How Your Church Can Transform Its Neighborhood

Public School #3 in Englewood

This is an insightful piece from Chris Smith, editor of The Englewood Review of Books. Chris is married to one of my high school friends and attends the same church as my wife’s brother and his family in Indianapolis. In this article, he details how their church went from a failed attempt at being a mega-church to having a huge impact on their down-trodden neighborhood in a poor area of the Near Eastside of Indy. Here’s a taste:

Englewood is a tiny postage stamp of a neighborhood on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis. In many ways it’s a stereotypical abandoned urban neighborhood. Located at the heart of the ZIP code with the highest rate of vacant housing in the state, our neighborhood continues to see occupancy rates plummet. But there are signs of hope.

On Rural Street, the century-old Indianapolis Public School #3 building (which has not functioned as a school since 1979) is being converted into 32 units of gorgeous, mixed-income housing. It will be the first development in the state to integrate market-rate and affordable housing with supportive housing for people coming directly out of homelessness or severe mental illness. Right behind the school, a vacant lot once covered with asphalt is now a community garden that has expanded every year for the past decade. And just south of the garden and school building, on the exterior of a commercial building on Washington Street that was once home to a seedy used appliance store, a local artist is painting historical scenes from Wonderland, the amusement park that graced our neighborhood a century ago.

In the midst of this surprising renewal is Englewood Christian Church, a failed megachurch that spiraled downward with the neighborhood. How is it that our congregation, now about 200, was able to help orchestrate these strains of change? The short answer: We learned to talk to each other.

To read what that listening lead to, check out the piece here. It is worth the read. I think many of us could learn from this example. Rather than attempting to tell our neighborhood how they can improve, let us listen to their dreams and goals, and figure out how to partner with them and show them the love of God as we work along side of them.

Science Fiction Becomes Real

Kepler-16b: the only world known to be orbiting a binary star system. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

With the recent release of the Blu-Ray version of Star Wars (you can buy me a copy here if you’d like!), it was interesting to see this news posted on the Discovery Channel web site Friday. Here is the gist of it:

If you could stand on the surface of Kepler-16b, you’d have two shadows. At sunset, you would see an orange star about the size of the sun and next to it a much fainter red star. As the stars slipped toward the horizon, they would change places in the sky, like partners in a square dance.

You would not need to be Luke Skywalker visiting his home planet of Tatooine in the movie “Star Wars” to watch the twin sunset. The only science fiction in this story is how to make the 200 light-year journey to Kepler-16, a binary star system jointly sharing the Saturn-sized planet, Kepler-16b.

You can read the rest here, but this is a pretty fun coincidence of science and science fiction.

Luke Skywalker Views the Double Sunset in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

Technology: Good or Bad for Teaching?

Students using an interactive whiteboard, part of an ambitious technology plan in the Kyrene School District in Arizona.

Thanks to AP Stat teacher, personal friend, and fellow Messiah College alum Doug Tyson for pointing out this article. The article points out the clear lack of convincing statistical data to prove that the mad rush to have the latest technology is actually paying off in improved student performance. Here is a taste:

To be sure, test scores can go up or down for many reasons. But to many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.

This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements. Advocates for giving schools a major technological upgrade — which include powerful educators, Silicon Valley titans and White House appointees — say digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets.

Some backers of this idea say standardized tests, the most widely used measure of student performance, don’t capture the breadth of skills that computers can help develop. But they also concede that for now there is no better way to gauge the educational value of expensive technology investments.

“The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data,” said Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an investor in educational technology companies. When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”

Lots more details and discussion in the article, and it is definitely something that is worth considering for those of us trying to help our students learn as much as possible. Here at Messiah, I still teach on a blackboard with chalk in most of my classes, and mix in presentations only as I find it helpful (not that much in most classes). I don’t use clickers, though I do ask for student reactions, and sometimes have informal “votes” to see what students think the answer is. Perhaps this has to do with my subject area (statistics and math), or my own biases. Any reaction or thoughts on either side of the experience from my readers in the classroom, either as teachers/professors or students? Here is a graphic from the article. My former students should be able to spot a problem in the three graphs on the left.

Managing Search Engines

A couple of interesting posts today about search engines. (HT: Messiah College librarian Beth Transue) The first from the back end/business side, trying to optimize their placement in search results. The second discusses how Google’s search engine essentially filters the results we see, and so reinforces our current beliefs, rather than exposing us to a wide variety of unfiltered results.

Let’s start with the business side. Ken Mueller offers the following introduction:

The other day I was sitting in a client’s office for a meeting when they got a phone call. The person who answered listened, then looked at her boss (my client) and said:

“Do we want to be on the front page of Google and Bing?”

Without missing a beat, my client replied:

“No.”

