Paranormal Academics

A Suspension – An illusion where an object or person appears to maintain their position in air without any means of support. Unlike a levitation, an object does not rise or fall on its own. The supports from under the subject are typically pulled away and then placed back at the conclusion of the effect. 

- From the Glossary of Magic Terms 

In honor of Halloween… 

I am a fan of James Randi. Spending most of his life as a stage magician, The Amazing Randi retired at age 60 and has subsequently dedicated his life to the art and science of “debunking”, which, simply defined, is the process of discrediting and/or contradicting claims as being false or pretentious. In other words, a debunker is a skeptic with skills.

From Skeptic Magazine

Although it has nothing to do with the content of this week’s thought, my fellow language geeks will appreciate this aside; the American Heritage Dictionary lists the first appearance of the word “bunk” in American English in 1923 as a derivation of "bunkum", of which the first recorded use was in 1828, apparently related to a poorly received "speech for Buncombe" given by North Carolina representative Felix Walker during the 16th United States Congress. I must visit Buncombe someday.

Regardless, the point is the fact that James Randi has a Foundation, an “educational” foundation nonetheless. The James Randi Educational Foundation is the sponsor of the “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge”, a fund set up to provide the first person that could provide objective proof of paranormal activity. The website is silent on protocol around a second occurrence.

Allegedly, over 1,000 applications have been filed but no one has passed the preliminary test, which requires that both parties must agree in advance as to what conditions of the test constitute a success and what constitutes a failure.

With that setup, I found two articles that trouble me this week. Neither was written this week, but I just now got around to reading them.

The first article is a defense of the ongoing and growing criticism around the cost of higher education. The second deals with the how bad colleges and universities are in terms of graduation rates. Half of my audience is now gone. I am sorry. Next week, I’ll try to do something more topical.

Here is an excerpt from the first: 

“Another strand of the dysfunction narrative focuses on the gold plating of the college experience. In this view, colleges spend far too much money on lifestyle amenities. The criticisms fall on things as diverse as career advising centers, psychological counseling, and plush exercise rooms.“ 

“Lax workplace culture at colleges and universities offers yet another fat target. Tenure is a common punching bag. In different tellings of the story, the faculty either does not work hard enough, or alternatively works too hard on the wrong things – research at the expense of teaching. Faculty governance often is fingered as a problem since it supposedly allows the professoriate to dictate the terms of its own employment. These workplace culture arguments often are augmented by politicized attacks on the type of research done by many professors in the humanities and social sciences.” 

“Lastly, statistics indicating that administrators and support staff have grown as a percentage of the higher education workforce supposedly offer even more evidence of rising inefficiency. Over the past 20 years, as enrollment has grown by 40 percent, the number of support-staff members on campuses has doubled. This is often taken as prima facie evidence of bloat and inefficiency.” 

- The Real Cost Equation by Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman, published October 19, 2010. 

In fairness to the authors, this treatment is geared more toward university structure, but they do mention “colleges” a number of times and that makes it relevant to me.

In keeping with the Amazing Randi’s rules, which require advance agreement on the conditions of the test and what constitutes success and failure, I will begin. Unfortunately, I have no paranormal skills and, therefore, cannot know if you will agree with my evidence or argument ahead of time, but that circumstance didn’t deter better people than me.

I will begin with tuition increases. From the mid-1990s through 2003, tuition increase $2 per credit hour each year. From 2003 to present, the increase has been $5 per credit hour. Small, planned, and incremental increases have been and continue to be our philosophy. Parents with children in 5th grade today can, with relative confidence, estimate their tuition costs at Parkland College. 

As far as exotic services like a career center, psychological counseling, and plush exercise rooms, technically we have all three.

The Career Center at Parkland has three staff members assigned. As I mentioned in a previous post, I hear countless tales from thankful students (and parents) about how Parkland College helped a son or daughter, husband or wife, mom or dad, figure out their academic and career goals. And in the College Center, so many of the students I talk with are undecided about what they want to do and are looking for a little guidance, so much so that I think almost every student would benefit from a visit. Whether you are a student choosing a college major, a dislocated worker, career changer, or retiree, there are resources and services designed to help. No sleight of hand here. 

We have eight counselors at Parkland that are certified to do personal counseling. Each counselor and advisor has their own style and I found it very interesting to see the different techniques in action when I visited. I view it as a good thing that we have such a diversity of approach in the Center as it allows our students to find a compatible soul and a connection with that person. This type of work with students requires exceptional listening skills and the ability to “translate” what a student is attempting to communicate. Some students provide very little information and other times, it’s a flood. As more students with diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions come to college, our staff is asked to do more.

Advances in pharmaceuticals and better treatment options allow students that once never considered higher education to attend. And our counselor to student ratio is 2,598 students to 1 counselor. If there was ever a need for the “saw the woman in half” trick, here it is.

Our “plush fitness center” is on the way. Today, students, staff, and faculty share a basement hallway that has been walled off to make a “fitness center”. Since 1987, this approximately 1200 square feet has served our community poorly and we are building a new one that will contain over-the-top amenities like open floor space (#6,7,& 8), two offices (#4 & 5), and two classrooms (#3). If that fits your definition of “plush” there you have it. Sound like smoke and mirrors? 

Let’s move on to those dastardly faculty members. 

The claim is that “the faculty either does not work hard enough, or alternatively works too hard on the wrong things”. I smile as I type this next bit.

