Thought Bubbles

Dear Chick Who Stole From Me

Yvonne — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:49:11 +0000

That’s right, you’re a trespasser and a thief. A common, petty criminal. WHO STEALS FROM CHARITY.

That pile of stuff on my porch? Was not for you. It was not abandoned, it was not free for the taking. It belonged to a charity on its way to pick it up.

You, my dear, are someone who steals from the poor and the mentally ill.

I hope you’re proud of yourself. Enjoy the sweater and the jacket and everything else you took. Maybe wearing them will make my sense of human decency rub off on you.

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Global Warming is Reversing

Yvonne — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:09:31 +0000

Judging by the number of pirates, that is.

…

What?

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Using 10% of Your Brain

Yvonne — Sat, 24 May 2008 16:39:37 +0000

The “you only use 10% of your brain” statistic showed up on Cracked.com’s most frequently quoted bullshit statistics list. Which is good, because the statistic is nonsense, but also bad, because their explanation of why it’s nonsense is…mostly nonsense. In their explanation, they basically accept the 10% statistic is true, they just say that contrary to popular belief, you can’t actually do any better.

No no no no no.

The 10% statistic is bogus. You, in fact, use almost all of your brain almost all of the time. Depending on what you’re doing, your brain might not be working very hard, but it will be working. If I perform an fMRI on you while you lie there and do nothing, your entire brain will still light up *. If I put you through a sensory deprivation protocol for long enough, you will actually start to hallucinate, because your brain craves input and activity.

Take, for example, the simple task of sipping from a glass. Your prefrontal cortex, probably in response to a “thirsty!” signal from the hypothalamus, decides that you want some water. It (in conjunction with the parietal cortex) plans the sequence of movements needed to pick up the class and drink from it and signals your motor cortex to execute the plan.

Meanwhile, your occipital cortex processes the scene in front of you and, with the help of the temporal cortex, recognizes a particular object as the glass you want to drink from. Your parietal cortex uses the input from visual cortex to triangulate the distance to the glass and calculate the trajectory of your arm and the shape of your hand so that you can pick it up.

After you make contact with the glass, the tactile feedback goes back into your parietal cortex so that you can grip the glass firmly. And then your parietal cortex and premotor/motor cortex work to monitor the proprioceptive feedback from your arm and make needed course corrections so you bring the glass to your lips rather than dumping the contents into your eye (infants are still training this particular neural circuit, which is why they often do whack food into their eyes).

That’s most of your brain right there. So you can sip from a glass.

—
*You’re probably saying to yourself, “but I’ve seen all those brain pictures with just a few brightly-colored blobs of activity…” Well, that’s because fMRI uses something called subtractive logic.

In order to determine what parts of your brain might be really important to a task, we also scan you doing something totally mundane, like staring at a + in the middle of a screen. We then take your brain activity map from when you were doing the Really Important Task and subtract off the activity from the Totally Mundane Task to see what’s left.

As you can see, there are certain assumptions about the nature of brain activity built into the methodology, which is why neuroimaging is not quite the magic bullet it’s made out to be in the media.

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A Terrifying Realization

Yvonne — Sat, 24 May 2008 04:55:27 +0000

My kid brother (the baby of the family) graduated from college last weekend.

You know what this means?

This means that the incoming first-year grads, at least some of them, ARE THE SAME AGE AS MY KID BROTHER.

I can’t decide if this is more or less terrifying than when I occasionally freak myself out realizing that I’m nearly a decade older than incoming college freshmen. A DECADE. THE EIGHTIES DID NOT EXIST FOR THESE PEOPLE.

I’m old. Old and still in school. WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?????

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In Which I Discuss Ben & Jerry’s

Yvonne — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:44:39 +0000

This is complete and utter blasphemy, considering that I used to live down the street from Babcock ice cream and currently live around the corner from a Rita’s, but I think Ben & Jerry’s is the best ice cream ever.

When I was in high school and still had the metabolism of a hummingbird, I would occasionally eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s in one sitting. And then go have dinner.