Now, it’s not that my client doesn’t want to be on the “front page of Google”. It’s that she understands that this is basically, at worst, a scam, and at best, empty promises.

You may have even gotten one of these calls. They often ask you if you want to be on the “first page” or “front page” of Google, and in some cases I’ve heard them say,

“There’s an opening on the first page of Google, are you interested?”

as if slots open up and it’s there job to help fit you in.

If you get these calls, I hope you’ll run the other way. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Mueller then offers seven suggestions and then some final words. See the whole thing here, especially if you are working in a position where trying to optimize search engine results is of great importance to you or your employer.

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Results for Articles Returned from a Common Google News Search by Different Users

In the other article, by Mary Ellen Bates at Librarian of Fortune, offers a quick take on the reports of the effects that Google searches have upon the news and sites that are returned when you search. Bates assumed that the effect was real on general searches, but was skeptical that the effect was as pronounced with searches using Google News. She did her own (admittedly) informal study, and was surprised by the results. Here is a taste:

What I found surprised me; there was more variation among search results than I had expected. Knowing that a graphic is worth 1000 bytes (or something like that), here are a few ways of telling the story.

Caveat: I was a philosophy major in college and never had to take a stats course, so this analysis was done without the benefit of any relevant skills. I’m happy to go through the details of my analysis with you if you’re interested, or if you would like to share your thoughts on other ways to display this information.

And then she concludes:

Bottom line: Holy moley, Google does filter the news. You really need to go beyond the first few search results if you want to get a relatively well-rounded view of the news.

I’ve offered one of her graphs above, but there are several in her post. She explains each of her graphs, and what she thinks they mean. Bates talks more about her methodology after the body of her post, and it leaves much to be desired statistically. I would like to see a more appropriately designed study, including information on demographics of those included in the study in order to see how that might have affected the search results seen. Still, the results, basic as they are, are likely indicative of  a real “filtering” of results, and is troubling if your goal is unfiltered news, or think our country would benefit from hearing and understanding those we don’t agree with.

The (Shorter?) Ride Home

Interesting, in light of my recent post about homesickness, that I just read this article by Joe Palca today (published yesterday on NPR) about the frequent perception that the ride home from a trip is shorter than the trip to the destination, even if they take the same amount of time.

In 1969, astronaut Alan Bean went to the moon as the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12. Although the trip going to the moon covered the same distance as the trip back, “returning from the moon seemed much shorter,” Bean says.

People will often feel a return trip took less time than the same outbound journey, even though it didn’t. In the case of Apollo 12, the trip back from the moon really did take somewhat less time. But the point remains that this so-called “return trip effect” is a very real psychological phenomenon, and now a new scientific study provides an explanation.

Niels van de Ven, a psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, says the conventional wisdom is the trip back seems shorter because it’s more familiar, so people recognize landmarks. “And that might help to increase the feeling of speed, of how fast you travel,” he says.

But that didn’t seem right to him. “When I take, for example, an airplane, I also have this feeling, and I don’t recognize anything on my way, of course. When I look out of the window, I don’t see something I recognize,” van de Ven says.

Van de Ven’s project is then described. His results indicate that there is something psychological going on, since there is a perceived difference even when the time is unique. You can read the whole piece here, but you might not want to. As Palca concludes:

It’s true that the return home effect is just an illusion, and a better understanding of it might make it go away. But van de Ven says that might not be a good idea.

“In the end, this return trip effect gives you a positive feeling once you get home, so I’m not sure whether you want it to go away.”

Update: A Response on Math Ed

After this recent post on the state of mathematics education, I was pointed to this response by Al Cuoco (HT: former guest blogger Corey Andreasen). Here is the introduction:

A recent editorial in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html

puts forth a plan to “fix math education.”

I’m disappointed.

The arguments presented are variations on themes that have surfaced (and been debunked) several times over the past century.  The ones in this NYT piece are especially weak examples of this genre.

Cuoco then proceeds to deal with the article point by point, and correct what he feels are incorrect characterizations of the real standards. At the end, he concludes:

In the field tests of early versions of our precalculus course, we held an advisory board meeting of high school juniors and seniors (many of them “very weak” in terms of traditional measures).  This was at the end of the first term; up to that point, students had been experimenting with recursively defined functions, modeled in a CAS on their calculators, finding closed forms for such functions, proving that their closed forms and the recursive models were equal on the non-negative integers by mathematical induction, and then doing a bit with Lagrange interpolation.  At the meeting, Wayne Harvey asked the question, “What’s different about this course from others you have taken?”  Four kids answered, almost in unison, “It’s more realistic.” That response was startling, even to us, because “realistic” is usually taken to imply everyday or other “real world” contexts, and this was purely mathematical. But what the kids meant was that it felt more like real work, more like the kind of thinking they must do when they are solving a real problem—what mattered was that they got a chance to exercise their own creativity.  What mattered was how, not where, their mathematics was used.

