Killspeak

In April, I wrote an article on my father’s research: the potential of a blood test, called TEG, of warning doctors of life-threatening blood problems. I wrote this for a course on science journalism I took this past semester. The prof, Alf, passed it on to Anne and Anna who published it in Inkling Magazine.

Traffic is moving well. I’m in a car with Dr. Sandro Rizoli, somewhere between Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. There are coolers full of blood in the back seats and trunk. “If someone rear-ends us right now,” Dr. Rizoli says, “they’re going to feel really bad: there’ll be blood everywhere.”

He jokes, but he takes car accidents very seriously in his work as a surgeon. Car accidents are one of the leading causes of life-threatening injuries, what doctors call trauma. Of all the Canadians admitted for trauma each year, 6500 die. It is the leading cause of death for people under the age of 45 in Canada and worldwide.

“Trauma patients die from two things: head injuries or bleeding,” says Dr. Rizoli. Head injuries and brain damage are tough, but “patients that don’t stop bleeding are worse. No matter how well we stitch them up, if they keep bleeding, they won’t get better.”

Dr. Rizoli is the director of trauma research at the Sunnybrook Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on bleeding and trauma. He is also my dad, which is why I am in the car with him. He needs someone to carry the coolers.

Read the whole story at Inkling. Thanks to Alf, Anne, and, of course, my pops for helping me out with it.

“Maybe if you know what you’re doing, you get it wrong.” Kellogg Booth stood up and made his way to the white board. Our discussion had reminded him of a test question he once had to answer. “It was for the draft,” he said.

On the white board he sketched a rough plot: two curves, with amps along the x axis and voltage along the y. “Which of these would you say has the greatest power, the green or the orange?”

Green because it’s taller. Duh. Next question.

If you know what you’re doing, you’re not going to fall for that. You know that power can be found by taking the area under the curve. From the look of it, the broader orange curve will have a greater area, so you put orange down as your answer.

Now, if you’re really paying attention, you’ll notice that the scale along the y axis isn’t linear, but logarithmic. This means that, while the green curve doesn’t seem to be any more than two times taller than the orange one on paper, it’s actually representative of a much greater difference between the two. Since the green curve reaches far higher than the orange one, it covers a greater area. You answer green.

Green is the correct answer. If you’re dumb or lazy you get it and if you’re smart you get it, but if you’re in between, you know just enough to get it wrong.

Kelly’s punchline: “But I think that’s what they were going for. They wanted to get people who were smart enough to trust with guns, but dumb enough to go to Vietnam.”

We could call this kind a porridge filter: it selects those that are not too ignorant, not too knowledgeable, but just right.

How common are porridge filters in the real world? Are they more often products of design (as Kelly suspects of the above case) or accidents? What other cases could they be useful?

By the way, if I’ve messed up my physics, let me know.

Update: I came across the following in Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion.

“What is the Intelligence Test?” he demanded to know, and swept the curtain aside.

“A private joke,” said the annoyed Padraig.

But Jack saw good reasons to explain it, and so he said, “Cast your memory back to when Fortune had set us ashore in Surat—”

“I remember it every day,” said Surendranath.

“You stayed there to pursue your career. We fled inland to get away from the diverse European assassins who infested that town, and who were all looking for us. Soon enough, we came upon a Mogul road-block. Hindoos and Mohametans were allowed to pass through with only minor harassment and taking of baksheesh, but when it became known that we were Franks, they took us aside and made us sit in a tent together. One by one, each of us was taken out alone and conducted to a field nearby, and handed a musket—which was unloaded—and a powder-horn, and a pouch of balls.”

“What did you do?” Surendranath demanded.

“Gaped at it like a farmer.”

“I likewise,” said Padraig.

“So you failed the Intelligence Test?”

“I would rather say we passed it. Van Hoek did the same as we. Mr. Foot tried to load the musket, but got the procedure backwards—put the ball in first, then the powder. But Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc loaded the weapon and discharged it in the general direction of a Hindoo idol that the Moguls had been using for target practice.”

“They were inducted,” said Surendranath.

“As far as we know, they have been serving in the armed forces of the local king ever since that day,” Jack said.

I just finished a course on scientific journalism. Going through some of my files today, I found a quote I’d pulled almost a year ago from an interview with Bruce Sterling:

…re-purposing scientific material to literary purposes without ever speaking that kind of spavined pop science-ese. The kind of lame language that says something like [holds up digital camera]: “You know, if you could see the tiny grooves that have been carved on the chip of this digital camera, why they would stretch to the moon and back three-and-a-half times!” Which is an attempt to invest wonder in a dry, industrial process. It’s the Carl Sagan school of trying to pump mystic scientism into the dryness of physics. There’s just something phoney-baloney about it because it’s taking an intellectual process that’s very much about methodically stripping the mystery out of natural phenomena and then trying to re-mystify it by approaching it from some more friendly sensibility. And there’s just something bogus about that. It has the bogusness of an adult telling a pre-pubertal child about the birds and the bees without talking about the burning needs of sexuality.