The full-time faculty at Parkland College teach between 15 and 16 credit hours per semester. Here is the math: Each credit hour taught requires two clock hours per week of in-class time, preparation, grading, assessing, answering questions, et cetera. The faculty is also required to hold five office hours per week, during which they are available to students for questions, assistance, advising, and the like. And additional five hours per week is allocated to departmental or college service. This includes committee work, curriculum development and coordination, recruitment, research, advisory committee organization, or any number of related activities. That looks like a 40 hour work week to me. No illusions here.

Lastly, there are allegedly “statistics indicating that administrators and support staff have grown as a percentage of the higher education workforce”. I suspect this is aimed largely at the proliferating number of administrators hired to manage the bureaucracy the higher education is. You will find no argument from me on the last part of that sentence. Imposed bureaucracy grows faster than the national debt in the form of state and federally mandated reports, audits, surveys, legal requirements, legislation, and grant pursuits, to name just a very few.

In 2000, Parkland College employed 39 people that had administrative contracts. In 2010, that number got a little out of control, growing to an amazing (just like Randi) 40 administrators. 

One might ask what the numbers for support staff look like? I can’t find the number for 2000 at this very moment, but in 2003, there were 258 support staff at Parkland. Today there are 236.

By the way, student enrollment in 2000 was 14,640 per year. Today, we are just over 20,000. No spoon bending here.

The second article, or more accurately, series of articles, has to do with the very popular “completion agenda”.

“Supporters and critics of community colleges alike question the merits of the primary success metric currently produced by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System: the "federal graduation rate," the completion rate for first-time, full-time students who earn credentials within 150 percent (recently changed to 200 percent) of the generally accepted amount of time it takes to complete. (In other words, four years for a two-year degree, and eight years for a four-year degree.) 

Supporters say the current data don't reflect the good work the colleges do, failing to account for the many students who transfer to four-year institutions without degrees, and the many students who come to the institutions for something less than a degree -- a certificate, or even just some retraining -- and get what they wanted. Critics argue that better data would simply provide clearer evidence that community colleges are failing in their mission, reinforcing what are terribly low completion rates at some institutions.” 

- Measuring 2-Year Students' Success October 21, 2010 

Most of the national discussion about community college focuses on completion rates. How long does it take a student to complete a two-year degree? This appears to be a very simple, straight forward question. Colleges should be able to count the total number of students enrolled in a given year as well as the number that graduate and calculate the completion rate. In order for this kind of measure to be valid, we need to accurately define the cohort of students to be tracked and we need to define a reasonable timeframe that reflects reality. Let me tell you now that this is nearly impossible. I’ll explain.

One might assume in perfect world in terms of cohort and timeframe, the completion rate would be 50%. That would be a perfect score, assuming all our students enrolled full-time and in 2-year degree programs of 60 to 65 credit hours.

The inset table, generated by our own Institutional Research Office, reviews both number and percentage of ALL students enrolled in CREDIT course at Parkland in a given year. It takes a very simple look at total number of students enrolled versus and how many “graduate” in the various categories. 

You can see from the chart that in our best year of the three -- 2009, just 8% of all credit students at Parkland graduated with a degree or certificate.
As a taxpayer and a human being, this figure is disconcerting to say the least. I would contend that the table above is not very useful way of measuring a college. Matter of fact, it’s useless.

Why? Four reasons:

The first issue with this measure is that the vast majority of our students are enrolled in two year programs, meaning that only about half of our students are eligible to graduate any given year. A perfect score for that year would have us graduating (16,780 students /2 years = 8390) 8390 students. If you agree with this logic, our completion rate rises to 17.8%.

Second, as you are aware, the student population enrolling at a community college is far more diverse in terms of age, background, and socio-economic status than a university. The vast majority of undergraduate university students attend full-time, taking 12 or more credit hours each semester. At Parkland, less than half of our students attend full-time. Actually, only 43% of our students attend full-time and the other 56% attend part-time. We also know from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement that 80% of our students work 20 hours a week or more.

For discussion purposes, let’s assume that students that attend college part-time will take 4 years to complete a two year degree. Some take more and some less, but this is as good of a starting point as any.

In 2009, we had 16,780 students enrolled in credit courses. We know 56.3% of that number are attending part-time. That comes to 9,447 part-time students.

If we were to adjust the original table to account for part-time students, how would it affect the “perfect score”? The number is now 6027 and our completion rate becomes 24.8%.

The third difference lies in student intent. Nearly 70% of our students at Parkland consider themselves to be degree-seeking. By the way, even though a student may have declared themselves to be degree-seeking population, some incalculable percentage has no intention of finishing a degree or certificate. There are several reasons why this is the case. First, in order to qualify for financial aid, a student must pursue a degree. For many students, this leads to an arbitrary and meaningless decision.

Regardless, we know that only 70% of our students in a given year are actually pursuing a degree, at best. How does this knowledge affect the “perfect score”? The number is now 4228 and the completion rate becomes 35.3%.

As an aside, the 30% of our students that intend to transfer to a university to finish a 4-year degree, there is little incentive to complete the requirements for an associate degree. Students are most likely to transfer after having completed just 38 credit hours of transferable general education course work. In addition, we enroll approximately 5000 University of Illinois concurrent students each year. By serving these students, by some completion measures, it actual hurts our completion/graduation rate.

Fourth, approximately 9% of the students at Parkland are enrolled in developmental coursework. The “extra” classes that a student may need to complete before enrolling in college-level classes can range from as little as 3 to as much as 30 credit hours for students entering at the lowest levels. I do not have the data on hand to accurately calculate the effect that developmental courses have on completion rates without going into student-level data, but the point is still valid.