This issue of viable and engaging contexts is complicated for a couple reasons.   Many of the students in my high school classes came from situations that many of us would find hard to imagine; the last thing they cared about was how to balance a checkbook or figure the balance on a savings account. But they loved solving problems.  For another thing, reality is relative. The authors claim that “it is through real-life applications that mathematics emerged in the past, has flourished for centuries and connects to our culture now,” and I agree.  But the best mathematicians and scientists I know, and the students in my classes who really got it (and these were not necessarily the “good students”)—who saw the power and satisfaction one can derive from doing mathematics—all see mathematics as part of their real world.

You can read the full response here.

Once again, I’m not really an expert on high school mathematics education, so I am willing to admit that I might have “fallen” for the misrepresentation of the standards. Andreasen certainly seems to be endorsing the view expressed by Cuoco. We have plenty of departmental alumni out there teaching, and many of my friends from the AP Statistics work that I do teach in the high school setting. Any of you want to offer your perspective to help me understand the discussion better?

Feeling Homesick?

Interesting article from George Mason’s History News Network on the feeling of homesickness, and its long predicted demise. (HT: John Fea) For over one hundred years pundits have predicted that advancing means of technology, especially in communication, would help to end homesickness. Lately, it has been thought that the pervasiveness (or perniciousness, if you prefer) of franchised chain stores and restaurants have added to the logic used by those who make such predictions. Of course, most first semester college students, military overseas, missionaries, and others relocating for some period of time will attest that homesickness, in varying degrees, is still alive and well. Here is a taste from the article:

Today it is easier to recreate home than ever before.  Brand names, chain stores, computers, and cell phones allow the displaced to live in the midst of images and objects similar to those left behind.  The mass-produced goods and entertainment of multinational companies offer comfort to migrants precisely because they are mass-produced, identical to what they had at home, and much easier to obtain than mother’s home-baked goodies were a century ago.  Here the contradictions of capitalism are on display:  Some fault it for uprooting individuals, destroying all sense of home and place, replacing the distinctive and particular with the identical and the anonymous, the small friendly grocery with the big box store.  Yet capitalism, with its technologies of reproducing, of mass producing, which can be so destructive, also offers familiarity through those very processes.  Because corporate capitalism seeks the broadest possible market, it blankets large parts of the earth with identical tastes, sounds, images.  The corporatized, homogenized landscapes filled with Burger Kings and Walmarts provoke aesthetic nausea in some, but for many on the move, they offer a sense of the known and the familiar.  Chains obliterate all differences, but this is one of their selling points to uprooted migrants.  Perhaps home is where the Walmart is.

Take Ricardo Valencia, who moved from Guadalajara to Pahrump, Nevada in 2005, to support his family in Mexico.  The day after arriving, he thought, “I want to leave! Because I’ve always been really close with my family . . . . But I had to stand it, we had to stand it.”  To cope with his homesickness, he called home and emailed family.  More notably, he visited places that reminded him of home.  Some were chain stores, for in Guadalajara he shopped at Office Depot, Walmart, Sam’s Club.  He visited those stores in Nevada and found in them the “same things, things I had purchased for my children, my wife [in Mexico].”  When lonesome, he’d go to Walmart and buy toys for his children.  “Objects mentally transported me with my family.”

So, does the author think we have this thing beat? Hardly. I think this also has had an effect on our students here at Messiah College, and is something that churches think about when looking to attract new members. Messiah asks how it can make students feel somewhat at home and comfortable during the adjustment to campus. Churches tend to use certain songs because they are comfortable and known. New songs are slowly introduced, but never too many at a time. Those moving from one area to another look for church home that sings the songs they know and enjoy from their previous church. For the authors more secular take, check out the rest here, and feel free to offer your thoughts in the comments below.

The Difference in the First Week

Thanks to John Fea’s Sunday Night Odds and Ends post for this reminder that the first week of classes is never quite the same as the rest of the semester, and therefore can be a poor predictor of the rest of the semester:

If you’ve taught before, or even just been a student before (which I trust all ProfHacker readers have been), you know that the first week of the semester (or quarter) is not like the rest of the weeks to come. This means that, however your first week played out, it is not predictive of the next three months.

But it’s easy to forget that you’ve been through the first week of the term before. Maybe a better one, maybe a worse one. But you got through it and probably don’t even remember it all that clearly any longer. Here are a few of the reasons why whatever happened last week (or will happen next week, depending on your calendar) is unique to the first week of the term.

The author lists these five points of uniqueness:

1. Everyone’s routines just changed.
2. Something will malfunction.
3. “Should I stay or should I go?” is the first week’s theme song.
4. You didn’t sleep well
5. You’ve just met a bunch of new people.