I have chowed down happily on Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Chocolate Fudge Brownie, Phish Food, and many others. My current favorite is Half Baked. Whoever thought to put brownie chunks AND cookie dough chunks into the same ice cream is a genius. I am eating a half-cup of it as we speak (and then I will have dinner).

I thought Ben & Jerry’s could do no wrong until I tried Cheesecake Brownie, the flagship ice cream of the ONE movement to end poverty.

Blegh.

We’ve already established that I enjoy brownie ice cream, and I love cheesecake even more than brownie ice cream. But cheesecake-flavored ice cream is…weirdly sour and unpleasant.

So keep your poverty-fighting and your ice-cream purchasing habits separate and everything will be fine.

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The Midwest: A History Lesson [Updated]

Yvonne — Sun, 11 May 2008 07:11:47 +0000

This is what’s on the front page of the Washington Post right now:

It’s totally crass to be complaining about this given that people died, but Oklahoma is not a Midwestern state!!! And you can argue about Missouri.

I’m a Midwestern girl born and bred. Since I moved away, it’s become pretty obvious to me that the vast majority of people in media have no clue about the Midwest. So here’s a lesson.

The term “Midwest” refers to the states that were part of the Old Northwest Territory. After the westward expansion took us past the Mississippi River, this area ceased being the Northwest of the country and people started calling it the Middle-West, or Midwest. The Old Northwest Territory included Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and part of Minnesota. These six states make up the Midwest.

Most of the states to the west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies were acquired during the Louisiana Purchase. And most of those states are part of the Great Plains and are thus referred to as Plains States.

I can grudgingly accept Iowa and Missouri as Midwestern states even though they weren’t part of the Old Northwest Territory because they’re not far enough west to really be part of the Great Plains. This acceptance is particularly grudging in Missouri’s case because part of Missouri properly belongs to the South, which is a whole different can of worms, historically and culturally.

But Oklahoma is clearly a Plains State (if not, then it’s part of the South) and referring to it as part of the Midwest is…BAH!

Updated May 11 @ 8pm

The front page now says this:

Thank you, invisible hand of correct geography.

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Scientific/Statistical Interpretation 101

Yvonne — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:16:17 +0000

A rant.

Please, for my sake, stop using the phrase “scientific proof.”

Science is about probabilities, not proof.

Absolute proof, the determination that something must be true in every situation with no exceptions, is only possible if you can construct your own universe. You prove things in mathematics (which is the language of perfection and does let you define your own universe), but we cannot prove things in science because we are stuck with the highly noisy and imperfect universe that we were born into.

The phrase “scientific proof” is an oxymoron. You will never see an actual scientist use this phrase in scientific writing. I cross this phrase out every single time I see it in my undergrads’ papers. Using this phrase tells me immediately that you have not been trained in scientific reasoning and that your scientific commentary should be accompanied by a salt lick.

Science relies on statistics, and statistics are about probabilities. A lot of people seem to equate the phrase “statistically significant” with “proof” and…WRONG. Statistically significant just means that there is only a small chance that this particular experimental result is spurious.

We usually use a threshold (alpha value) of .05 in science. If your statistical test turns up a p-value of .05 , it is statistically significant. It means that there is a 5% chance that you could have gotten this size effect, or a bigger effect, through random chance. There is a 5% chance that this is a false positive. Five percent. One in twenty.

If p is smaller, than there is less of a chance that the finding is random, but p is never zero.

So for every 100 experiments that are statistically significant at a value of p = .05, that means 5 of those findings are likely spurious.

This is why replication and corroborating evidence are the hallmarks of good science. The more times you can successfully repeat an experiment (or related/similar experiments), the more likely that you are onto something real.

The kinds of things that have been accepted as scientific fact are things that have been replicated so many times, that have been corroborated in so many ways, that the odds that these things are happening randomly are extremely low.

