Planets in the sky

What if the other planets in the solar system were orbiting the Earth in place of the Moon? This is what it would look like:

Beating probability

Since we just finished doing a bit of probabilities in math, here’s an article about how one guy figured out how to beat the lottery.

The first lottery Mohan Srivastava decoded was a tic-tac-toe game run by the Ontario Lottery in 2003. He was able to identify winning tickets with 90 percent accuracy.
–Lehrer (2010) in Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

However, he decided not to just try to get rich of what he’d discovered. It’s an example of using the power of math for good:

“People often assume that I must be some extremely moral person because I didn’t take advantage of the lottery,” [Srivastava] says. “I can assure you that that’s not the case. I’d simply done the math and concluded that beating the game wasn’t worth my time.”

As a side note, my philosophy about the lottery is that it’s basically a tax on the poor:

[H]igh-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics refer to lotteries as a regressive tax. (In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy.)
–Lehrer (2010): Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

First Draft of History

A first draft of why it happened must begin in a rural town in Tunisia on the shores of the Mediterranean where Mohamed Bouazizi was the unlikeliest catalyst of the extraordinary realignment in the region.
— Sharrock et al. 2010: Egypt: how the people span the wheel of their country’s history

David Sharrock, Jack Shenker and Paul Harris just posted an excellent, big picture, article in The Guardian about the events leading up to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak.

The article starts with the corruption that provoked Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia and makes the connection to Khaled Said death at the hands of the Egyptian police. The descriptions of these events are graphic, so be warned. Sharrock et al., go on to describe how the Egyptian protesters were able to use technology to organize in a way that has not been possible before. The article ends with the vacillating moves of the Obama administration as it was buffeted by events in Egypt.

“This time we were determined to do something different – be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces], giving us the chance to walk down hundreds of different roads and show normal passers-by that taking to the streets was actually possible.”

The plan worked better than they could ever have imagined. Throughout the capital and across the country, pockets of protest sprung up and overpowered the thinly stretched riot police, who had no choice but to let the marches continue. Later, when the different strands rallied in city centres – including Cairo’s symbolic Tahrir Square –the police used guns and tear gas to disperse them.

But it was already too late. By destroying the smokescreen of police invincibility, even for only a few hours, the youths had pierced Mubarak’s last line of defence – the fear his subjects felt at the thought of confronting him – and a fatal blow was struck to a 30-year dictatorial regime.

— Sharrock et al. 2010: Egypt: how the people span the wheel of their country’s history

This piece is a bit long, and the vocabulary a bit advanced, for the average middle school student, but it is an excellent summary and first draft of history.

egypt-celebration-02 — After hard work, great risk, and sacrifice, euphoria.

Negative Feedback is Important

For success to occur, many things must go right: The person must be skilled, apply effort, and perhaps be a bit lucky. For failure to occur, the lack of any one of these components is sufficient. Because of this, even if people receive feedback that points to a lack of skill, they may attribute it to some other factor.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)

If we’re not skilled at something then only practice and learning can remedy the situation. But, according to Kruger and Dunning (1999), human nature tends to try to blame other things, like luck, instead of our own lack of skill when things go wrong. Interestingly, we’re even resistant to thinking that our lack of skill is the problem, even when we’re given that negative feedback.

So an essential skill for the student is to learn how to take criticism constructively. Self-awareness, metacognition, and the ability to be honest with oneself are important. Let this be a warning:

“One of the ways people gain insight into their own competence is by comparing themselves with others.” “Incompetent individuals fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing the behavior of other people.”
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)

P.S. Note that “incompetent” is used here to express a level of knowledge and skill that can be improved on to become “competent”. Incompetence is not a fixed quality, unless you let it be.

P.P.S. This is another reason why it’s important that students share their work with one another and the class. The best work tends to ratchet up the standards and expectations.

Egyptian Protest Simulation

For the record, the following was my attempt to simulate the current Egyptian protests. I tried this one afternoon after the class had watched a particularly stirring video of the protesters, and my intention was to give students with a simplified picture of what was going on and who was doing it. We’re not covering revolutions until next year, but the current events in Egypt are too important to ignore.

The Players

1. Hosni Mubarak

Hosni_Mubarak_ritratto — Hosni Mubarak. (Image by Presidenza della Repubblica via Wikimedia Commons)

Hosni Mubarak is the President of Egypt and autocrat for the last thirty years. I tried to match students, in a rough and ready way, to the personality/characteristics of the people and groups they were supposed to represent, so for Mubarak I picked someone who could think fast on their feet and would play the role to the end, not giving up easily to the demonstrators just because they (as I believe all my students are) are sympathetic to their cause.

