“The air that they breathe”

Susan Cain wrote a book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking*, on introversion in contemporary society. We reserved types get little respect: students are forced to work in groups rather than independently; office spaces are more and more often based on an open plan (mine is, and I wish it weren’t); and if an introvert doesn’t act like an extravert, she and her ideas will probably be overlooked because others won’t shut up and listen. Cain would put it more politely, I’m sure, but that’s the situation, and she argues in the book that the world is missing out. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s one of the next on my list.

{Rant:} On the point of classroom arrangements forcing kids to always work in groups, there’s another problem that has less to do with introversion, although I wouldn’t be surprised at all if introverts are more often the victims. If you make kids work in groups, and grade them as a group, the “good” students will get stuck doing most or all of the work while the other half watch and get the same grade for doing nothing. This happened to me countless times in school, and since I didn’t want to be labelled a nark and treated worse by classmates who already thought I was (gasp) a nerd, I didn’t complain to teachers most of the time.

There was a project in middle school social studies, for example, where we had to write a report and design a pamphlet about a foreign country (Zambia, in my case). We were put into groups of three or four, and when the other two in my group heard that I was the third, they both exclaimed “Yesss!” loudly enough for the teacher to hear, though she paid no attention. They knew me well enough to know that they had a free ‘A’ on the project just by being in my group, because I cared enough about my own grades to do nearly everything myself, however much I wanted them to suffer the consequences of their laziness. There were no consequences for laziness in group work, if there was one straight-A student, unless she was willing to sacrifice her own grade and get an ‘F.’ I was not willing, and they knew it.

And this didn’t happen just in middle school, it happened at every level of the educational system that graded group work: in a college art class, I and two other freshmen had to let the upperclassman in our group get away with contributing nothing (or worse than nothing–she wasted our time by asking us for the information she had agreed to research herself, before emailing us a one- or two-paragraph write-up that wasn’t worthy of a second-grader, so we had to write that section of the paper from scratch when we should have been putting on the finishing touches). We explained the entire situation to the professor when we turned in our report, and she basically said we had to suck it up because she couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything based on our word (and our copies of the girl’s email and each draft of our paper).

This is why I’m utterly opposed to graded group work at, really, any level of the school system. Working in groups is fine and sometimes useful, especially for talking ideas through, but putting a grade on it encourages cheaters and freeloaders to sit by and get a free grade at the expense of those who, through peer pressure or hopelessness, won’t rat them out. {/rant}

(Sorry.) Anyway, now Cain has given a TED talk, and it’s quite good. Do introverts everywhere a favor and watch (and share!):

From the talk:

“So I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy or why we had to spell this word incorrectly.”

“There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

“Solitude matters and…for some people, it’s the air that they breathe.”

“I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly.”

* With a pretty lovely cover design. I mean just look at that ‘Q’! Beautiful. (/fontnut)

In defense of the James Webb Space Telescope

Yesterday I heard through Phil Plait on Twitter (who writes Discover’s Bad Astronomy blog) that a new budget draft from the House Appropriations Committee would slash budgets for the sciences, most notably that of NASA, whose budget for FY 2012 would be $1.6 billion lower than this year. That’s a huge cut, and the bill would explicitly scrap the entire James Webb Space Telescope project!

JWST is seen as being the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been operating for over 20 years and has contributed immensely to our understanding of the cosmos. (Tidbit: We knew the universe is expanding, thanks to Edwin Hubble in the first half of the 20th century, but it was his namesake space telescope that showed us that not only is the universe expanding, that expansion is speeding up!) Hubble has peered back almost to the origins of the first galaxies; James Webb would take us even further. With it, we could see the formation of the first galaxies and stars; could see stars forming inside the clouds of gas and dust that obscure them from Hubble’s view. We could look for planets orbiting other suns, and even get a picture of what elements those planets harbor–that’s so much more than the faint hint of a planet that we get now with Kepler! We could look at other planets, outside our solar system!

In case you haven’t seen my earlier post on Hubble and my interest in things astronomical, it was the stunning imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope that first piqued my curiosity about galaxies and star clusters and nebulae. These images are breathtaking, some of them bizarre, some ethereal, some almost incredible: they are like works of art. But they’re not paintings, not mere imagined things; these are images of objects, flaming gas balls, pinwheels of light, and dusty clouds some of which are hundreds of thousands of light-years across and millions or billions of light-years away (millions or billions of years in the past!) and all of which are really out there in the vast dark of our universe. Can you even begin to imagine such immense size or distance? Can you wrap your head around the fact that by looking through a telescope in space, we can look at the past–so far in the past that we can almost see the universe before it even had galaxies? This was the power of Hubble for me; but Hubble’s life is almost over, and it’s time for something new to take its place. James Webb can be that something for a whole new generation, but only if we see it through.

There are billions of dollars invested in JWST already. The mirrors, it was announced last week, are fully polished. The equipment, part by part, is being completed. This telescope is at the top of the priorities for astrophysics research, described in Nature News as “the key to almost every big question that astronomers hope to answer in the coming decades;” its importance for America’s standing in the field of astronomy is hard to overstate, and its power to captivate and engage the interest of the public will probably be at least as great as that of Hubble. And the House Appropriations Committee is telling us to throw all that away when we have already come so far.