(Sure, the title of this post is a bit forced, but if I’m not going to be bothered to get out of my bathrobe to write it, I’m not going to go to any great length to be clever.)

I just finished a conversation with my landlord about standardized testing and the recent government push for such tests to be written by undergraduates at American universities. She saw this as due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how learning occurs (which, of course, is dependent on how it’s measured). The SAT, she claims, better measures how well people can prepare to write the SAT than it does how knowledgeable and capable they are in the areas of knowledge represented in the test. Standardized testing won’t allow for student performance to be compared fairly across universities. It will instead pervert instruction so that students will perform better on the tests—especially if a university’s federal funding and prestige is tied to test results.

I wouldn’t argue with her conclusions. (Anyone who’s read Freakonomics or has decent common sense—that covers just about everyone, right?—knows that tying funding to standardized testing gives teachers incentives to teach to the test, if not cheat and change students’ answers.) I do, however, think that the motivation for such testing is not caused primarily by a misunderstanding of how learning occurs (or is best measured). No, it’s borne of a more pragmatic kind of thinking: management.

Having a verifiable, quantitative means of supporting decisions is much emphasized in prescriptive high-level management, economics, and game theory. If you can show that Shrek 7 is likely to result in a greater return on investment than Clooney Political Thriller 4, you can justify choosing Shrek. This is particularly important in cases where decisions are not individual, but an institutional process. The director may love the script for Clooney Political Thriller 4, the CFO’s cousin might owe Clooney a favour, but that’s not likely to convince the stockholders. They’ll want to know about the film’s ROI. Ultimately, there needs to be a measure, and it should be standard and accepted. Good managers act on key performance indicators.

This is exactly what wide-spread, all-encompassing standardized testing provides: a key performance indicator. Already, SAT and GRE scores are used to judge applicants to universities, as are grades. Why not extend the system so that they are standard, more consistent and reliable? The prestige of big-name institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and the like can be justified or destroyed by how well their students perform on the tests. Incoming hires can be judged by their scores, perhaps weighted by the average of scores for the university they came from. Scores can be tied to dollar values, correlated with other measures of performance. Standardized testing isn’t about measuring learning or capacity, but assigning value. It’s not about education. It’s a management initiative.

As I’m certain you’re all well aware, measures can be toyed with. There are thousands of ways of easing a decision through, clever ways of presenting stats, or assessing risk and making decisions using uncertain data, of course. Oversights, elision, optimism, bias, inaccuracy, time pressures: these can change how well a measure represents what it should. Scores are relied upon, used (and abused), even when they’re juked, they’re only as good as the means through which they’re obtained. They can be warped by not only a sneaky statistician or lazy inventory clerk, but by an incomplete form or poorly written question.

As powerful as it may seem, testing is an awful way of measuring understanding or expertise. A comprehensive multiple-choice test can tell you how well students performed on that comprehensive multiple-choice test on the day they were tested. You can only hope that this score is somehow indicative of that student’s greater, longer-term understanding of the topic. Further, the results of that test are confounded by those who studied more (not necessarily the same students who know more or better), who have good short-term recall, whose teacher used the same terminology used in the test, who cheated and got a copy of the test off the web, who are simply better at multiple-choice than those who are better in an oral exam, etc. Test scores are test scores, not knowledge or expertise scores. Managers who live and die by such measures may not see that. If scores change, so do decisions. The scores become what they measure.

Blaming managers is easy (and profitable). We all have a limited capacity for information and have to use summary measures and other generalities to get things done. Common currency is a good example. I don’t pay the taxi driver by driving her around and I don’t barter: she translates her services into a dollar value using a accepted equation and I give her that much money. There are cases where this form of exchange should not be applied, where the measures can’t be ascertained or agreed upon. Are divorce settlements accurate measures of the emotional investment spouses made in each other? Should the plight of ten million starving in another country be attended to ten times more intensely than the million hungry homeless in ours? No, these cases are blurrier and more difficult than paying for a cab.

Yet many of us confuse the measure for what it measures. Education is an SAT score. Health is BMI. Prosperity is GDP. Government is voting. Worth is salary.