2. The Secret Police (also pro-regime “protesters”)

egypt-id — This ID is of an undercover security officer who tried to start a fight, he was apprehended but not hurt, however, he said he was paid to come and start trouble. (via Al Jazerra English)

The student playing the secret police was given a weapon, a popsicle stick, with which he could attack the protesters, but was not powerful enough to “kill” anyone on its own. He had to follow the instruction of Mr. Mubarak. I chose one of my more kinetically oriented students for this role, and he spent a lot of time crawling under tables and harassing the protesters as they tried to make their signs.

I tried the simulation in class before the overnight battles where pro-Mubarak “protesters” attempted to take Tahrir Square, so I just briefed the student tasked with this job that he was the dreaded secret police. However, given that the anti-government protesters were able to beat of their attackers, and that police ID was found on captured attackers, I think the pro-government rioters can be lumped in with the secret police.

3. Barack Obama

Official_portrait_of_Barack_Obama — Barack Obama.

I chose my student whose major ambition is to be president for this role. He’s quite serious about it, and follows world politics, so could handle the tricky balance of deciding if to support a client who has provided stability (until now), as opposed to supporting the pro-democracy protesters, as his predilections would demand.

4. The Army

Egypt political crisis — Egyptian Army tanks in Tahrir Square in Cairo. (Image from Al Jazeera English)

This was another tricky role to play. The top brass tend to support the regime, while the enlisted soldiers and lower-level officers have shown support for the anti-government protesters. There was even a story of a lower level officer joining the protesters because his brother had been killed in the protests. The Army also has the tanks and power to decide things one way or the other if they so choose. They’re also well respected.

I gave the student playing the Army a simulated gun, but told him, in secret, that he only had three bullets, not enough to “kill” all the protesters.

5. The “People”

egypt-TV — The quiet majority. (Image from Al Jazeera English)

Despite all the people protesting in Tahrir Square, the vast majority of the population of Cairo are at home, worrying, watching things unfold on TV, trying to figure out what’s going on and what to do.

My quietest student got this job, one who could exhibit a lot of restraint, and be reluctant to do anything radical. They were instructed that their main role was to worry, but, if things got so bad that they had to take sides, whichever side they took would win. They were that powerful, but unaware or fearful of using that power.

6. Student Protesters

Despite the smile on the face of the student protester in the adjacent image, I instructed the student representing the young student protesters in Tahrir Square that those students were, at the core, angry and frustrated. They are educated so they know a bit of history and about politics. They know what things could be like, how things could be.

7&8. The Muslim Brotherhood

protest-egypt-02 — The Muslim Brotherhood.

I assigned two students to be the Muslim Brotherhood, given their relative size. They wrote their protest sign using Arabic characters since the Brotherhood, with all their charities, represent the poorer, less educated people (so they’re less likely to have English as a second language).

My students were told they were pious and work closely together, to represent the religious background of the Brotherhood and the discipline of the organization.

9. Middle Class Protesters

protest-egypt-03 — Middle class protester with young child.

In between the major street battles, when the protests swelled to their largest size, the middle class protesters came out. They have something to loose but want the best for their kids. Some of them brought their kids.

They’re educated and probably have a decent income. Although they’re not the loudest or most angry, these are the kind of people with the high per-capita incomes that you want for any new democracy to succeed.

10. Mohammed ElBaradei

Mohamed_ElBaradei — Mohamed ElBaradei (image from the IAEA).

ElBaradei is an interesting character in all the turmoil in Egypt. Westernized and liberal-minded, he’s spent a lot of time working for international organizations but has only focused on Egyptian politics in the last few years. As such, he doesn’t seem to have much of a grass-roots constituency.

I try to get my students to argue with me on the basis of logic rather than anything else, and I chose a student who’s rather good at it for this role. Protests, however, are driven more by logic than emotion. So when this student got frustrated and gave up after trying to organize the protesters, who they were all too busy making their signs, I thought added some unexpected verisimilitude to the simulation. (I had to prod them quite a bit to wrap up on the signmaking, otherwise we’d have gotten nothing else done for the rest of the day).

Missing

Putting all this together quickly did mean that I probably missed some major players, including, I suspect, the important role of the media.

Putting it all together

With the actors in place (and signs finally ready), my protesters marched on the square. The Army was caught in between the protesters and Mr. Mubarak. The “People” watched from the sidelines. Everyone had their say, from the perspective of their group, but I had to do a little coaching to keep them to their assigned tasks.

No one won in our simulation. It ended in a stalemate, because the only actor capable of bringing things to a conclusive end, the Army, could not decide which side to choose. Which is pretty much where Egypt has been for the last week. Until today.

Graphing discussion threads

wikipedia-threads — Graphic representation of the Wikipedia discussions about deleting articles. The image links to an interactive version of the graphic at http://notabilia.net .

Swings to the right are arguments for keeping the article, swings to the left are arguments to delete them. Moritz Stefaner and others’ website have created this wonderful graphic of Wikipedia’s discussion threads. They have lots more details and discussions on their website.