Depending on your preference and your faith in the assumptions I made in the calculations, you may or may not agree that 35.3% is a more accurate representation of the graduation rate for Parkland College. With a little bit of discussion, we could probably agree that this (or a reasonable variation) scenario is accurate. My point is that one of the most significant issues in the completion agenda discussion is in defining the cohort of students to be tracked.

To complicate the picture further, we shift focus to the reporting we already perform.

Currently, we report our graduation/completion rates in two ways. The first method is for the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the second is for the Illinois Community College Board/Board of Higher Education.

With respect to IPEDS, there are two measures of significance. The first are data are for full-time, first-time, degree/certificate-seeking student graduation rates within 150% of normal time to program completion. Our latest published rate is 23%. For comparison purposes, IPEDS assigns us to a comparison group of other, similar colleges. The comparison group rate, which included 7 other Illinois community colleges, was 15%.

In comparison to all community colleges in Illinois, which is not an apples to apples comparison, Parkland ranks 28th of 48 campuses, with the highest rate at 46% (Frontier CC) and lowest at 3% (Olive Harvey CC).

The second significant IPEDS measure has to do with graduation rates of full-time, first-time, degree-seeking students at three different points: 100%, 150%, and 200% of normal time to completion. Using this measure, Parkland College consistently outperforms its 26 peer colleges.

Our numbers for 2009 with comparison group rates in parenthesis:

100% of normal time: 10% (7%) 

150% of normal time: 23% (16%) 

200% of normal time: 30% (22%) 

With respect to the Illinois Board of Higher Education’s Data Book on Illinois Higher Education, the measure of graduation/completion rates is slightly different. Community Colleges are judged on the proportion of first-time, full-time freshmen who complete their degree with 150% of catalog time, transfer, or are still enrolled at the college. Obviously, this is a much broader measure. Using the most recent data, Parkland College shows 75.2%. When using this measure, Parkland ranks 2nd in the state, after Rend Lake Community College.

In summary, Parkland College appears to be in the middle of the pack with respect to some measures (that don’t take into account significant difference between colleges) to nearly the top performer when other measures (IBHE) are applied.

Clearly, there is lack of agreement among those we are accountable to with respect to what the cohort of students should be as well as the timeframe that makes sense. The completion agenda, as it sits today, is a mess. There are several competing models, funding sources, and interests with no clear picture as to which model, if any, will be the winner. 

The community college equivalent of the James Randi Foundation exists several times over as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina, and others offer financial incentives to create the mutually agreed upon test.

It appears to me that Parkland College is performing well in general, but when our data is disaggregated, we know we have work to do. Examples are minority student completion and retention rates and certificate completion rates, due in large part to a small number of certificate programs available at Parkland. 

Yes, we have work to do and readily embrace that challenge every day. You expect it of us.

In order to do this job, some tools are required. We need well-trained and dedicated staff, faculty, and yes, administrators. The endeavor requires a physical campus (somewhere between spartan and plush) that isn’t embarrassingly on consignment from the 1970’s in terms of décor and technology. And finally, we should be held accountable for our performance using measures that make sense. 

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Bigfoot and Sugar Pills

Be very wary of people who go to college to "get an education". I mean, what are you doing the rest of the time? Un-getting an education? - Unknown

Sugar pills. You can buy 500 doses here for $49. For the more discriminating shopper, you can go here and get roughly the same thing for $24. Both will work fine for treating depression.

Apparently, the fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills in controlled, scientific studies has thrown the industry into crisis. But really, we have known for quite a while that there is lots of evidence that placebos work in medicine and that people get well simply because they think they're supposed to.

Allegedly, the mere proximity an ultrasound machine to someone's face is effective for post-operative dental pain, regardless of whether the machine is even switched on.

During the 1950s, doctors were somewhat taken with the notion of “ligating the internal mammary artery” to treat angina. Unfortunately, when someone did a placebo-controlled trial, complete with a mock-operating room and an incision, but only pretended to “ligate the internal mammary”, the theatrical procedure was just as effective as the real one. Ouch.

So we did the intelligent thing. We just stopped doing the procedure because it was useless, not to mention the consternation it likely caused for the billing/complaint department.

We know that red sugar pills are more effective stimulants than blue sugar pills.

We know, of course, that two sugar pills have a bigger effect than one, and that an intramuscular sugar pill injection is far more effective than sugar tablet form.

We know that brand-name aspirin, with brand-name packaging and the wealth of advertising and cultural background material that supports it, is more effective at managing our aches and pains that that no-name generic, knock-off stuff, no matter that they've both got the same active ingredient. Four hyphens appear in that sentence. That makes it better.

We’ve known for quite a while that placebos can affect lots of things, but especially the stuff that has some level of subjectivity attached and that a big part of effectiveness comes from the ceremony and the cultural context of the treatment. But, I have only recently learned that there are some that believe higher education isn’t much more than a sugar pill, albeit a highly invasive one.

I read (part of) a book by Tyler Cowen called “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World”.  In it, he makes the statement that, “…placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo. The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?”

Is that what we do? Is that all “education” is? Is it the social function of bringing people together, and letting positive peer pressure do its magic? Is it that educators and administrators stage a kind of "theater" to convince students that they now belong to an elite group called the learned? Is it that only once students finish 2 or 4 years of higher education they will have drunk a sufficient amount of (k)cool-aid (but the kind made with real sugar) to believe? 
Maybe a little. I should explain:

School in general works to some degree because it makes people feel they've been transformed. College graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates. The College Board reports that, “…the data showed that median annual earnings for workers 25 and over also increased with more education. In 2008, high school graduates earned an average of $33,800; people with some college education but no degree earned $39,700; people with an associate degree earned $42,000; bachelor's degree holders earned $55,700; master's degree holders earned $67,300; doctoral degree holders earned $91,900; and those with a professional degree earned $100,000.”