And the corollary is also true: if people have tried to demonstrate something experimentally and failed repeatedly, the odds that they are hunting a phantom are extremely high. The “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” argument has been used to perpetrate many a nonexistent controversy, but this argument is only true within the bounds of formal logic (which is a branch of mathematics). In science, a series of failed studies (assuming said studies are well-designed and well-executed) is evidence that what you’re looking for just isn’t there.

End rant.

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Chinese Watercress, How I’ve Missed You

Yvonne — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:57:28 +0000

My favorite Chinese restaurant in Pittsburgh closed last summer and since then I’ve been without my Chinese watercress.

Chinese watercress, which is sometimes called on choy, is my favorite vegetable in the world. The Mandarin name for it literally translates to “empty-hearted vegetable”, a nod to its hollow stem. It’s sweet and tender and utterly delicious when blanched and then stir-fried with a bit of garlic. I could eat it every day.

But it’s a pain to cook at home. First, I’ve never been able to find it in any regular grocery store. You have to go to a specialty Asian market (and usually one that favors Chinese cuisine). The long, thin, and very numerous leaves are a nightmare to rinse. And even after you’ve picked off all the bad leaves and chopped off the woody, inedible parts the stem, you still have so much plant that you must cook it in batches. Which then wilts down into a tiny and not-very-satisfying plate.

Paying $12 for a big plate of this stuff is entirely worth it.

Since my favorite restaurant closed, I’ve been looking for another Chinese restaurant that both makes edible Chinese watercress and will deliver to my house. And last week, a random Chinese take-out menu showed up in my mailbox.

It had Chinese watercress on the menu.

I ordered from there today and…mmmmmm. China Palace, you may have one of the most generic restaurant names ever, but you have a repeat customer. Thank you.

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Smart People Opens Today!

Yvonne — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:38:25 +0000

They filmed part of Smart People in my building. Lots of my fellow grad students managed to catch a glimpse of Dennis Quaid. I didn’t, because I sort of didn’t care enough to go look.

I might see Smart People eventually, just to be all “Hey, I work there!”, but it doesn’t look like it’s worth the price of admission.

They filmed part of Wonder Boys in my building too, though of course I didn’t work there then. There’s a scene at the very end where Michael Douglas runs into a building and the shot shows an interesting grid pattern on the floor. That’s my building. I walk through those doors and over those gold tiles (which are tiles purchased by various graduating classes) almost every day.

Wonder Boys is probably a much better movie.

In sadder news, Bob Kames, the chicken dance king, passed away recently. Let us all flap our arms in memory.

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Del Monte Orchard Select® & SunFresh®: Best Canned Fruit Ever

Yvonne — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:03:14 +0000

There’s a part of me that yearns to be a pioneer woman, to spin yarn from my own sheep’s fleece and knit socks, to grow fresh food all summer and can it for the winter.

Normally, I lament the lack of fresh fruit in the winter, or at least the lack of fresh fruit that doesn’t look like it barely survived the trip from Chile. But this year I made an amazing discovery: Del Monte’s fruit-in-a-jar in the produce section.

I randomly threw a jar of the sliced peaches into my basket one day and was frankly blown away that it didn’t taste like high fructose corn syrup. That’s because it doesn’t contain high fructose corn syrup! I know! The ingredients are peaches, water, sugar, “natural flavor”, citric acid, and ascorbic acid. That’s not very many multisyllabic chemical compounds (though they are surprisingly sing-able).

These peaches actually taste like peaches and are really great eaten alone or with cottage cheese.

I’ve also tried the apricot halves from the same Orchard Select® line and the mango and the new grapefruit lovers mix from the SunFresh® (read: more exotic fruits) line. All are excellent. Given how hard it is to get good mango at any time of year around here, I may switch to eating the SunFresh® mango exclusively.

As good as these products are, they still don’t quite quash my pioneer-woman leanings. I was reminded once again today of how dismal supermarket tomatoes are. I can’t wait to move into a real house with a real yard and grow my own.

