Ben White

Lip service surveys

03.17.09 // Medicine, Miscellany

The world is full of surveys: surveys for free meals at TGI Friday’s, surveys for news polls, and at school, surveys for curricular reform:

“In order to improve this course for next year, we would appreciate it very much if you would take a few minutes and fill out this evaluation form.”

And the idea behind a survey is a good (nay, excellent) one: to gather feedback and ostensibly make changes and corrections based on it. The issue is in survey construction and follow-through. The usual survey has a variety of broadly worded statements with answer choices 1-5, 1 being “strongly agree” and 5 being “strongly disagree.” There will usually be a text-box for general comments at the end. You take this survey and your answers disappear into the depths of the internet never to be heard from again.

But from the beginning, the idea that you can sum up whether something works effectively or not based on a numerical average is a kludge. Furthermore, even if an average of 4 does approximate satisfaction, that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways to do things. It’s an understandable shorthand, but anyone hoping that it’s sufficient to understand reception  is fooling themselves. If people’s responses show that weekly quizzes are on the whole useful, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer or think it better if they were biweekly, on Mondays, on Fridays, longer, shorter, or anything else. If people say dividing the year into 4 chunks is no good, it doesn’t mean 7 would be better. A number is all well and good, but at the end of the day, how someone feels isn’t the crux: it’s why they feel the way they do.

In order for a survey to be effective, it has to take time. Each question needs to have its own comment box. Then, someone needs to go through those comment boxes and compile all of the suggestions and problems. Take the suggestions and complaints, then formulate new courses of action. Then, before implementing them, offer them anew in a survey:  What do you think about these choices? Do they sound good? How good? Better then before? If not, why not? If that takes too much time to do, have students volunteer to do the grunt work. They’ll put in on their CVs, the administrators can continue doing whatever it is that administrators do, and everyone is happy. This is also how you make changes quickly. It doesn’t need to take years.

People tend to make incremental changes to the status quo. It’s hard to make drastic changes, especially if those changes reverse your hard work or go against your own inclinations; it’s even harder to come up with these changes yourself when necessary. This difficulty then breeds the stagnation that allows bad systems to continue even when their obsolescence is practically taken for granted. And yet, this is how you get curricular form with a stethoscope on the heartbeat of a student body.

Sometimes things don’t work—but if a goal is truly to teach a subject effectively, then no one can tell you better what does and does not work than students. This is how you don’t spin your wheels around a problem, making arbitrary changes. You need to ask for feedback, but more importantly, you need to be willing to listen to it.

Anatomy of an NBME Shelf Exam

03.04.09 // Medicine

The NBME offers comprehensive subject exams, ostensibly to torture students and devour whatever scraps of self-worth they have left. The typical question format:

A X-year-old [type of person] reports to the doctor/ER with a X-hour/day/week/month/year history of not-feeling-so-hot. Upon examination, distracting details. Irrelevant information. Single key relationship. More words to make the test take longer. Talkie-talkie. What is the likely cause of this you-should-have-learned-in-your-class-and-probably-did-but-maybe-you-didn’t-who-knows-there-are-so-many-questions-on-this-test-it’s-all-a-blur person’s problem?

Rinse and repeat for three hours. Then do it for it every class you take. The joys of biochemistry could never be fully appreciated until they were compiled in such a form.

In-ear, shmin-ear

02.22.09 // Medicine

Every few months, I see some news report on the revelation that listening to loud music can cause hearing loss.  Yesterday, Time online posted “iPod Safety: Preventing Hearing Loss in Teens,” the latest in this series of mediocre ear-science.  I’ll admit that in this case the facts are accurate, it reminds me of a lot of stories that are less so.

The point, which is true, is that listening to loud noises of any kind tends to be bad for the ears. The louder the noise, the less time it takes to cause damage. Prolonged exposure to loud noise leads to both tinnitus (ear-ringing, which sucks) and sensorineural hearing loss (which sucks and is irreversible). This is actually a serious problem, and it’s caused the kind of hearing loss in teens that used to be reserved for old-time factory workers. My beef is that there is one finding several years ago that has given rise to a huge misconception:

In-ear head phones generate more sound pressure at a given volume setting than over-the-ear counterparts [source].

This is logical, given that in-ear headphones are actually in your ear, literally closer to your tympanic membrane, which transmits the physical pressure waves to your middle ear. Because iPods are generally used with in-ear headphones, some news outlets and people came away with the idea that in-ear headphones are automagically more dangerous—which is hogwash.

This is silly because pressure and volume are essentially the same thing. When the in-ear headphones produce more “volume” at a given setting, the user actually hears the music louder. If I were to switch from over-the-ear to in-ear phones, chances are I’d adjust the volume accordingly. The fact that earbuds can pump out more decibels in and of itself is meaningless. Admittedly, there has been some work that has shown that some earbuds don’t cancel external sound all that well and therefore might lead to higher volumes when used, but this varies wildly between brands. All that means is that the government should subsidize some new Bose headphones for people who work in loud places, because good sound-canceling headphones are the only ones that eliminate this problem effectively. Being closer to the ear is not an inherent problem unless the volume isn’t adjusted accordingly. This is not an unnoticeable danger increase.

