requirements and grade leniently. Thus, paradoxically, they become less effective teachers in order to achieve better teaching ratings.

The article goes on to show that by several criteria, what student evaluations actually assess is the easiness of a course, and how little the students are challenged by the material.

There’s more to it than that, of course. My campus has a lot of faculty who have won teaching awards, and we have a reputation for being demanding and resisting the trend towards grade inflation, and I know many of them are getting their high SET scores by being engaging and enthusiastic and making students think. Those are important aspects of teaching. But we ought to also be measuring faculty effectiveness at teaching the material, and those little forms don’t do it.

Because student ratings appear to reflect their enjoyment of a course and because teacher strategies that result in knowledge acquisition (such as requiring demanding homework and regular course attendance) decrease students’ course enjoyment, SETs are at best a biased measure of teacher effectiveness. Adopting them as one of the central planks of an exercise purporting to assess teaching excellence and dictating universities’ ability to raise tuition fees seems misguided at best.

Now throw in the fact that SETs are systematically biased against women faculty and that students tend to downgrade minority faculty (they are reflecting cultural biases all too well), and you’ve got a whole grand tower of required makework that doesn’t do the job, and also reinforces trends that we all say we oppose.

We’re all gonna die of cancer

Not this again. CNN is running another article about “X causes cancer!”, where in this case X is coffee. Not regular coffee, just very hot coffee. That is, coffee served at a temperature high enough to cause painful burns might also increase the incidence of esophageal cancer.

Huh. OK. You know, living causes cancer. Epidemiological studies like the one cited are important for identifying possible problems, but your whole life is a great long exercise in risk management where you balance doing things against cowering in terror. We have to consider realistic assessment of risk. So I was going to actually read the study (the short summary given is that an analysis of a thousand studies found that “drinks consumed at very hot temperatures were linked to cancer of the esophagus in humans”, but no numbers were given), but CNN screwed up: their link to the study goes to a paper on the carcinogenicity of pesticides in the Lancet instead. I thought I’d rummage around and try to find it myself, but instead I found this editorial in the latest issue which was pretty good, much better than yet another study that finds a superficial cancer link. So I’m including the whole thing right here.

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I don’t give a damn about your gun specs

Here’s a sure-fire way to annoy me: write and explain to me how I got the details of some stupid gun wrong. Har, har, it’s semi-automatic, not fully automatic. Don’t you know nothin’? It’s 7.62mm, not 7.63mm. The muzzle velocity is…

Just stop right there, go find a nice quiet place, and masturbate happily to your copy of Guns & Ammo. I’m not interested.

Henceforth, the official name of all guns and rifles and whatever fine distinction in the title you want to give them is irrelevant: they are all called Shooty McShootface. You can announce that their purpose is to shoot clay targets, or Bambi, or to look fine on your mantlepiece — I don’t care about that. Their purpose is to kill people. Got that? They are devices to hurl small pieces of metal at lethal velocities that are intentionally aimed at human beings to do them harm.

Your obsession with them is sick.

At least Samantha Bee knows how I feel.

Except…a plague of boils? That’s letting the NRA off easy.

Activate Streisand Effect: Donald Trump’s hair needs attention

trumphair

Peter Thiel, the obnoxiously rich right-winger and Trump-supporter who sued Gawker media into bankruptcy over unseemly stories about Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, is not satisfied. He’s now going after specific Trump stories he doesn’t like, and is bankrolling lawsuits about a couple of other Gawker stories.

In other words: A Thiel-funded attorney is helping a man sue Gawker Media over an article that comes nowhere near invading his privacy, concerns a clear matter of public interest, and explicitly states that the subject is not guilty of a crime.

You know what this means: we have to promote the news story that’s being attacked. And it’s actually a rather interesting story, unlikely news of Hulk Hogan’s infidelity and bedroom antics — it’s an article that tries to untangle the mystery of what the heck is going on with Trump’s weird, unnatural hair. It makes a pretty good case that what’s going on is that it is a very expensive, rather finicky specialized hair weave by a company called Ivari International, which costs about $60,000 to install and $300-$3000 a month to maintain. (You might want to file that information away for the next time someone complains about the cost of Clinton’s trips to a hair salon, because you know the media won’t ridicule a man for spending that much on vanity).

Ivari is suing for defamation, which is peculiar. Accurately describing the technology used to stitch hair extensions onto a balding man’s head is not defamatory, and the only thing I can think of that might be defamatory is that Ivari might not want its name associated with that creepy skein of floss everyone can see in every appearance of that Republican slimeball. I know that if I were in the market for fake hair, telling me that their technique produces the thinning dead animal that Trump wears would not be a selling point.

Maybe Ivari should sue Trump for flaunting his handiwork.