I would add at least one more big uniqueness:

• There is no graded work: I made some practice assignments, and announced a quiz for this week, but I don’t get enough accomplished in the first week to collect anything I’ll be grading. I would be surprised if most courses start collecting graded work within the first week of classes, especially since we started on Tuesday, so each class had only two meetings.

You can read the details of ProfHacker’s take here. I’ll be busy beginning week two here at Messiah College. Yes, even though it is Labor Day, we still have classes!

On Campaign Negativity

An interesting discussion of the effect of negative (or attack) campaign ads was sparked by the recent lead-up to the recall elections in Wisconsin. (For the motivation for these recall elections, you can see this post from a guest blogger and this post on the accusations aimed at the governors campaign, and the discussion in the comments sections.) This article looks at the breakdown on the campaign funding in the largest metro areas of Wisconsin, and uses that as a launching off point for a discussion of the effects of such negative campaigns. (This data indicates that only 5% of the ads were positive!)

This time, says Goldstein, “I’ll say it. I’ve never seen a campaign more negative.”

Goldstein is being descriptive, not judgmental. “Negative” ads aren’t inherently “bad.” They can be false or true, fair or unfair, issue-based or personal, as can “positive” ads. The sleaziest campaign ads are almost always negative ads. But so are the most informative, some studies suggest.

Why was this campaign so “negative?”

Goldstein offers several reasons. There were big stakes. The outcome was in doubt (competitive elections generate more negative ads). Most of the money was spent by independent groups, which tend to be more exclusively attack-oriented than candidates are. The challengers and their allies were making a case for recalling incumbent lawmakers. Incumbents and their allies had a counter-strategy of “disqualifying” their challengers (making them too unpalatable to consider voting for).  Both sides were serving up hard-hitting rhetoric aimed at turning out their base.

And later:

In a paper on the 2010 ad wars, Fowler and Rideout wrote that the heavily negative advertising in that cycle could have had a variety of consequences, based on previous research on the subject: it could have turned off some voters; it could have motivated others to vote by raising the political stakes; it could have even produced a more informed electorate, since negative ads tend to be more policy-oriented than positive ads.

For years, scholars have studied and debated these effects. One hugely influential study in the 1990s argued that negative ads reduce voter participation by essentially turning people off. But that study came at a time when turnout in America was declining and scholars were looking for explanations for that trend. Turnout has actually ticked upward in recent cycles (a period when negative advertising has increased).

Goldstein came to a different conclusion in his own academic research: that negative advertising, whether you like it or not, sometimes increased turnout. He examined ad data, election returns and voter surveys over the course of a decade.

“We never found it depressed turnout, and we never found it decreased knowledge,” he said.

For the numbers from Wisconsin, and the full discussion, check out the rest here.

Another Case of Bad Studies Getting More Press

After yesterday’s post about bad science, I came across this article about another scientist that is being singled out for nothing more (apparently) than pointing out that the better studies show the weakest link between soda and childhood obesity. I would think this would be good news, but apparently not. And ABC seems to be in on the scheme to discredit him. Check it out:

On June 21 ABC News posted a story on its website insinuating that “Big Food,” had corrupted one of the nation’s leading nutrition researchers, biostatistician David Allison.

A Distinguished Professor and Director of the National Institutes of Health-funded Clinical Nutrition Research Center at the University of Alabama, Allison received a presidential award in 2006 for his contributions to mentoring students and increasing the participation of minorities, women and disabled students in science.

But, oddly, the story didn’t run on air – and wasn’t broadcast until the nadir of summer’s dead zone, just before Labor Day weekend, when George Stephanopoulos announced that ABC reporter Dan Harris had some “tough questions” about “one scientist who stands out for questioning the link” between sugary soda and obesity in the face of “study after study” showing such a link.

As I noted on June 22, Allison doesn’t stand out at all. In fact, he says what the US Department of Agriculture expert panel on nutrition says about the evidence on soda and weight gain (a panel made up of leading academics in the field) – and what the majority of clinical reviews of the evidence have concluded: the quality of the science claiming a link is poor. There is a lack of the kind of study – randomized control trials – that can actually prove a causal link.

However, Allison also caused a stir in the field of nutrition by showing that the bias in obesity research was greater among independent researchers who claimed an association between soda and weight gain than it was among the industry supported studies which either found weak or no associations (note that Allison didn’t discount the presence of some bias in industry research).

Indeed, the stronger the association, the less statistical rigor the study had. This research has royally teed off a clique of scientists who a) did these studies, and b) have been demanding that soda be seen as the new tobacco and taxed out of people’s diets.

Read the whole article here, and his 22 June post here. The original post is much more detailed about the scientific research on the subject. Again, not the worst example, but another example in the trend.