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More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About the Chicken Dance

Yvonne — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:45:36 +0000

I’m looking for a recording of the chicken dance* song right now, and this is what I’ve discovered:

An iTunes search for “chicken dance” gets you 150 hits.
There is a Cree and/or Blackfoot tribal dance called the chicken dance. It is presumably not polka.
The chicken dance is included on albums titled The Complete Wedding Party CD, Oktoberfest, The Real Complete Jewish Kids Party, From Russia with Love, and Soltravieso Presenta Bailando Sin Parar
The chicken dance has been performed by Dora the Explorer, Hampton the Hampster from Hampsterdance the Album, and a group of beatboxing Marshmallow Peeps
One recording of the chicken dance has been classified as “New Age”
The chicken dance has LYRICS. Multiple versions!

Snap your feet
Flap your wings
Shake your backsides
Clap twice and sing

I wanna be a chicken
Wouldn’t wanna be a duck
Why quack quack quack
When you can cluck cluck cluck

Join hands and go ’round in circles
Around the circle you go
Join hands and go ’round in circles
All around the circle you go

And in Spanish too!

—
*We do this in the bleachers at Badger football games. Yes, even the hook-arms-and-swing-round-and-round part. Given the average level of intoxication at the games, and the fact that bleachers aren’t exactly designed for bad polka, I’m surprised there weren’t more injuries.

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Democratic Presidential Primary Yada Yada Yada

Yvonne — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:57:36 +0000

The political ads have started airing in Pennsylvania, even though the (closed) primary is still a month away.

Just in time for me to officially be tired of primary season. The longer people fuss about whether or not Clinton landed in Bosnia amidst sniper fire or whether or not Obama’s pastor is an America-hating racist, the more I am reminded of this.

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Gmail Woes

Yvonne — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:25:05 +0000

Is it just me, or does IMAP Gmail really kind of suck?

I’ve only been using Gmail for a couple of months, but I swear the IMAP server goes down at least once a day.

I’m not fond of the Gmail web interface either. Whatever dynamic coding they have behind the default view keeps crashing my Firefox.

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Apparently I am an Imposter Wisconsinite

Yvonne — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:38:08 +0000

I was recently informed (by multiple people, no less) that real Wisconsinites consider it sacrilege to put ketchup on bratwurst.

Is this true???

I have never heard this before in my life. I usually top my bratwurst with ketchup, mustard, sauerkraut, and relish.

If it’s true, I suppose I could argue that I’m not really a Wisconsin native. I was born in Ohio (silly Buckeyes) and didn’t move to Wisconsin until the ripe old age of three. And left Wisconsin at the riper, older, age of twenty-three.

But given that Wisconsin is superior to Ohio in just about every way, I’d really like to keep my Wisconsinite card.

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Algebra and Arithmetic Education

Yvonne — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:30:25 +0000

Jonah Lehrer writes this about algebra education:

Why is algebra so hard to learn? Because it’s so abstract. No other high school subject is as disconnected from the real world. When students open their algebra textbook, they enter into a world of pure ideas, with page after page of elusive equations and intangible theories. In fact, supporters of mandatory algebra classes tout this as one of the subject’s benefits: it is often a student’s only introduction to abstract thinking.

Well, sort of. Yes, algebra is abstract*, but I think that’s a relatively small part of the problem, and I question the premise that algebra is significantly more abstract than say, analyzing the symbolism of Dante’s Inferno.

I’m going to argue that algebra is so hard to learn because students never really understand arithmetic to begin with. Math is inherently abstract**. If you only learn to do math in concrete terms, in the way that most elementary math is taught, you are not really learning how to do math. You are learning to be a calculator (and there’s no reason to learn to be a calculator, because we have perfectly good ones already). But if you really understand the arithmetic, then algebra should be pretty easy.

In fact, students are doing simple algebra way before junior high.

5 + 7 = ?

This is something we typically see in elementary school math.

5 + 7 = x. Solve for x.

This is something we typically see in early algebra. It is the exact same problem.

When you do long multiplication, you are really applying the distributive property.