Our own results confirm. But why?

Saying that you studied modern American literature by itself rarely gets people a job. But by saying that you are adept at critical-thinking (and producing the skills to back it up) just might.

The problem is that critical thinking is not a definable skill set, in and of itself.  Unless something was published recently that I missed, all the known world's collected wisdom of several thousand years has failed to accurately describe an effective and replicable way of teaching critical thinking.

It is sort of like Bigfoot. We can describe generally what it looks like, but very few people have seen it, and there is some doubt about whether it actually exists.

Critical thinking deals with some sort of problem solving, say the application of the principles of mechanics to living organisms. It has to do with how good a decision is or how well a problem has been solved. It focuses on specific outcomes.

For example, you can give a student an assignment to consider reasonable alternative explanations for an historical event, but they can't do it unless they know what's reasonable in that context. Similarly, you can tell a student to look at an issue from multiple perspectives, but if they don't know much about the issue they can't think about it from multiple perspectives.

Our academic assessment woes aside, universities (and to some degree, colleges) are very concerned with prestige, status, and pretense. This translates into thick syllabi, famous professors, research dollars, and impressive graduation ceremonies. It sounds like a speech (my own included) that you may have heard. You know, the one admonishing students to persist, to invest in their education both financially and in time and effort?

One of the reasons we spend so much on college is to convince ourselves of our own commitment; similarly, in medicine, experiments show that aspirin relieves more of our pain if we know that we spent more money on the pills.

When I went through basic training in the Army, the culminating event was a week-long hazing called “The Crucible”. I learned quickly that it had absolutely nothing to do with Arthur Miller.

To sum it up, it involved very little sleep, lots of yelling and screaming, marching long distances, and practical examination of routine skills we learned the prior eight weeks. The “crucible” exists so that the soldiers feel they suffered/invested to get there and it remains an extraordinarily effective technique. It has to do with perceived value -- our opinion of a product's value. It may have little or nothing to do with a product's market price, and everything to do with the product's ability to satisfy our needs or requirements.

Correspondingly, effective higher education probably won't ever be cheap or easy. What you get in college is the opportunity to demonstrate that you can manage your own schedule, complete projects and papers on schedule without someone standing over you every minute, autonomy, and resources. In reality, the students are jumping through lots of hoops and acquiring a new self-identity. It really does cost a lot to bundle together a bit of learning, some good theater, and some missionary zeal, replete with the socially required props. And to some degree, it is about the ability to deal with a bureaucracy, and that’s, my friends, is a valuable life skill. It also demonstrates the ability to come up to speed on some topic, and be able to engage in some logical discourse. In total, I think this is why employers value a college degree.

To keep on with the medical analogy, a college or university is a delivery system (think the syringe) that imparts the "medicine" of knowledge. The “knowledge” is an independent entity; it isn't the "cure" itself. A delivery system is incredibly important to a medical outcome, but it's not the drug, so (at least in my understanding) it can't be a placebo.

The drug, on our case, is the information, knowledge, skills, and techniques, sequenced and presented in a way that engages the student.

And here it comes, the big reveal…the critical element that separates higher education from medicine is the professor.

In medicine (or at least pharmaceuticals), the treatment is independent of the doctor. The effect of swallowing two little pills has nothing to do with the skills and talents of the person handing them over. It’s all about the "treatment" regardless of who administers it. But in education, the professor is supposed to be a major cause of learning. And it is true.

In nearly all “teacher effects” studies where one of the variables was the faculty, the effect of different teachers was always bigger than the effect of different treatments (what was meant to be studied). Read that again. I’ll wait.

In my last posting, Nanothoughts, I talked about a study that showed that 10 seconds of video (without sound) of a teacher allows students to predict the ratings they teacher will receive. Similarly, hearing the sound without the visual (rhythm and tone of voice only) were enough as well. This is powerful evidence that teachers differ in ways that cannot easily or normally controlled, but which are very quickly perceptible. Somehow and with lightning speed, students' minds are able to determine value of a teacher.

Basically, teachers have a huge effect but one that we don't understand at all from a social science standpoint.

The most fundamental lesson that comes to my mind is that our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound. Despite confidently asserted empirical analysis, persuasive rhetoric, and claims to expertise, very few social-program interventions can be shown, in controlled experiments, to create real improvement.

We continue to consider socio-economic factors influencing learning and cognition, learning styles, multiple intelligences, student preferences, faculty teaching style, active-learning techniques, constructivism v. behaviorism, air temperature, room size, time of day, and daily caloric intake. Every one of these variables has been studied to some extent and when assessed individually, some generalizations can be made, but always with exception and never with absolute certainty. 

There is as much difference between two teachers doing, purportedly, the same thing in conventional classes as there is between two teachers doing different things.

As long as we keep on thinking that it works, it probably does.

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Nanothoughts

Split second decisions. Nanothoughts....           

Telstar Logistics

The trouble with split-second decisions is that they often feel as though they made themselves. It is not necessarily the case that simply that snap decisions are less accurate than other kinds of decisions, but it is easy to understand that there is just as much, if not more potential for error when making quick decisions.

If you only have 12 seconds, it is probably a bad idea to begin balancing your checkbook or making jam.

The other issue with quick decisions has to do with consequence. If you are an airline pilot steering a jet into a river because the engines failed, we care a lot about and, hopefully celebrate your ability to make quick, decisive and accurate decisions. Same thing does for the neurosurgeon and the bomb disposal technicians, and search committees.

Wait. What?