No, they’re not. These are complicated and complex things that have had systems and measures forced upon them to make them, well, manageable. They’re worthwhile only as generalities, and we should be aware of their limitations and distance from reality. Education, health, these are all things greatly affected by high-level, institutional decisions. Those in positions of power should reason about their decisions using the effects they have, and to know and to judge these effects is important. It is just as important is not to overdo it, to think that numbers and indicators are the reality they’re supposed to measure. They’re faulty and incomplete, and approximations at best. Having every American undergraduate write an exam in third year isn’t going to tell much about how educated they are, and it should not be used as if it would.

And, please, don’t make me write any more exams. They’re so damn stressful.

Update: I’ve heard that, in business, people often say “what gets measured gets done.”

I’m keen on books. I buy a lot of them, ask for them as gifts, and when I can find the time, even read them. I also live in Canada, which means I’m quite familiar with Indigo. Most every bound stack of ink and dead trees on my shelves was purchased at one of Indigo’s mall stores, sprawl superstores, or website.

Indigo wants its customers to know it’s all about Canada. Indigo stores often cover a whole wall or stairwell with the names of Canadian authors and musicians, printed white on red. The cynic in me knows these creators are being used to put a friendly face on a private company. This patriotism isn’t hokey, but it is marketing. It may be tolerable because of the obscurity of Canadian cultural personages; Canadians that do know them are probably eager enough to have these authors recognized, so forgive Indigo for covering itself with their names. Nonetheless, Indigo is using Canadian culture-makers to sponge good will from its customers.

Increasingly, Indigo is the primary provider of Canadian cultural products. Indigo enjoys an almost total lack of competition: it’s “the closest thing to an unregulated monopoly in Canada’s private sector.” Indigo owns Chapters, Coles, Book Company, SmithBooks, and The World’s Biggest Bookstore; only a few, city-centre–type independent booksellers remain. The company also dabbles in censorship through supply: Indigo doesn’t sell Mein Kampf and kept an issue of Harper’s off its shelves because of some cartoons.

This is not a very likable company—but I’m keen on books, so, yeah, I shop at Indigo without much hesitation. I pay to be a part of their iRewards programme (and, in doing so, let them track everything that I buy). I even maintain a list of books I’d like to someday buy using their online wishlist.

This wishlist is where I keep track of interesting books and DVDs. Even if I have no strong desire to own a book, perhaps only to keep an eye out for it at the library, I’ll add it to the wishlist because it’s handy. The wishlist is the first place I’ll direct people who ask me what I’d like for my birthday, Christmas, et cetera. Even when killing time in one of Indigo’s stores, I’ll often look up my wishlist using their self-service terminals to remind myself what I’m interested in.

The wishlist is where I store my book- and DVD-related intentions, which change a couple of times a week. So it’s frustrating when I’m kept from using the wishlist by some of Indigo’s short-sighted design decisions. Far too often, I’m not allowed to add an item. Sometimes, I find that my list has been re-organized. It’s almost like having your pen run out of ink, or have someone shuffle your notes while you weren’t looking.

These may not seem like big problems. I can maintain a list with del.icio.us, right? Sure (that’s where all the books I can’t add end up) but it doesn’t have live prices, pretty cover art, easy to buy links for less technically inclined gift-givers, or the ability to be checked in the store. I would much rather Indigo improve their wishlist service, and I’m pretty sure that Indigo would like that too. After all, other than their ubiquity, it’s the only thing that really keeps me a customer, and it’s at the centre of that business.

So I’ve made a short list of simple design changes that I believe would alleviate my frustration, as well as make the wishlist better for me and consequently for Indigo.

• Let me add any book in the database. I don’t care if it is “temporarily unavailable to order.” If I can find it in your database, I should be able to wish for it. In the cases where it is unavailable, offer to notify me when it does become available. If the book is out of print, why not provide a quick list of other editions that may be available? In either case, no harm is done by letting me add the item to my list. I may never be able to buy the book from Indigo, but I will continue to use the wishlist, and that’s sure to snare me in a purchase sooner or later.

• Allow me to sort my list. Me. Indigo should not re-order the list (as it has in the past, for no good reason). Doing so is confusing and off-putting. I can’t trust Indigo to keep my list my way. Oddly, items aren’t even sorted: not by title, author, price, availability, or date added. They should be, and the criterion for sorting should be in the user’s control. It’d be useful to see, say, which DVDs on my list are the cheapest, or which I’ve added most recently.

• Let me set how much I want something. Right now, there’s no way for me to separate the books I really want from the ones I may pick up sometime. A simple three-level setting would be enough to remind myself and show others which items would make a better purchase.