When you work with decimals, percentages, fractions, and ratios, you are really working with linear functions.

And so on and so forth.

I think that putting the blame on algebra’s abstractness is really selling students short. I really think the underlying problem is the quality of mathematics teaching in the early grades.

An elementary math teacher is responsible for developing students’ number and operation sense, which sets the stage for all future mathematics achievement. An elementary math teacher must have what Liping Ma calls a “profound understanding of [elementary] mathematics” and be able to see the connections between basic arithmetic and higher math. However, elementary math teachers in the US do not need to demonstrate this level of knowledge to teach math, and generally do not have it. Subject-specific education and certification requirements for math teachers don’t appear until middle school, and by then it’s probably too late.

—
*I also question Jonah’s use of the word “abstract.” Abstract doesn’t really mean something is a “pure idea” and that it’s divorced from the concrete world. Abstract means that it transcends concreteness—it can be made concrete, but it doesn’t have to be. Take linear functions, for example. An apple can only be an apple, but a linear function could be used to represent:

Distance (d = rt)
Mass (m = dv)
Force (f = ma)

etc., all of which are common real-world phenomena. Or you can just write out the standard form of a linear function, y = mx + b, and use that in whatever context.

This does, however, get at the silliness of treating math and science (well, mostly physics) as two separate subjects.

**Numbers themselves are abstract concepts. You can have three of something, but as in the linear function example above, the number three is just a symbol and isn’t attached to any particular concrete referent. Three apples, three oranges, three blue-haired aliens—all have the quality of “three-ness”, but none are actually the number three. If you want to get technical, they’re subsets of three—the mathematical definition of the number three is the set of all sets that contain three elements.

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In Support of Digital Book Readers

Yvonne — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:39:54 +0000

TidBITS lobbies Steve Jobs for an improved e-book reader (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan). I’ve seen the the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader Digital Book and I semi-covet both, particularly for the easy-on-the-eyes display.

Most of the talk about digital readers has been for the regular book market, but I think there’s an entirely different market that would embrace digital readers with open arms, but have slightly different needs than your average fiction consumer.

Students.

We students read reams and reams of journal articles. In fact, almost all of my upper-level courses have only had “coursepacks”—binders full of articles and other materials—and no regular textbooks. We march faithfully to the professor’s chosen copy center, fork over anywhere from $12 to $50, and walk away with several pounds of photocopies. This could all be digitized. Heck, textbooks could be digitized too. Save time, save trees.

What I would like, as a student, is some device that combines the advantages of reading journal articles on paper—ability to highlight and make notes in the margins—with not having to lug around and/or file giant reams of paper. Less eyestrain, less back strain.

I would like to be able to load my own pdfs and other files onto the device. I would like some way of telling the device how the pdf is formatted—one page per sheet or two.

I would like a stylus, so I can write notes right on the document and have them saved.

I would like some sort of organization system so I can tag articles with keywords. Some way of indexing favorite quotes or key data would be great, too.

I would like some internet access with a standard browser so I can log into the library system or a course web site and download new articles straight to the device.

Basically, some kind of souped-up laptop-meets-Kindle-meets-Endnote-meets PDA sort of thing. What say you, Apple?

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We Shouldn’t Have to Pay Kids to Learn

Yvonne — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:02:35 +0000

You might have heard of various pilot programs around the country to see if paying kids for grades will improve test scores. I tend to agree with The Frontal Cortex’s take on it, with a few additional comments.

First, this is not actually a new idea. It’s being implemented in the schools for the first time, yes, but plenty of my classmates’ parents paid them for making good grades when I was growing up. Second, I don’t think it’s that far off from what happens in adulthood anyways. I’d guess that for the vast majority of people, getting paid is a big part of the reason why they go to work.

A few of Jonah’s commenters have mentioned the overjustification effect, which basically says that adding an external motivator, like money, can destroy your intrinsic motivation to do something. The most commonly-used example is that of volunteer work. You initially start volunteering for an organization because you believe in the cause. Eventually, they stick you on staff and you start getting paid for your work. But the organization hits some rough finances and can’t afford to do that any more. In this situation, many people will walk away from the organization rather than go back to what they used to do — work for free. That’s overjustification.

