Data Encoding

Today I had the misfortune to be looking at the latest draft output from one of the Ministries, those warded Grand Temples of the Meritokratia of Atlantis. The earnest young priests had coded two different functions with the same range of codes, then used that range of codes differently elsewhere.

Here is an hypothetical example of how it would have worked in practice.

Let's say that a person is the target of an imaginary ailment like Maladrach's Pyriferous Pustules. Then the possible procedures for treating it are MPP-01 (douse in water), MPP-02 (dowse for water), MPP-03 (pop the pustules), MPP-04 (pop the postulant), MPP-05 (postulate a pop). And the outcomes of the treatment might be MPP-06 (full recovery), MPP-07 (terminal spontaneous combustion), MPP-08 (referral to pyrothaumaturgic specialist) and so on.

Of course, you can't tell by inspection whether you're looking at a treatment or an outcome, since the code MPP is the same! Worse, if you have new treatments, you can't insert one after MPP-05, since you used running numbers for the outcomes that start immediately after MPP-05.

To make matters worse, these people decide that for smaller practitioners with fewer options, you could use MPP-01 (douse in water), MPP-02 (dowse for water), MPP-03 (full recovery), MPP-04 (referral to a specialist) and so on.

In other words, the same codes are used to represent completely different things in a different context.

If I had been coding, I would at the very least have used something more like MPPP-001 to MPPP-nnn for MPP Procedures, and MPPO-001 to MPPO-nnn for MPP Outcomes. And I would have reserved MPPP-nnnn and MPPO-nnnn for future use in case wonder-working turned out to be more complicated than the present state of the art.

It's a shame that the OSA probably prevents me from showing you, dear readers, the very slides themselves. Then you would see and be scandalized both by the great waste of your tax dollars and the calibre of the brains consuming said dollars.

January Session

For some reason, January is when all the budding epistemologists crawl out of their winter depression to hunt the elusive responses to questions on the theory of knowledge. It is interesting to see how one can be of help and yet not so helpful.

Just the other day, I had a note from a young person saying, "Errm, could you make your responses easier to understand so I can put them in my essay?"

I wasn't quite sure how to answer that one. I admit my ramblings are not always easy to understand — hey, in retrospect I myself can't figure out a few of them. But mostly, they aren't so difficult, and they do make some sort of sense.

Over the years, the time-sensitivity of human knowledge needs has increased to the point where impatience has become a counter-virtue. Everything is needed quickly with minimum effort. Every fix must be shot up into the brain, bypassing the sensible metabolism of useful filters.

It distresses me. It leads to problems with universal attention span and ability to retain stuff. Recently, I discovered that Primary 4 students (children mostly turning 10 that year) learn all the facts about air that O-level students (young people mostly turning 16 that year) need to know. Yet I've noticed that for some reason, most of the 16 year olds have forgotten all of it.

Then again, when I was in school, carbon dioxide levels were at 0.03%, and now they're at 0.042%; they've gone up 40% (yes, yes, confusing, I know) since then. Some things need to be updated and the latest figures used, certainly. But topics like discussing how doubt is the key to knowledge will never go out of fashion.

Learn to live with that, young people. Learn.

Logicality

Sometimes I listen idly to the flow of words around me, more often truncated than not. As an educator, I realise that subjects get abbreviated — biology is 'bio', 'geography' is 'geog', chemistry is 'chem', and so on.

But sometimes, this truncation is a state of mind. Some of these young people are actually studying bio, not biology. What is in their heads is more akin to bios, just the things of life itself, without the accompanying logos or conceptual structure.

Sometimes, this happens with the best of intentions. Modern history is taught in part through skill-based learning. Sources are given, the task is to evaluate them and determine their relative credibility and come to some conclusions — acts of an historian. Yet, at the same time, we mustn't neglect the big sweep of things, the river within which these are molecules and droplets.

We all know stuff in different ways. There are things like functional knowledge, technical knowledge, academic knowledge — they serve different needs and fill different cognitive niches. You can know 'how to' (in theory or practice), you can know 'what is' (in the affirmative or negative) — knowledge is an answer to something that needs an answer.

And how to obtain knowledge is one of the knowledge-handling skills, just as 'how to disseminate it', 'how to construct it', an 'how to validate it' also are. We need the knowledge of things we can do with knowledge, and things we can do to knowledge, as well as the knowledge itself.

This whole matrix is joined together by the art of the connection, the weaving of tight connections between parts of knowledge. To make bigger areas of knowledge, something called a logic must be used to connect smaller bits up. When you have connected enough parts up, 'bio' becomes biology.

It's a pity about 'astrology' though. Haha.

