Penumbral Lore; the Shadows of Science

My mother keeps asking for, and losing, hand knitted gloves. This will be the third year in a row which I’m making them for her. That’s OK, I guess, I can use the practice. This year she picked out some beautiful Limbo Color superwash yarn, and I planned to cast on two gloves on two long circular needles - a great trick for ADDled knitters like me, who might lose interest with the second glove.

When you’re knitting gloves t’s important that the cast on (starting) edge is elastic, so that it can stretch over the hand and fit on the wrist. I usually use something called a ‘cable cast on’ for this, but wanted to learn something new. So I checked out the advice on ravelry and checked out the Knitwitch video “Twisted German Cast On“, which looks clean and clear, but I kept ending up with the two ends of the yarn failing to interlock.

So I googled and found another video:

I spent about twenty minutes following the steps, then ‘correcting’ by pulling the final loop by hand. Very slow, it would have taken an hour to cast on the eighty stitches needed for both gloves.

So I tried the next google hit, and found a photo series on webshots home and garden. I followed, step by step, and suddenly I was whipping through it. I could see how it was the same thing the video showed, but at the same time it wasn’t. It made sense!

“Ah-ha!” I thought. “Obviously this is a case of different learning styles - perhaps a good blog post”. I asked the eldest if she learned better from videos or still pictures, and she had no clue. I asked my husband, who had seen me struggling with the video. He felt he learned tasks involving small motor skills from muscle memory (well, yeah, but the initial instruction has to come from somewhere), but that videos worked better for him than photos… Learning style differences seemed likely…

We’ve all heard a lot about different learning styles over the last thirty years or so. There are models that describe learning as being either auditory, kinesthetic or visual. There are models which attempt to take into account personality type and multiple intelligences. I found web tests to tell me my style.

According to the Felder Scale I’m balanced between active and reflexive, completely intuitive, with no sensing components at all, more verbal than visual and more global than sequential; According to the MBTI I’m either ENTP or INTP. My multiple intelligence scores vary a lot from test to test, but I’m consistently highly logical/mathematical and not very musical at all.

To be honest, I didn’t expect there to be much hard data out there about which intelligence scheme/learning style inventory actually reflects the way people learn best.   I was not surprised when I looked at the research.   There hasn’t been that much pure research in the field, it’s mostly been done by people looking for practical tools to improve the educational system.

So I’m going to keep playing with all the different self-tests, and look for suggestions as to how I can learn best, but I consider my own observations as to my learning style as equally/more reliable than any suggestions I get from them.

…and I’ll look for static pictures rather than videos, because that’s what’s working for me.

I was intrigued by a story I heard today on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me“, about some newly published research linking a low waist-hip ratio [WHR] (small waist, big hips) to intelligence in mothers and their children. So I fired up google to see where the research came from, and what the full story was.

WLTX TV said the research was done “the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California at Santa Barbara”, didn’t report the authors or where it was published, but did draw its own conclusions about Keira Knightly and Jennifer Lopez.

ABC News took a more serious stance. See, a serious picture of a brain and everything! They mentioned that it had been published in the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior. It pointed out that the intelligence differences in the study, though statistically significant, are small. It also pointed out that the journal has published lots of sex stories in the past. It made sure to highlight that the study authors said that the ratio didn’t mean the same thing as the woman aged.

The Register was highly critical, called the researchers “US eggheads”, and made a bunch of statements about the change in the ratio since the 1950’s. (hint, guys … ‘foundation garments’)

The reporter at Associated Content took article as personally affirming. She also named the authors and linked to the study itself.

Waist-hip ratio and cognitive ability: is gluteofemoral fat a privileged store of neurodevelopmental resources? by William D. Lassek and Steven J.C. Gaulin

Only the abstract is available for free, but it’s worth reading.

The article is about teenaged mothers, the premise being that the lower WHC will have an effect as they are competing with their children for vital resources. As I read it, the abstract could be roughly paraphrased as “pregnant teens hurt their own brain development, and those of their babies. Maybe, if they’ve got a good reservoir of Omega-3 FAs stored up in bodacious booties, they’ll get some prediction… Looks like…”

Any speculation about evolutionary advantages was saved for the conclusion (but notice that that speculation made it into the news coverage oughtright…)

There’s been a lot of ‘health at any size’ stories lately. I urge you to look at them with some optimism, but to be aware that the reporter may not really ‘grok’ the research he or she is relaying to you. With that caveat, the New York Times reports that overweight people have lower mortality rates than obese people (expected) or than underweight people (I expected that, anyway) or than ‘healthy’ weight people (a surprise).