“[A research project] conducted by Frank Bernieri at the University of Toledo in Ohio, dealt with job-interview impressions. This researcher selected two participants to act as interviewers and had them professionally trained for 6 weeks on interview techniques. These two later interviewed nearly 100 people of various backgrounds and filled out an extensive six-page interview questionnaire on each. Bernieri’s goal was to determine whether there are particular mannerisms that could ingratiate some people with interviewers.

He found that wasn’t the case. There don’t seem to be any particular tricks one can use to win at an interview.

But then one of Bernieri’s students asked if the videotapes of these encounters could be used for another purpose. She had heard that “the handshake is everything” and wanted to test that old adage. Using a 15-second piece of video showing the candidate knocking on the door, shaking hands, and being greeted by the interviewer, she asked a group of new participants to rate these applicants on the same criteria that the two trained interviewers had been using.

“On nine out of the 11 traits that the applicants were being judged on, the observers significantly predicted the outcome of the interview,” Bernieri told The New Yorker. “In fact, the strength of the correlation was extraordinary.”

This is a disturbing conclusion. Here were well-trained interviewers, knowing just what to look for and how to get the information they sought, filling out a detailed, five-part form ensuring a complete and unbiased interview. Yet total strangers, who viewed only 15 seconds of video, arrived at similar conclusions.”

Wow. What they are saying is that the most qualified person doesn't always get the offer? Instead, the qualified candidate who makes the right first impression gets the offer? Yes, well, it gets worse.

Way back in 1993, a couple of experimental psychologists at Harvard University analyzed the nonverbal aspects of good teaching.  Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal enlisted the help of some Harvard teaching fellows who agreed to have their teaching videotaped.

A 10-second silent piece of that video was shown to outside observers, who were asked to rate the teachers on a 15-item checklist of personality traits. Trends emerged.

By athena.

Even when Ambady cut the video back even to just 2 seconds, the ratings remained the same. Apparently, all the important stuff happens in the first 2 seconds.

Now for the kicker: Ambady and Rosenthal discovered that a person's conclusions after watching that 2-second video clip of a teacher he has never met are very similar to the conclusions reached by classroom participants after an entire semester's exposure. The moral of the story is that impressions matter, sometimes more that they should. Of course, there is also the possibility – and some would argue, probability – of this impression being biased.

The ability to make sound decisions instantly over short spans of time is discussed in detail in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink", which I highly recommend. Another of his works that I read last spring break entitled “What the Dog Saw”, is outstanding as well. Malcolm is been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996 and has written four books. 

According to Gladwell, making split second decisions, based on what initially may appear to be a limited amount of information, occurs in a part of the brain called the adaptive unconscious.  This part of your brain is "a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”

"There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.” Gladwell explains how this process works, how to develop and control this skill, and when to trust these decisions as opposed to a different decision process.

But neither search committees nor teaching are generally considered high-pressure or high-stress environments, at least most days, right?

Right. So what are we to do, if anything? I mean, what’s the point? Two seconds…?

There really is only one piece of advice. It was given to me by several of my mentors a long time ago and it was to “be true to myself”. In other words, be yourself and be at your best.

Perhaps the best way to influence that split second decision is to not worry about them. There's something liberating about the idea that you don't really have to perform, to pretend to be something you're not.  It appears, based on the studies, that it is really hard to "fake it" in both the classroom and an interview. Since there's nothing you can do about it anyway, you might as well be yourself.

It is, however, a reminder to pay attention to the smallest components of our everyday lives. Every day, whenever we meet a new person, or confront a complex situation, or have to make a decision under conditions of stress, pay attention to those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that you can’t help but form.

If we paid more attention to those fleeting moments, I think it just might change the way we interact with one another, our notions of civility, the way job interviews are conducted, how classes are taught, and on and on.

Isn’t that what we are all about?


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If You're Happy and You Know It...

“If I have a dollar, and you have a dollar and you give me your dollar and I give you my dollar, we each have one dollar. If I have an idea and you have an idea and you give me your idea and I give you my idea, we each have two ideas.” - Buckminster Fuller, Comprehensive Design Scientist

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” – Mahatma Gandhi 

If you were to consider all the things in your life (relationships, work, socioeconomics, et cetera) as a whole, how happy would you say you are on a scale of one to ten, with one being the least happy and ten being the most?

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to participate in discussion with Tom Ulen, the Swanlund Chair and Director of Illinois Program in Law and Economics at the UIUC. Tom was utterly captivating, covering a range of concepts ranging from rational or enlightened self-interest, to hedonic psychology and happiness economics. Please excuse the links to non-scholarly sources on Wikipedia, but they give you the gist of things.

I was pondering what to write this week and remembered this lecture and how much it interested me, so I pulled out my notes and did a little more reading.

As it turns out, most people are happy, above at least a five on the one to ten scale a couple paragraphs up. Actually, according to Ulen, the average in the United States is 7.8. You may be as surprised as I was to know that there is quite a bit of work that has gone into the study of happiness and the factors that appear to have influence. As a result, we've learned that human beings have a distinct inability to predict or understand the things that will make us happy (or not).

We are inclined to underestimate how fast recovery from traumatic events will take and overestimate how “bad things are”. In addition, we tend to focus on what happened to us most recently as well as the best and worst parts of our experiences and “forget” the long periods of equilibrium in between.

Psychological hedonism consists of the idea that all human choice is motivated by a desire for pleasure, or at least an aversion to pain. With respect to how we deal with others, the theory claims that when sane people choose to help others, it is because of the pleasure they themselves obtain, directly or indirectly, from doing so. Psychological hedonism is a special case of psychological egoism, in which the concept of enlightened self-interest is equated with pleasure.

