17th Century Science Ciphers

Did you know? It was common in the 17th Century for scientists to publish cipher-versions of early findings, so as to establish priority in the discovery. (Something of an early, public-encrypted arXiv, as it were.) Huygens wrote in 1668:

a way of securing his discoveries and inventions for the future by way of cypher or anagram, to be lodged in the Register-book of the society, till he should think it convenient to explain them in a common language; making withal a beginning of this way of communicating new discoveries by sending the following cypher; which was ordered to be entered into the Register-book.

Stack Exchange: Skeptics.

Oxford: Likely Alone in Universe

A new assessment from Oxford University finds it quite likely that humans are alone in the universe:

Our main result is to show that proper treatment of scientific uncertainties dissolves the Fermi paradox by showing that it is not at all unlikely ex ante for us to be alone in the Milky Way, or in the observable universe.

Our second result is to show that, taking account of observational bounds on the prevalence of other civilizations, our updated probabilities suggest that there is a substantial probability that we are alone.

Fortune.

Gates Foundation Considered Harmful

Independent assessment of the Gates Foundation's intervention in the last decade, to the tune of $575 million, shows it not just to be wasteful, but even actively damaging:

Laudable as the intention may have been, it didn’t work. As the independent assessment, produced by the Rand Corporation, put it: “The initiative did not achieve its goals for student achievement or graduation,” particularly for low-income minority students. The report, however, stops short of drawing what I see as the more important conclusion: The approach that the Gates program epitomizes has actually done damage. It has unfairly ruined careers, driving teachers out of the profession amid a nationwide shortage. And its flawed use of metrics has undermined science.

Cathy O'Neil at Bloomberg.

Growth Mindset Found Lacking

Large-scale meta-study at Michigan State finds that the "growth mindset" intervention that's been all the rage for the last few years doesn't actually accomplish much:

"This research is important because millions of dollars have been spent on growth mindset interventions in schools," said Alex Burgoyne, a Ph.D. student studying cognition and cognitive neuroscience. "Our results show that the academic benefits of these interventions have been largely overstated. For example, there was little to no effect of mindset interventions on academic achievement for typical students, or for other groups who some have claimed benefit substantially from these interventions, including students facing situational challenges, such as transitioning to a new school."

Medical Xpress.

Illustration of Platonic Solids

A very nice illustration of why there are only 5 regular polyhedra (Platonic solids), by Martin Holtham on Twitter:

Stop Grading on a Curve in New York Times

By Adam Grant in The New York Times, two years ago:

The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that’s toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.

The New York Times

Animal Numerosity Everywhere

The NY Times reports on a themed issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, in that many animals have impressive built-in numerosity ability: being able to distinguish between quantities between one and five, say, or proportionally in how 25 is different than 30. In some cases, better than humans: monkeys can visually identify certain number sequences in a split-second.

We are reminded of when Noam Chomsky conjectured that enumeration might be the first mental stepping stone on the way to language -- or how apt it is that we call the "natural numbers" by that name.

Scientists have found that animals across the evolutionary spectrum have a keen sense of quantity, able to distinguish not just bigger from smaller or more from less, but two from four, four from ten, forty from sixty.

Orb-weaving spiders, for example, keep a tally of how many silk-wrapped prey items are stashed in the “larder” segment of their web. When scientists experimentally remove the cache, the spiders will spend time searching for the stolen goods in proportion to how many separate items had been taken, rather than how big the total prey mass might have been.

Small fish benefit from living in schools, and the more numerous the group, the statistically better a fish’s odds of escaping predation. As a result, many shoaling fish are excellent appraisers of relative head counts.

Guppies, for example, have a so-called contrast ratio of .8, which means they can distinguish at a glance between four guppies and five, or eight guppies and ten, and if given the chance will swim toward the slightly fishier crowd.

Three-spined sticklebacks are more discriminating still: with a contrast ratio of .86, they’re able to tell six fellow fish from seven, or 18 from 21 — a comparative power that many birds, mammals and even humans might find hard to beat.

New York Times.