What studies have shown is that individuals have a preferred ambient listening volume. Some very angry teenagers who like thrash metal tend to like to blow a hole out of their eardrum, but the rest of us tend to fall somewhere on a decent curve. What matters is what relative volume we prefer, not what method we use to get there. When people taken off the street were tested for average listening volume, the data reflect this reality: the biggest problem is background noise. We tend to like our music somewhere around 60dB. If the ambient noise is 20dB, many people will turn up the volume to 80dB. If you correct for background noise, preferred volume is nearly constant. So when people listen to their iPod somewhere loud (on an airplane or the subway), they’re probably doing a lot more damage than if they’re at home. It really is that simple.

The idea that in-ear headphones are actually worse for you is based on this distortion. They’re not; your preferences and habitat may be.

Sympathy-inspiring?

02.09.09 // Miscellany

This is not: “You Try to Live on 500k in This Town,” a NY Times article that explains why Obama’s proposal will make life unlivable for the executives whose daily life is inexorably tied to wasteful extravagance. When you don’t follow your own advice and save some of your 1+ million dollar salary, it’s harder for me to take your mortgage seriously. Just the same, when your necessary annual expenses include paying your Tom Daschle-style chaffeur, it keeps America firmly on the revenge train. If extravagance is required by corporate culture, then the culture-change brought about by salary-caps or (better yet) progressive tax increases can be a good thing.

Doctorate Factory

01.19.09 // Miscellany

There’s no surprise people are realizing and writing about the low-value of advanced degrees. Schools have used grad students as educational fodder, producing far more than the demand for academics can keep up with. People hoping for their PhD to be something beyond their pursuit of an intellectual interest unfortunately will continue to be disappointed when tenure remains forever out of reach.

Twiction

01.19.09 // Writing

Is it the fate of the internet to endlessly combine two words to make memes? Will these neologisms always make normal, everyday people throw up in their mouths, just a little? I recently discovered twiction, a combination of “twitter” (for the microblogging service) and “fiction” (as in fiction). Twiction, AKA twitter-fiction or (even worse) tweetfic, is fiction in a maximum of 140 characters, which usually translates to somewhere between 1 and 3 sentences. It’s been around for a couple of years and seems to fall somewhere between kinda popular and vaguely interesting.  It comes in two forms:

First, the more common form, standalone microfiction: stories told in a sentence, usually feeling like something in between Ernest Hemingway’s famous “story in six words” experiment (For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn) and more traditional flash fiction. Given the inherent limitations of the Twitter service, writing Twiction is a sort of writer’s challenge—can you write a compelling story in a sentence? Can you fit a character, a conflict, and a resolution in a line? Or, in another view of what makes a story: can your character change from the beginning of such a story to the end, all in less than 25 words? The answer? Sometimes.

Any twitterer trying to write twiction comes across the problem that it is actually very difficult to produce a lot of super-short stories with distinct plots, characters, and resolutions. 140 characters isn’t a lot. What I’ve noticed in reading around is that one common crutch is to resort to melodramatic endings (“and he was never seen again” sort of stuff), like this piece from the now defunct twitterfiction:

The poison cut deep rivulets in her flesh, her blood caught fire and her heart slowed. Soon she would be dead.

Death is an easy resolution, but it doesn’t make for a very compelling or thoughtful piece. Who is she? Why is she being poisoned? It’s impossible to fit in everything, but all we have here is an ending—not a story.

Another common “mistake” is to paint a scene or a scenario, but not a real story. After all, it’s much easier to write a character sketch or a lyrical description of a forest in 140 characters than it is to write a complete story. An example from 3S Stories:

Karma can be a bitch. Ike wasn’t sure what he did to deserve being reincarnated as a function call in Vista, but it must have been horrible.

It’s funny, and I actually rather like this one, but there’s no motion. There’s nothing inherently displeasing about it (and new writers struggle with the same issue even with no artificial restrictions), but it does mean a sizable chunk of twiction is more like the creative writing of interesting sentences than true standalone stories. In some ways, twitter might be more suited for twitter poetry, where an image alone—well painted—can stand on its own.

A second type of tweetfic is the serial-story (two examples), a more conventional length piece written in 140-character installments (like the serialized novels in magazines that were common in the olden days). The biggest issue here is writing a story that moves along at a decent clip in small segments. Writing a bunch of entries back to back defeats the purpose entirely. Pacing becomes a problem because there is a tension between condensing action too much (boring) and not making any progress per entry (also boring). On top of that, it’s impossible to go back and alter tweets. The story must go on, no matter if you think you’ve made some serious mistakes in previous entries. A strong detailed outline probably couldn’t hurt. Still, word-choice and character-limits will never be as frustrating as in the first type—if something can’t fit, then move it to the next installment.