So what has all this study told us about happiness? Well, Psychologists say it is possible to measure your happiness. Another Professor and psychologist, Ed Diener from the University of Illinois, designed a little test that takes just a minute to complete.

To find out how happy you are just look at the five statements below and decide whether you agree or disagree using a 1-7 scale.

1. Strongly disagree
2. Disagree
3. Slightly disagree
4. Neither agree nor disagree
5. Slightly agree
6. Agree
7. Strongly agree

Answer these questions as honestly as you can.

1. In most ways my life is ideal.

2. The conditions of my life are excellent.

3. I am satisfied with my life.

4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.

5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

Add up your scores.

31-35 - You are extremely satisfied with your life.

26-30 - Very satisfied.
21-25 - Reasonably satisfied.
20 - Neutral
15-19 - Slightly unsatisfied
10-14 - Unsatisfied
5-9 - Extremely unsatisfied

Did your result surprise you?
Don’t feel bad if you were/are. Studies have shown you aren’t really the best judge of your own happiness for a number of very interesting reasons, such as optimism bias and the Law of Self Contradiction, and the availability heuristic to name a few.

This idea of availability heuristic is especially interesting. In a nutshell, when contemplating a decision in which information is important, people tend to rely on readily available information in favor of objectively verifiable data. In other words, if a person has no information on which to base a decision, they tend to base response on whatever information floats by.

In other, other words, people tend not to gather objective information and do whatever is “vivid” or makes sense in their frame of reference. Mix in a little optimism bias and we find that even with right and objective information, people tend to be overly optimistic about life circumstances and ignore the data.
“It won’t apply to me.”

Our relationship to happiness can be maddening. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. We wish for what we don’t have because our minds tell us that if only we had x or y, life would be complete. This leads us to become too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want, and the belief that we can arrange our happiness as though happiness were a commodity may cause us to misrecognize the very thing that concerns us. What?

The upshot of the research shows that we tend to mis-predict what will make us happy because our brains aren’t really equipped to make such a prediction accurately. It’s sort of this fight against our brain’s natural reasoning capacity, and we always lose.

My proof:

According to several Ph.D’s and one noted endocrinologist, happiness is terribly elusive, requiring solutions, guides, prescriptions, and even a year-long focused project. Is it really this difficult? Really?

Apparently, happiness has little to do with money past a certain point. More evidence:

     The Price Of Happiness: $75,000 – Huffington Post

Above that and there is little change in the levels of daily joy or happiness. Two major studies show that money matters until “Enough” is reached, then other things, like the support of family and friends, bring increases in daily good feelings. 

In the US, you can buy happiness for $75,000. So says a new study of 450,000 Americans. As previous research has suggested, more money increases happiness up to a point, then it levels off. Here is the summary from the Huffington Post. We provide a link to a PDF of the full article from the National Academy of Sciences and to an article published July 1st in the Washington Post on related research by Ed Diener, one of the founders of happiness research with 136,000 people from 132 Countries with key findings that differentiate the satisfaction that money can buy and the positive feelings that come from other non-money things, like the support of family and friends. The results suggest a high degree of universality in what constitutes a good life.

According to Professor Ulen, the Huffington Post article above is a shining example of something called the Easterlin Paradox. Simply put, happiness does not increase with per capita income. Relative income matters, however if there is too big a difference between two employees of the same status, the prospects for unhappiness are nearly 100%.
I also learned that there is this very interesting notion of gross national happiness (GNH). The concept of GNH was developed “in an attempt to define an indicator that measures quality of life or social progress in more holistic and psychological terms than gross domestic product (GDP).”

The term was coined in 1972 by Bhutan's former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck. He used the phrase to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Allegedly, the idea of GNH was a casual reference designed to paint a picture of the relative happiness of the people in the realm. Today, we call it opinion polling.

Then the Canadians got a hold of it. Canadian health epidemiologist Michael Pennock developed a "de-Bhutanized" version of a survey in his work in Victoria, British Columbia.

Here are the factors that are considered:

• Psychological well-being - Assesses the degree of satisfaction and optimism in individual life. The indicators analyze self-esteem, sense of competence, stress, spiritual activities, and the prevalence of positive and negative emotions.
• Health - Measures the effectiveness of health policies, with criteria such as self-rated health, disability, patterns of risk behavior, exercise, sleep, nutrition, etc.
• Use of time - The use of time is one of the most significant factors in quality of life, especially time for recreation and socializing with family and friends. A balanced management of time is evaluated, including time spent in traffic jams, at work, in educational activities, etc.
• Community vitality - Focuses on relationships and interactions in communities. Examines the level of confidence, the sense of belonging, the vitality of affectionate relationships, safety at home and in the community, and the practice of giving and volunteering.
• Education - Takes into account several factors such as participation in formal and informal education, development of skills and capabilities, involvement in children’s education, values education, environmental education, etc.
• Culture - Evaluates local traditions, festivals, core values, participation in cultural events, opportunities to develop artistic skills, and discrimination due to religion, race or gender.
• Environment - Measures the perception of citizens about the quality of their water, air, soil, forest cover, biodiversity, etc. The indicators include access to green areas, system of waste management, etc.
• Governance - Assesses how the population views the government, the media, the judiciary, the electoral system, and the police, in terms of responsibility, honesty and transparency. It also measures involvement of citizens in community decisions and political processes.
• Standard of living - Evaluates individual and family income, financial security, the level of debt, employment security, the quality of housing, etc.

 Take a look their website at grossnationalhappiness.com.