I don’t think overjustification is really in play here, because presumably we’re talking about kids who’ve already lost the intrinsic motivation to learn, if they ever had it to begin with.

And therein lies the problem — I don’t think standard curricula do a very good job of showing students the truly interesting parts of the subject matter.

Take math, for instance. Math is usually taught as a series of disconnected facts and procedures. The brightest students are able to extract some of the underlying structure for themselves, but the rest of the students swim in a morass of arbitrary-seeming numbers and operations.

And they repeatedly solve problems that are asinine. Take this story problem that I found in a recent analysis of a geometry curriculum:

You are making tickets for a school talent show. You decide to make the ticket in the shape of a parallelogram… Find the area of the parallelogram.

Or how about this one?

You are making appetizers for a dinner party. The top of the appetizer is a triangle… Find the area of the triangle.

Yes, because when I’m cooking, I always stop to calculate the surface area of my food.

If you’re good at math, maybe you’ll just solve the problems without thinking about the story too much, but if you’re not, this just re-affirms the feeling that Math Is Stupid Anyways.

Maybe I’m biased, as I was a math major, but I think math has an inherent coolness to it—it’s the language of perfection. How about showing students how that works, instead of hiding it in these ridiculous cover stories?

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Brett Favre Retires

Yvonne — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:53:00 +0000

I’ve just about had enough of She Who Must Not Be Named (see below), how about you?

So Brett Favre is retiring.

My first thought was, “I’m glad Wisconsin isn’t voting today.”

My second thought was, “If Clinton wanted to win Wisconsin, she should have bribed Favre to retire two weeks ago. People would have gone to the bars instead of the polls.”

In case it is not obvious, I am not a Packers fan. Haven’t been since I went to college. There’s only room in my heart for one football team, and that space belongs firmly to the Wisconsin Badgers.

But if you’re one of the mourners, never fear. The NFL Network is apparently scheduling 30 hours of Favre coverage and there will be a special Favre edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. There’s also a wake fan gathering at Lambeau.

Edit: So the plugin that picks the “related posts” apparently thinks this is yet another post about… She Who Will Not Be Named, lest I confuse the plugin some more. So let me give it a hand…

Football.

Football, football, football.

Green Bay Packers. Wisconsin. Sports. Football.

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A Neuroscience Lesson for Charlotte Allen [Updated]

Yvonne — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:33:16 +0000

If you’re just cruising in due to the Charlotte Allen flap and don’t know who I am, let me introduce myself:

I am a graduate student in cognitive psychology. My concentrations are neuroscience and education research. My dissertation research is on spatial skills and math achievement. In other words, when Allen starts spewing nonsense about brains and math, she is making a mess on my academic home turf.

And her understanding of the science is so wrong, it makes my head hurt. I care not that she thinks women are only suited for staying at home and counting their shoes. As I said before, I wish she would do exactly that, and leave the scientific commentary to those who are qualified to do it.

Commenter Adam Klasfeld of Stinky Journalism challenged that I didn’t go far enough in my refutation of her science, and sent me to this piece about the folly of the brain-size/intelligence argument. He’s right, and the piece is well worth reading.

I found the additional commentary at the bottom of the article particularly interesting, including this choice tidbit from Allen herself:

It’s incontrovertible that men’s brains are relatively larger than women even when the measurements are adjusted for body size. One leading such study is Jill Goldstein’s “Normal Sexual Dimorphism of the Adult Human Brain Assessed by In Vivo Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” published in the journal Cerebral Cortex in 2001. There, Goldstein and her research team found that men have proportionately larger parietal lobes, which are associated with the mental manipulation of objects and relation of numbers to each other.

Should I assume she’s just being tongue-in-cheek here, too?