So what we have in twitter-fiction, I think, is a challenging medium that is almost at odds with the nature of Twitter (in the sense that Twitter users generally post frequently and have conversations with other Twitter users). At best, it’s a literary diversion in the blink of an eye with at least some degree of artistic merit. More often, just words. Though, after seeing the content of your average “tweet,” just words might be just fine.

Finally, an interesting phone on Sprint

01.13.09 // Miscellany

For the first time, there is a phone on my carrier that genuinely interests me: The Palm Pre, a brand new smartphone that has, at least at first glance, a winning combination of features.

It’s a touchscreen phone, and it offers all the fun gesture support of the iPhone. While some press members noted that the touchscreen functionality wasn’t quite as responsive, that doesn’t really matter because…

It has a full slide-out keyboard.

Perhaps most significantly, it has a brand new operating system, “WebOS.” Hands-on impressions have been uniformly positive, and there a few aspects that make me a little more than curious to see the final pricing when the Pre comes to market:

  1. Its programs are based on a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript—the same technologies that make up most of the web (Flash being the major exception). Remember the widgets that made OS X cool a few years back and then popped up everywhere? Same idea. It means that developing applications will be fast and straightforward. It also means that the internet will look and feel like the internet, something that cannot be said for browsing just about anything on Windows Mobile.
  2. Like Android, Google’s new open-source venture, webOS can multitask (unlike the iPhone)–meaning you can open more than one program at a time. The task-switching mechanism in webOS is called the “Card System,” and it’s apparently quick and awesome.
  3. It’s going to have a more open and tolerant app store. Unlike Apple, which has iron-fisted control over what you can and cannot run on the iPhone, Palm plans to be permissive:  anything that can run on webOS eventually will, without the need to “jailbreak” the handset or anything else dramatic. They won’t block Flash just because it will cannibalize their own software sales. This is also a perk of the Android Market.
  4. Palm plans to unveil a way to convert old PalmOS programs to webOS. How? I don’t know, maybe an emulator (which could be pretty slow). But, if the method works well, the Pre will instantly have a back catalog of useful software. One of the big perks of Palm products has always been the software and development community—incidentally, two of the things recent Palm phones have lacked. If you see a correlation between those two attributes, the iPhone’s success, and Palm’s downward spiral, so do I.

WebOS just looks slick and the UI looks effortless—which is exactly how a phone should be. Two notable shortcomings: there’s no video capture (which could potentially come as a software update), and Adobe has yet to definitively confirm that it will be Flash capable. Flash has already been demoed on Android, and if it comes out on both competitors,  it’d be a distinction that would really speak against Apple’s for-us-by-us attitude about critical software.

Now, if an Android phone finds its way to Sprint around the same time, it might be a harder choice. Of course, if my contract runs out first, then I may just switch to get the G1 on Verizon anyway—it has a lot of things going right, and the software perks are only going to get better. Still, I always had a fondness for the PalmPilot I had sometime around my Bar Mitzvah…if Palm can wrangle up some of the old cadre of PalmOS devotees and get them excited about devleoping software for webOS, we could see an interesting battle in the smartphone market this year. I think there’s a good shot: I haven’t coded outside of CS50, and even I want to develop for this thing.

Why a netbook?

01.10.09 // Miscellany

As I type this on my msi wind “netbook,” it occurs to me that some otherwise very smart people are getting a very odd message from the explosion in this new computer category’s popularity.

Farhad Manjoo, Slate’s tech guy and author of a book that has received very respectable reviews on Amazon, wrote last week that the netbook craze means that the public wants small tablet computers (preferably made by apple), and not cheap laptops with a small factor.

When I see the huge popularity of the new netbook category, I see it rooted in a new combination of small, light computers and cheap computer: People have a desire and use for this novel combination, but there haven’t laptops in this niche until last year. Nothing is easier to carry around to class, the library, or around campus than a netbook. While ultralights would do the job even better, the cost is prohibitive. Tablet’s aren’t desirable for taking notes, writing emails, or any other active text-input–it’s not an interface best suited for the job. When I bought my MSI wind, I needed a computer—not a bigger version of the iPhone.

While netbook’s are not an ideal as a everyday desktop replacement, they are great second computers and get the job for basic productivity software. And let’s face it, PC computing has been on the decline for some time now. My new MSI wind is roughly as powerful as the $2000 Powerbook G4 I bought four years ago. It runs XP beautifully with Firefox and Word open. That’s sufficient for 95% of my computer usage.

Would I want to sit at a desk starting at the 10″ screen at all times? No, of course not–but did I enjoy lugging my powerbook to class everyday? Nope. The keyboard gets the job done, but it’s an even better size for children and women with smaller hands, two groups that some people have said have really taken a liking to these small laptops.

Let’s be clear here. Netbooks don’t represent some new edgy crossover device. They are computers that sacrifice glamor in exchange for great value and a small form factor, nothing more.