Advice for the Perplexed

I have a simple piece of advice for the twenty or so of you who have asked me the same kind of question. That question, roughly put, is this: "What if my supervisor/reader looks at my essay and grades me according to measures I can't see in the rubrics?"

In this particular context, your supervisor/reader actually is only assigning a preliminary grade and someone out there will independently be marking your essay and assigning a real grade. Therefore my advice is this: ask for an explanation based on the rubrics, and if such is not forthcoming or the person begins to blather, prevaricate, or otherwise show ignorance of the influence of the rubrics, ignore this person. On the other hand, if the comments he/she makes are linked (validly and usefully) to specific items in the marking rubric, pay careful attention.

It's that simple. I have little patience for people who forget the use of marking rubrics and decide they want to shape your stuff according to other considerations.

EEKS

It's been some time since I first started putting together my observations on the State of the Old Place. Fifteen years since my first observation, in fact. In the latest iteration, I've observed an interesting phenomenon with a huge amount of supporting data. I call it EEKS.

In brief, the phenomenon originates in two subprocesses, a kind of cherry-picking and a kind of 'no true Scotsman' thinking. The logical outcome of applying these two subprocesses is EEKS, a rather odd and educationally distasteful phenomenon.

What happens is that a bunch of presumably professional educators (PPEs) start the first process by setting a difficulty bar for admission to a certain course of study or the right to be assigned a supervisor for some form of assessment. So, for a cohort of say 400 students, 280 of them are cherry-picked to be in what is perceived (but may not be) an elite course. Of these 280, a second cherry-picking occurs in which (for example) 20 of them are assigned to do Subject XYZ (or any other area of knowledge in which an extended essay may be written). At this point, the 400 (initially cherry-picked from the top 10% of a cohort which is already in the top 50% of the world's population and thus nominally in the top 5% worldwide) have become 20. These 20 are a chosen 7.14% of the top 3.5% in the world, or a selective top 0.25% elite.

At this point, some of them fail to meet expectations. The PPEs, who in some cases have been neglecting the students all along (after all, they are the top 0.25% of population worldwide, aren't they?), then tell the not-so-good ones that they are not truly elite and it is all their fault. Since they have been cherry(cherry(cherry(cherry(picked)))), they can't be failures. So they must have faked their way into the system and should rectify their own shortcomings. A true cherry would not be underperforming. Hence they must be 'no true cherries'.

The typical 'no true Scotsman' fallacy is one in which a person sets up a definition. He is later exposed to a case outside his control which falsifies his definition. But rather than blame his defining process, he shifts his evaluative process and says that the case is true but not a case within the original definition. At no point does he consider the fact that he might be wrong.

This situation, the EEKS phenomenon, is even more egregious. Not only is the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy applied, but it is applied to cases that the defining agency has had many years to work on, and in fact, has a duty to do so. The cases, in short, are the outcome of a PPE agency working towards a definition that is well-publicised. Yet, the PPE agency has not been able to make the case meet the definition. In this situation, the cherries who fall short are re-labelled 'pomegranates' or something, despite them obviously being cherries which have been abused, misused or 'benignly' neglected by the system.

In one particular case, after a long period of benign neglect, in which a cherry had been allowed to turn into something approximating a cherry tomato, the supervisor said, "Well, I don't know what to do with you, so I'm giving you a 'D'." Fortunately, a Certifiably Professional Educator (CPE) was found who was able to rectify the situation somewhat. Actually, a lot of the agency's success can be plausibly attributed to CPEs — some of these are actually PPEs with genuine talent, and some of these are freelancing agents.

EEKS.

Teachers' Handbooks

I spent a lot of today reading teachers' handbooks. These are a kind of esoteric document visited upon professional teachers in real-life schools.

They are long, systematically-structured documents, nowadays found as often online as not. They have incredible detail. They talk about relationships and practices and all kinds of stuff. And they contradict themselves a lot. And no school is ever run according to the teachers' handbook. In fact, I am quite certain that no school is ever run according to the principals' handbook either. I have looked, and I have found none upright — no, not one.

In fact, it is amusing, interesting and instructive to see where the handbooks make it impossible to actually run a school. The most obvious problem is too much detail; lay down a complex enough code, and a whole class of interpreters must spring up just to handle the error functions. Worse still, if the code is cumbersome enough, by the time one cycle completes, the next is already competing for processing time. Then everything locks up.

Fortunately, humans are clever. They can rank tasks by some sort of internal priority, and while giving minimal compliance, they just discard tasks which block up the process or slow it down. The end-product is close to the desired perfection, most times.

I will be more specific in future posts. Or at least, in my doctoral thesis.