Anyways, I took this as a personal challenge, so I downloaded the Goldstein study (it appears to be free) and read it.

There are many, many problems with her interpretation of the study, but I’m going to highlight the three biggest.

The First Problem
As Adam points out, there were no differences between the men and women in this study in terms of IQ, verbal skill, education, or any other cognitive/social factor the researchers looked at. In other words, you cannot and should not use this study to argue that sexual dimorphism in the brain produces cognitive differences.

It’s not even a study about cognition. It’s an exploratory study of hormone receptors in the brain and whether or not they’re predictive of sexual dimorphism.

The Second Problem
The researchers did not find that men have “proportionately larger parietal lobes,” as Allen claims. The parietal lobe is a big place. The researchers looked at six different subregions of the parietal lobe. One (angular gyrus) was marginally proportionally larger in men, and one (posterior supramarginal gyrus) was marginally proportionally larger in women. The remaining regions were a total wash.

Ironically, the only cortical regions that showed truly statistically significant effects were all proportionally larger in women.

More ironically, the list of non-significant trends shows that women tend towards larger hippocampi (spatial learning and memory) while men tend towards larger amygdalae (emotion, especially fear).

The Third Problem
Yes, the parietal lobe is associated with spatial awareness and mental calculations. But the parietal lobe is not a “math region.” Math is a task that requires both spatial and verbal skills (math is, after all, a language with its own particular syntax and surely everyone here has solved a story problem or two), and as such it is performed by a large brain network that includes both spatial and verbal regions. It’s generally true that men have a small but consistent advantage in spatial skills while women have a small but consistent advantage in verbal skills, but you can’t conclude that there’s an overall advantage for math in either case, because math requires both sets of skills.

I’ll save the detailed analysis of sex differences in math achievement for another post, but suffice it to say that Charlotte Allen has no idea what she’s talking about. The only question that remains is whether she’s being willfully ignorant or intellectually dishonest.

—–

Addendum:

Adam has linked my blog from the aforementioned piece. Thanks, Adam!

And Charlotte Allen is continuing to demonstrate her complete lack of knowledge of neuroscience. The latest:

I think the idea is that the extra male brain size goes to parts of the brain [sic] good for visual-spatial skills.

Let’s look at that data, shall we?

The Goldstein paper reports that proportionally, men have larger cerebrums, more white matter, and larger ventricles while women have proportionally more area devoted to cortex.

For the non-neuroanatomically-inclined, I will explain this using our favorite analogy from intro neuropsych.

You have a watermelon. This is your cerebrum. The rind of the watermelon is the cortex. Underneath the cortex is white matter (though in our watermelon analogy it’s red). Inside your brain (but not the watermelon analogy), you also have four spaces. These are your ventricles.

So according to the Goldstein study, men have proportionally larger watermelons, but that extra size is on the inside. Women have proportionally more rind.

In studies of higher-order cognition (like math), we study the rind, because that’s where the cell bodies of the neurons live. The rind is where the neuronal computation that we call “thinking” happens. The stuff in the interior is important too, but Allen’s statement is pretty silly in the face of the actual science.

And thus far I haven’t even mentioned the biggest folly of this crude brain-based determinism: experience changes the structure of your brain. You pump more iron, you grow bigger biceps, right? Well, if you have a job in which you do a lot of spatial learning and memory, like being a London taxi driver, you grow more hippocampus.

So even if we had definitive evidence that adult males have larger “math regions” of the brain, whatever they are, and even if we could draw a direct link from brain size, whatever that means, to math achievement, the driving mechanism behind the math achievement gap could still be nurture and not nature.

Charlotte: FAIL. SO MUCH FAIL.

What makes me really irate about this sort of thing is that it directly makes my life harder. See, part of my job is to teach good science to undergrads. Every so often, I get one who has bought her kind of pseudo-scientific garbage hook, line, and sinker, and then I have to unwrap his or her brain from around the figurative telephone pole.