Let’s get back to what is most important, you and me. It appears that there are really only four things that are associated with individual happiness and the list is fairly predictable:

1. You are married
2. You have lots of friends
3. You have a job
4. You have some spiritual connection

Of course, this list doesn’t work for everyone. Many aspects that you and I might feel are important don’t appear at all -- like integrity, love, creativity, etc., and I know plenty of people that were not particularly happy being married.
This list is also silent on the notion that the things that tend to make us happy not only change over time, but change as we get older. According to the experts, age-related happiness is sort of an inverted bell curve – we are happiest as youngsters and senior citizens. Between the ages of about 20 and 60, our relative happiness bottoms out. The stresses of life and worry tend to bring us down. Meh…

The good news in all this happiness talk is that we human beings have a superpower. It is something called adaptation. We quickly adapt to both good and bad things in our lives relatively quickly. Most of us have a “set point” of happiness that we return to after a spike (good or bad) in about a year on average. This theory has been tested on people that have experiences the loss of a loved one, paraplegics, and lottery winners.

It seems that evolution has weeded out the pessimists. Clap your hands.

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Socially challenged

Social media are a collection of internet-based software tools and services for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast messages opinions, thoughts and ideas, in the form of pictures, podcast, videoclips, and text.

Let me begin by saying clearly and loudly, I am not an expert.

What I am, though, is a student of the media and have been since my undergraduate days. I have been somewhat successful at trying out many of the products and services we call social media. 

You know them by their popular names. They include networking sites including Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. Most of you got to this post today via Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. These products and services have helped you and millions of others connect to friends, relatives, employees, customers, and potential customers, to use that term loosely.

Here is a great explaination.

In the olden days, most folks accessed social media the traditional way -- by using a computer connected to the internet. Now-a-days, all the cool kids are using cellphones to access social media. 


Anytime, anyplace, to anyone, including -- you guessed it -- even the person standing alongside. The one in the middle is my son, with his two best friends on either side.


I’d also like to point out that I consider texting a form of social media as well. The Pew Research center finds that 75% of all children between the ages of 12 and 17 have cell phones. Those of you that have younger children, I have three words for you:  unlimited texting plan. Save yourself a bunch of trouble. In addition, with my own son, I have noticed some distinct trends that I’ve taken the liberty to chart out for you.

You’ll notice that the amount of time spent texting varies by both time of day or night and correlates significantly with life circumstances. Notice if you will, that nearly 100% of a high school-aged child’s time will be spent sending and receiving text messages when a prospective girlfriend or boyfriend scenario is present. 


Of course, the texting is punctuated with Facebook status updates that mark the major milestones of the developing relationship.


Don't want to see someone? Call them. 
Don't want to call someone? E-mail them. 
Don't want to take the trouble to actually write sentences? Text them.


A true story:

My wife and I decided to get my son a cellphone as he started high school for the usual reasons, ease of contact and the ability to track his every move without his knowledge using available Global position triangulation technologies. We also subscribed to the text plan that allowed him some 200 messages per month. 


Given that he was not allowed to use a cell phone in school, my math went something like this:  


On weekdays, outside school hours, he has about six hours per day in which to text. There are five school days, times six hours a day, times four weeks in a month -- that’s 120 hours.


On weekends, of which there are eight days per month, I allotted roughly 12 hours in per day of awake/text time. That comes to an additional 96 hours. So all total, we have 216 "textable" hours per month. With the 200 texts per month plan, rounded up, comes to about one text message per hour every waking hour not spent in school.


That formula worked just fine for about two months and then something went terribly, terribly wrong. That something was the first school dance. My predictive texting formula changed from one text per hour every waking hour to 22.9 texts per hour, every waking hour. That comes to 4950 text messages in one month.


When your text plan charges you .10 cents for every text over the included 200, the result is an additional $475 dollars to your monthly bill. Three words. Really.


I just checked again. We are on the 27 day of a 30 day billing cycle and his message count is 4927. In the same time frame, he actually used his phone as a phone for a grand total of 18 actual minutes. My wife, on the other hand, has used 387 text messages and 547 telephone minutes. 


One other interesting note, within philanthropy circles, one of the major subtexts of the earthquake in Haiti was the phenomenal success of text-message fund-raising appeals. The Red Cross alone raised more than $30 million via text donations by the middle of February, more than 10% of the total funds raised. 


Let's get back to the definition. 


Sometimes it’s easier for comparison purposes, to understand what social media is not, and quite simply put, social media are separate and distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film. They are relatively inexpensive and accessible to anyone including private individuals.

In general, they allow one to publish or access information cheaply or free as compared to industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information. One characteristic shared by both social media and industrial media is the capability to reach small or large audiences. For example, a blog post, a Facebook update, a twitter, or a television show all have the potential to reach anywhere from zero people to millions of people, as Jay Leno is well aware.


So let’s talk for a few minutes about where we might be headed.


I’ll start with the International Telecommunication Union, which is an agency of the United Nations, regulates information and communication technology. In other words, they are significant players indirectly with respect to social media. They have produced a report that takes a look at the next step in what is called “always on" communications. Their premise is that the same kind of connectedness that we human beings experience via social media and networking is also happening with non-human beings and inanimate objects.


And the best example I can use to illustrate my point is something called RFID or Radio Frequency Identification. This isn’t necessarily a new technology, but the new applications of RFID technology are quite interesting.

These tiny, silicon-based RFID tags have been in use for quite some and my guess is that each of you is carrying around a few at this very moment. 


Of course, they are in your cell phones, in library books and passports, and they cost just a couple pennies to embed them into a whole host of products. If you have one of these I-Pass "thingys" for the toll roads around Chicago, that uses RFID technology. RFID tags are beginning to replace the bar codes on groceries in stores.