• Give my wishlist a friendly URL. I want other people to use the list, but I’m not eager to share it through Indigo’s email service or to cut-and-paste its unwieldy URL. Why not something easy to remember? I could jot down http://indigo.ca/my@email.address/wishlist/ on a Post-it, or read it over the phone without much trouble. It’d make it that much easier for others to buy me something I want.

• Tidy up the little things. Indigo should put some “Add to cart” and “Check for availability at local store” buttons next to each item, instead of check-boxes and a “Add all selected items to cart” button all the way at the bottom of the page. Further, they should replace the “Most Wished For Items” column with one showing relevant recommendations (items similar to those already on my list, perhaps). While they’re at it, Indigo should fix the page’s <title>.

C’mon, Indigo: let me give you my money.

Peter Lynn would like to write a book called The Greatest Puking Stories Ever Told, and I would like to buy it. Not only for the fact that he’s a good writer, or that he would like to publish it as a handsome leather-bound, but because I enjoy hearing barf stories—and, honestly, who doesn’t? Drunk or sober, young and old, nothing is as sure to involve and amuse as a good vomit story. That time you puked on your pillow and were too tired to clean it up. That time you put a Swiss Chalet meal back in the container it came in an hour after eating it. That time you followed a trail of what seemed to have once been fried rice and whiskey down some stairs to find three underage drinkers comically passing around a soggy paper bag, laughing and saying “If you’re gonna spew, spew in this.” That time you vomited for a large audience.

Some friends and I were returning home from a party at a friend’s place (where the toilet had “R. Mutt” scrawled on the side of the bowl). She lived way up by York University, a long subway ride away from home. We were travelling on a Sunday: the trains were few and far between and the cars were pretty full.

I was spinning. We had all had quite a bit to drink; I had all of the night’s good times souring inside me. Before stepping into the train, I was trying to reassure myself that I did not need to vomit. When at that point, of trying to soothe your stomach with words first imagined and then silently mouthed to yourself, vomiting is inevitable.

My friends weren’t any help. They’re the kind of people who, when made aware of your need to barf, will taunt you, jab you in the stomach, impede your frantic scramble for the washroom. You’ll be throwing up in the bathroom, long past the point of swearing you’ll never drink again, and reach one of those moments of respite where your body is deciding whether or not to retch some more. My friends? They’ll be right outside the bathroom waiting for that very moment to begin to make loud retching sounds, provoking another spell of vomiting. They’ll keep on doing it too, until you’re exhausted, at the brink of consciousness, just as hoarse from the bile as from cursing their names.

When I answered a curious “Are you alright?” with a bleary-eyed nod and a stifled burp, they knew exactly what state I was in. From Finch to Lawrence station, I tried to keep my eyes on the advertisements and the tunnels rushing past the window, away from my friends’ sly grins and fake half-retches. It was awful.

At Lawrence, a group of cheerful young girls came onto the train and sat across from me and my friends. They were sunny, happy, chatting loudly, and perfumed. Their pungent, vanilla-like reek made my stomach churn. I swung against the doors and closed my eyes. I had a wet mouth. It was going to happen.

The doors opened, I rushed out into Eglinton station and met the nearest garbage bin with a big fist of puke. I held onto the garbage and emptied myself. At first it came with strong pumps, but soon became painful and drawn-out, like squeezing all you can from a tube of toothpaste. It was loud. It was gross. It was in full view of everyone in the subway car.

The car driver had left the doors open, perhaps because of a shift-change, perhaps out of kindness (not wanting me to miss the train and have to wait for another). When I had finished, I turned around to see the occupants of the car watching me. They were silent, embarrassed, disgusted. The chirpy early-teen girls were wide-eyed and still. I boarded the train less aware of my acid breath than of the way I was being judged. This was not what the other passengers had wanted to see on Sunday morning. Except my friends. They seemed okay with it.

Lynn, your book idea is great. Think of it: sections dedicated to hasty cover-ups and last-minute dashes, cautionary tales of survival, and leather covers that’ll be easy to wipe. It’ll be a bestseller.

Look in the mirror, use both hands to pull your lips wide, then snap your teeth open and closed [if you're confused, check the photo]. This makes you aware of your skull. Why, your face is just a thin layer of meat!

The imagined futures of books and films are an in-growth of the moments in which they are made, symptoms of their time. Yet these futures are here, in the same moment as you, already part of the past made by the restlessness of now. The Crown Fountain unsettles your sense of the present. It’s beautiful, unreal, oddly familiar. There’s something uncomfortable in this confusion of times, in sharing today with others’ tomorrows.

The future is now, it’s just not well distributed. What would Philip K. Dick say?

In the past week, you’ve found yourself listening to Pendulum’s Plasticworld often. Its first minute, as it descends from orbit (Space Lion), is quite satisfying.