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Charlotte Allen: Maybe She’s Just a Terrible Satirist

Yvonne — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:08:18 +0000

It’s been suggested that maybe, just maybe, Ms. Allen was trying to be satirical. Tongue-in-cheek. JOKE’S ON YOU, HUMORLESS FEMINAZIS!!

Fine. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s garbage and shouldn’t have been published.

If Allen was trying to be satirical, she needs to go back to freshman comp and learn what satire is. Doonesbury is satire. The Onion’s War for the White House is satire. The opening of my favorite Mother Jones article is satire (the original Alice in Wonderland is also satire). Certain pieces of Allen’s article might reasonably be construed as satire, but the whole doesn’t hang together as a satirical work.

If you’re trying to write satire, you should not be devoting 15% of your space to mis-interpreting scientific research. If you’re trying to write satire, you should not repeatedly step on your own points with said scientific research.

This poster at Metafilter managed to say exactly what I tried to say yesterday, but with 99% fewer words:

Let me see if I can follow the rhetorical progression of this article here:

Some women, somewhere, are doing something the author does not approve of.

The author claims this means that all women are stupid.

The author supports her thesis with dubious studies she does not understand, to the extent that she actually cites results that undercut her own points (e.g., according to a study she cites, women have slightly more minor traffic accidents and a massively lower amount of fatal traffic accidents — about 60% fewer per passenger mile and an amazing 81% fewer as a measure of total traffic fatalities — which she claims proves that women are poorer drivers) …

Thus proving she is stupid.

See?

I do not think she has proven what she thinks she has proven. She has amply demonstrated point 4, but not point 2.

The problem is not that the paper published an unpopular article—challenging popular viewpoints is part of a newspaper’s job. The problem is that the paper published an article that is stylistically, structurally, and scientifically incoherent.

My undergrads who turn in that kind of miserable writing get Ds, but Charlotte Allen gets an op-ed in the Washington Post. Good grief.

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Charlotte Allen Bashing

Yvonne — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:51:50 +0000

Welcome, Charlotte Allen news-seekers! There are already two followups to this post, in which I deconstruct the “it’s satire” rebuttal and further debunk her scientific claims:

Everyone else is doing it, why can’t I?

Count me in as another one who wonders how this piece of utter garbage got published in the Washington Post.

I think hilzoy said it best

Note to Charlotte Allen: if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything.

but I want to address the nonsense that Allen tries to pass off as scientific truth.

The first sign that Allen doesn’t have the faintest idea what she’s talking about is this:

Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

First, if we are talking about crash rates, the datum about men driving more miles is unnecessary.

Second, the data might actually be used to show that women are safer drivers than men (which I believe is reflected in generally lower car insurance rates for women). The overall crash rate for women is only slightly higher than that for men, but women cause substantially fewer fatal accidents. The critical data we need here is the type of driving. I suspect that men do more freeway driving, which would lead to more fatal accidents due to the higher speeds. Never mind that this entire discussion ignores what is by far the best predictor of fatal crash rates: age.

Third, navigation is not crucial to good driving. Navigation is crucial to getting where you want to go. People can drive for miles and miles without having the faintest idea where they’re going, but be driving perfectly well. In fact, this is what a lot of driving simulators and driving tests have you do. You drive. Someone else tells you when to turn.

But she apparently likes the taste of her foot so much, that she sticks it in even further and starts chewing on her knee:

The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men’s and women’s brains not only look different, but men’s brains are bigger than women’s (even adjusting for men’s generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy.

Wrong on all counts.

Brain size (and what do you mean by “size” anyways? Mass? Volume?) is not a reliable indicator of intelligence. Visuospatial skills encompass much more than mental rotation, and their link to math and science achievement is a) tenuous, and b) stronger for men than for women.

And then she closes with this:

While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

In other words, she knows so little about statistics or about how to construct a coherent argument that she steps on her own point.

Which might be why she spends the next three paragraphs arguing for her own stupidity.

Here’s a thought, if you’re so dim, how about leaving the big-shot publishing gigs to people who are capable of serious thought?

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