Science > Complexity

Text Complexity with Carol Jago

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Text Complexity with Carol Jago
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR5sQc4fIs3sfxMYfj942ag
2014

Text complexity is something all teachers struggle with when selecting reading for their class. They can look at lexile levels, but that doesn’t always represent that text complexity or deeper meaning of the text.

Consultant Carol Jago discusses the considerations for navigating text complexity in this excerpt from one of a series of on-demand, point-of-use professional development podcasts available in Journeys Common Core, Grades K-6, Collections, Grades 6-12, and HMH Professional Development Services courses.

related:
https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2019/01/12/lexile-framework-for-reading

Random walks and the complexity of life

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complexityRandom walks and the complexity of life
By Casey Dunn
http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/caseywdunn/random_walk/blob/master/randomwalk.html

http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/evolution-youre-drunk

[http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/creature-cast/the_evolution_of_complexity_218422]

Welcome To The Entanglement

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Welcome To The Entanglement
July 15, 2016
Alva Noë
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/07/15/486141004/welcome-to-the-entanglement

It’s not just that the more we know, the more we realize how much more there is to know. It’s that the more we know, the less we seem to understand.
[related: https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/the-laws-of-physics-are-like-an-onion]

An earlier generation, before Galileo and Newton and Descartes, might have taken it for granted that there are realities — life, morality, freedom, God — that are simply beyond our comprehension.

What greater proof that we can understand and master reality than our ability, for example, to build a rocket, shoot it into space and hit the moon?

We have entered the Entanglement — the phrase is due to computer scientist Danny Hillis — an era in which our technologies themselves are so complex as to exceed what any of us can really grasp. It used to be thought that a “Renaissance Man” could know everything that was known. If Arbesman is right, no person alive today can even really understand everything that we human beings make.

The book is full of examples from the recent history of technology: from “correctly functioning” medical equipment administering lethal doses of radiation, to software instabilities wreaking havoc with global financial markets, to self-accelerating Toyotas.

We are like map-makers (a la Borges) whose maps are so complicated that we get lost in them

The riddle of experience vs. memory

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Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory
TED2010
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory
Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently.

complexity

14:20 What controls satisfaction:
– money
– goals
– spending time with people we like

The extraordinary complexity of modern life (1909)

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what perplexes every man today in every walk of life is the extraordinary complexity of modern life as compared with the life in the midst of which our grandfathers found themselves, as compared with the life in the midst of which the generation immediately preceding ours found itself.
The life of the present day is incalculably complex, and so many of its complexities are of recent rise and origin that we haven’t yet had time to understand just what they are or to assess the values of the new things that have come into our life.
Not only is life infinitely complex in our day as compared with the previous age, but learning is correspondingly complex.

philosophers from the beginning have said of this complex and interesting game we are playing. That is the field of philosophy.

You cannot tell whether he can do it until he has made the effort. I do not know of any other way of bringing out a mind than by obliging the person who is alleged to have one to use it; that is the only way in which you can determine whether he has one.”

from:
The Meaning of a Liberal Education  (1909)
by Woodrow Wilson
Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 18:593-606
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_a_Liberal_Education

related:

https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/games-and-apps-social-skills-and-schooling

https://www.aacu.org/leap/what-is-a-liberal-education

Economics Claims a Precision Rarely Found

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Economics Claims a Precision Rarely Found
Thanks for Mr. Roberts’s views on how dismal the science is in the dismal science.
May 24, 2016
http://www.wsj.com/articles/economics-claims-a-precision-rarely-found-1464121659

Regarding Kyle Peterson’s “The Weekend Interview with Russ Roberts: When All Economics Is Political” (May 14): … reliance on regression analysis to find confirmation of our preconceptions

… all systems, and especially economic systems, are highly nonlinear in how they respond over time to any disturbances to the system, especially human, but also natural, disturbances.
It is effectively impossible to include all effects in any model of such a system, so we simplify for the sake of obtaining a computational forecast estimate in our lifetime.
Unfortunately, any nonlinear system unwinds over time in ways not exactly predictable given the limits of our computational model.
It is hubris to think that more data can make predictions of large material, human, environmental and econometric ensembles more reliable.
This is commonly known in chaos theory as the butterfly effect.
Even meteorologists …

this is a letter to:
When All Economics Is Political
The dismal science has too much junk science, says Russ Roberts, an evangelist for humility in a discipline where it is often hard to find.
By Kyle Peterson
May 13, 2016
http://www.wsj.com/articles/when-all-economics-is-political-1463178093

The conflicting needs of security and surprise

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Are We Asking Too Much Of Our Spouses?
April 25, 2014
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/25/301825600/are-we-asking-too-much-of-our-spouses

Psychotherapist Esther Perel argues that a good and committed relationship draws on the conflicting needs of security and surprise.

Can desire be sustained in the long haul?

Can we want what we already have?

Happiness: we made it first a possibility and today it’s a mandate

Adventure. Novelty. Mystery. Risk. Danger. The Unknown. The Unexpected. Surprise.

Reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure in one relationship, used to be a contradiction in terms.

6:47 So we come to one person and we are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide.

Give me belonging. Give me identity.
Give me continuity, but give me transcendance, and mistery, and all in one.
Give me comfort, give me edge.
Give me novelty, give me familiarity.
Give me predictability. Give me surprise.

This dilemma, between our need for security and our need for adventure, how we’re trying to bring them together under one roof, is maybe more a paradox that we can manage and less a problem we can solve.

related:
http://www.npr.org/books/titles/146866856/mating-in-captivity-unlocking-erotic-intelligence

Complexity of the healthcare delivery system

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Understanding Error
Chapter 1: System Complexity
http://accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/multimedia.aspx?IsPSM=true&multimediaID=6416966

The overall goal of this module is to introduce the learner to the complexity of the healthcare delivery system that contributes to patient harm despite best intentions and efforts.
Specifically, this module will define characteristics of complex systems and describe a framework for examining the nature of real work in complex systems.

related:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/06/16/321682150/power-to-the-health-data-geeks

A Virtual Outbreak Offers Hints Of Ebola’s Future

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A Virtual Outbreak Offers Hints Of Ebola’s Future
August 14, 2014
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/08/14/340346575/a-virtual-outbreak-offers-hints-of-ebolas-future

“I’ve spent a lot of time doing computer models of disease transmission, but rarely does it involve something in Africa. Africa is often overlooked,” says Bryan Lewis, a computational epidemiologist at Virginia Tech.

“Some of those factors are the ones that are hard to measure,” he says. “You’ve got to choose how much of this complexity you care to explicitly represent.”

“At the moment, these models — at least for Sierra Leone and Liberia — we aren’t putting in any mitigating factors.

Given that all this modeling is as much an art as a science, different groups working on the problem have been comparing notes. They’ve also been fielding calls from government officials and policymakers.

Martin Meltzer, who heads up the unit at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that’s been creating computer models of the outbreak, says that people always ask him the same two questions: “How many people are going to die, and when is this going to end?“