We are already losing the shuttle program. Please, please don’t let this happen to JWST.

Links to more info here:

• “Appropriations Committee Releases the Fiscal Year 2012 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations” (House press release)
• “AAS Issues Statement on Proposed Cancellation of James Webb Space Telescope” (American Astronomical Society)
• “Congress puts NASA and JWST on the chopping block” (Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy blog)
• “Why We Need the James Webb Space Telescope” (Julianne at Cosmic Variance)
• “James Webb Space Telescope” (Risa at Cosmic Variance)

And here, a pretty entertaining vlog advocating for the JWST:

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A brief greeting and less brief GRE prep book review

Happy 4th to y’all Americans! (Hmm, I think half my viewers are from the Commonwealth. So, um, happy day to you too. )

Since I did almost as well as I wanted to on the Quantitative section of the GRE, I decided to write a nice review of the math prep book I used. Yeah, yeah, the test is changing in four weeks, but the basic concepts will remain the same, so I figure some folks may still find this book useful. Anyway, here’s the review.

I can’t comment on the quality of other books for math prep, as I used this one almost exclusively. As another reviewer recommended, I worked through the entire book, skipping or skimming nothing. I took my time; I learn math best when I work through it carefully and practice until it’s almost second nature. I found the huge number of geometry practice problems especially helpful, as I took geometry in my first year of high school and am now a couple years out of college already. I only took two math classes in college, of which only one (Discrete Maths) was useful at all in my prep, for combinations/permutations and probability questions.

There were a few errors in the latter half of the book (in one, for example, the question quoted in the answers section was nearly opposite to the question that had been asked, so the answer given was incorrect). However, considering the number of problems in the book, the accuracy is excellent; and if you can catch the book out on its errors, that’s probably a good sign of how well prepared you are for the real test.

When I first took a diagnostic test, from the Barron’s general prep book, I scored 560Q and 760V; I ran out of time on the quantitative section, in addition to getting several wrong. On ETS’s PowerPrep software the day before the test, I scored 800Q and 760V–the best prediction for me. A second Barron’s diagnostic predicted 700Q, 760V. And on the real thing, I earned a 780Q and 760V. (Yes, I’m rather consistent on the Verbal section, it seems. I chock it up to four years’ prep as a philosophy major.)

I’ve always been pretty good at math, but I freeze up if I’m out of practice on a particular subject. This book covered everything I needed it to, with enough practice of enough variety to bring me to a 780 on the Quantitative section, in spite of my shaky nerves. I know the GRE will switch to the new format within a month, but I would highly recommend this book, even so–it’s a tried-and-true guide that will continue to be useful while publishers are working out the kinks in their material for the new test. Even beyond that, it will remain a good source of extra practice problems.

Oh…I should have noted that the sections were written by different people, some done better than others. Toward the end, where I found errors, was often also where I found poorly written sections (by which I mean unclear or having really minimal review–or overly voluminous review). Maybe I should check which those were and update the review soon.

Hello World!

So…I am still alive. I have been rather remiss in my attention (or complete lack thereof) to this blog. I’ll try to post more now that I’m done with the GRE.

Yep, I took it! Today was the day, and while I would’ve liked my score to be just a little higher (just a hair! –read: 20 points on Quant), I did well. Well enough I’m about to go buy a bottle of Bailey’s so I can make a celebratory Irish cream latté. A tout a l’heure.

Is originality merely the rehashing of old ideas?

This is my second practice attempt at the Analytical Writing Issue task. I finished this one in 45 minutes even (or is that “odd”? ), but I had to stop halfway through proofreading. Hope all my subjects agree with their verbs, and everything. The first two topics were ones I had decent examples for off the top of my head; I worry I won’t be so lucky on the real thing.

Originality does not mean thinking something that was never thought before; it means putting old ideas together in new ways.

An old dictum states that everything a person thinks has been thought before, that “there is nothing new under the sun.” And in many cases, this is true.

Witness the countless love poems that have been written: we express the same concept with myriad images and metaphors, always seeking new ways to depict a feeling that is common to all people in all times. Surely, in the context of love poems, originality must mean putting an old idea in a new light.

Even the modern personal computer was not a new idea when it was developed as a practical product; the idea of a programmable computing machine goes back at least to Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century. And his idea was arguably a ‘mere’ modification of adding machines that have been used for thousands of years. A long history of computing machines has led up to our current Macbook Pros, iPods, and touchscreen tablet PCs; the originality and innovation in the computer industry involves a great deal of modification to existing technology. We create new technologies by borrowing and improving upon existing ones.

But is all originality merely modification or recombination?

Einstein famously said that imagination is more important than knowledge. And he was a fit judge: a genius physicist, his Theory of Relativity caused a paradigm shift in the physical sciences, rewriting our model of the universe. He showed that Newtonian physics was deeply flawed (albeit useful on the scale of the everyday world), a feat that required no small amount of knowledge. But it required no less of him in originality: at the heart of Einstein’s theory is a redefinition of time itself. No one before him had imagined that time and space might be related, that they might be anything but constant.

It requires originality to express old ideas in novel ways, or to transform the idea of an adding machine into that of a Macbook Pro. But sometimes, someone does think a new thought; that kind of originality can change our world radically, well deserving the name we give it: “genius.”