The cynic in me says that reporters are looking for stories to sell, and will eagerly ’spin’ any research to appeal to the largest possible audience (um… no pun intended…?) Demographics have got something to do with it. Possibly a growing awareness that the ‘think thin’ message we’ve been drowning under for years has produced an epidemic of eating disorders (as obesity continues to become more of a problem) is in the back of a science reporters mind as well, but mostly it’s a desire to make the story ‘interesting’.

I admit, I do tend to write about the story, then go off on my speculations and thoguhts on it, but at least I make an effort to be clear about what’s the research, and what’s my own thoughts on the research. If you ever catch me fuzzing that line, please comment and tell me!

Comments and Notes

Yesterday I mentioned that the eldest child got recognition for her scholastic achievements. This morning I will add that the youngest did as well. Not that we’re hung up on grades in this household, but every so often I’m moved to share how well the kids are doing.

Chelseaknits, who seems to have set up a blog.com account just to write a comment on Monday’s post on QM, stopped in the middle of it. I hope her brain didn’t explode.

Lisa tagged me for the ‘Crazy Eights‘ meme. I’m flattered, really - I just met Lisa on NaBloPoMo a few days ago, she seems like a wonderful person, and I’ve added her to my blogroll. I just don’t want to get caught up in meme-madness in this journal. I barely do memes on LJ, even.

Speaking of Memes

Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ to describe a unit of cultural information, analogous to a gene as a unit of genetic memory. Yes, Dawkins is a scientist. He was writing about genes, not cultural information, so he wasn’t really trying to claim expertise outside his field. “The Selfish Gene” is on the reading list and I will get around to it eventually.

Even so, the idea was picked up and pushed by parties claiming that it was ‘really’ the way cultures operate. Hey, if memes are like genes then maybe cultures evolve like organisms, and share genetic information… Maybe there are meme viruses and infections. This fits in so many ways, it must be science. (Nope!)

The idea of a unit of information, which then changed the way other information was processed, acted recursively. Suddenly, once the idea of explaining ideas as ‘memes’ came up, it propogated through society and changed the way every idea was seen (which is what memes are described as doing). I call this magic, not science (before any students of memetic theory take offense I ask that they see “Working Definitions“. ) It’s an interesting philosophical framework, but hardly an actual ‘Theory’. The more you press the gene/meme analogy the further out on a limb you’re going. It’s certainly descriptive, but String Theory comes closer to being predictive (supposedly the LHC may make some ST verification possible, but I won’t start discussing ST until I’ve worked further through QM). Darwin had a HUGE body of carefully recorded data to work with when he came up with the idea of ‘Survival of the Fittest’, that data just isn’t there as far as ideas and cultures. We all ‘know’ this stuff, but that’s just a starting point.

The second, related but distinct, use of the term ‘meme’ applies to an internet phenemonon. I first encountered this type of meme as “the hamster dance” (but don’t click) (just trust me) then “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” (click if you must). Both of these were catchy video files which were linked to ad nauseum and then altered and propagated all over the place. People put huge amounts of time and effort into creating their own versions, and the kept going until (or well past the time when) they were no longer funny.

The third kind of meme is also an internet phenomenon. They are typially small applications, or ‘quizzes’, which are made to be filled out and propagated across blogs and social networking sites. They were made to be altered and propogated, and the amount of effort that goes into propagating them is minimal.

I love listening to the Science summary podcasts, even though I am usually weeks to months behind. I miss the days when I worked in the lab which actually had a subscription and I could challenge myself to see how much I could follow of stories which were outside my own field.

This particular episode attracted my attention because of the opening story, comparing the social ability of two year old members of three different primate species. The story is fascinating, because it addresses what it means to be human from a scientific perspective.

For as long as I can remember, one ‘working definition’ of human intelligence after another has been proposed and then encountered startling contradictory evidence. “Man is the Tool Using Animal” - um… no. “Man has language” - not so clear. I’ve even read refutations of arguements (old and obsolete long before I read them) that only humans feel pain, or affection, and therefore animals are not worthy of consideration of any sort…*

So the newest attempt to describe the difference in intelligence between humans and other primates is something I look at with interest, but also with a tinge of skepticism. The idea that the basic difference between us and our nearest relatives is our instinctive ability to learn from each other is certainly appealing, and it does seem to ring true more than any of the other quick-and-dirty explanations I’ve heard, but I’m interested to see what the follow-up studies find before saying ‘yes, this is the answer!’

*As I wrote this, I received a phone call from my husband, telling me that Sukah a very loving and sweet beagle, belonging to some friends of ours, was struck by a car and died. My heart goes out to her and her family, and I feel their loss. Sukah, you will be missed.