 I found a video to illustrate.


The tags, which actually can be printed directly on grocery items, uses ink containing carbon nanotubes that instantly transmit information about the contents of your grocery cart to the checkout station. Think about the eventuality of running your full grocery cart by a detector that will instantly know what’s in the cart and ring you up in seconds. 


Yes, we are even implanting them into our bodies. We just had this discussion at Parkland, about move from traditional keys to swipe cards. I suggested implanting RFID chips, which met with some resistance. Well, really, you’ve already had the option to tag your cat or dog for years. 


We have all kinds of lapel pins that we give out. Why not embed RFID chips in them, so when you get close to the door, a sensor reads your tag and decides if you should be able to unlock the door? If you lose your pin or your security clearance changes, a couple of keystrokes are all it takes.


Think about a time when new technologies like RFID and smart computing promise a world of networked and interconnected devices that provide relevant content and information whatever the location of the user.

Click for an example….

So what does this all have to do with social media? We are well on our way toward the day in which the Internet of data and people gives way to tomorrow’s Internet of Things. A long story short, today we network with each other. 


Increasingly, we will begin to add things to our repertoire that enhance, guide, alter, and influence our daily lives. 

We will rely more and more on mobile devices. There were over 1.8 billion mobile phones in circulation by the end of 2004. At the end of 2009 there were 4.1 billion. 


More than half the global population now pays to use one. They’re everywhere and its getting more difficult to find areas of the world that don’t have cellphone coverage. In 2007 China Telecom installed a cell tower near the Mt. Everest base camp. Many developing countries have skipped the copper-based, hard-wired telephone lines that we grew up with completely and have jumped from nothing directly to cellphones.

Today, you can Twitter on an airplane, as more than ten air carriers are providing in-flight internet connections. 


I was on a flight about seven months ago, trying out the service. It was March 28th at 5:05 pm. 


I was pretty sure we were about to die. 


We ran into a patch of turbulence that was particularly nasty and our plane was rocked for what was probably only a minute but it seemed a whole lot longer. It was turbulence like I’ve never felt before. Drinks were thrown all over the place and at least one person was injured.

During this time, I took the opportunity to update my Facebook status. I’m still not sure why I did that; I suppose to leave some record and it was the best pre-death status update I could think of at the time. My point is that five people in different parts of the country -- my sister-in-law, my son’s girlfriend, a neighbor, my aunt, and a family friend all knew what happened to us within just a few seconds. 


That’s pretty cool all by itself. 


But it’s too much work (really?). I had to actively post that information. The next logical step in this technological revolution of connecting people anytime and anywhere is to connect inanimate objects a communication network.


Like airplanes. 


Software can tell me that my son just boarded flight 1537 to France and is sitting in seat 16c, and that it landed safely at DeGaulle eight hours and ten minutes later. It connects me with the people I choose to care about, with their permission, anytime and anywhere we choose. This is the vision underlying the Internet of things. The use of electronic tags (e.g. RFID) and sensors will, I guarantee, extend the communication and monitoring potential of the network of networks, as will the introduction of computing power in everyday items such as appliances, shoes and packaging. 

What Mark was talking about is the increasing “availability” and decreasing “visibility” of processing power.  In other words, computing through dedicated devices will slowly disappear, while information processing capabilities will emerge throughout our surrounding environment. With continuing developments in miniaturization and declining costs, it is becoming not only technologically possible, but also economically feasible to make everyday objects smarter, and to connect the world of people with the world of things. 


Ok. Examples:

“Adunio” is a small, low cost circuit board intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, or anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Its use in real world has led to a revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter.

The dumbest example of the application of this technology that I have ever seen is a device attached to an office chair that tweets at the presence of natural gasses (ahem).


Another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet about what’s fresh from their oven. 


This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point. This is the revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state. The Internet of Things isn’t happening in the R and D labs of large multinational conglomerates. It’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world. 

As I mentioned before RFID tags have been used for years now in passports, ID cards, and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned.  And they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands, including Abercrombie and Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of pants.


RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. 


You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits. 

Those of you with a Facebook account, have you ever noticed the top right hand side of the page?  It tries very hard to present you with advertising information that is customized to your demographic and interests.  My Facebook page tells me that I apparently, I have interests in another degree, yoga, and instructional materials.


Clearly, there are privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your groceries dead on arrival. 


There are privacy advocates that are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — think about the idea that RFID could be on our person without us knowing or that your cellphone might be surreptitiously turned on to monitor your whereabouts. None of us would like that too much.


But on the other hand, soon you will be able to “Google” your car keys, or your dog, or better yet your husband, or when you can’t find him. So, as social media becomes more widely accepted as a communications channel, more and more businesses will find ways to use it. Some of them will innovate, and social media is the vehicle. 


When the audience becomes the media channel, they can create and distribute through networked conversation without relying on a broadcaster. We all feel a need to belong to a group, social or otherwise, whether through shared interests, familial relationships, or supporting the same baseball team. Belonging feeds our sense of who we are and it makes us human, and the technology allows us entrée to wider groups of people who share our interests – and as the groups become bigger, they tend to become better informed, and the stories more complex.


Today, both social media and the corporation are connecting directly to these groups. This phenomenon is causing something to happen. It’s called disintermediation.  Another video explains best.


The key word is ‘scarce’ and networked distribution changes everything. Let me tell you why.  

You have probably heard the story of Gordon Moore and self-titled theory called Moore’s law. 


As a reminder, Gordon was chairman of the Intel Corporation and in 1965 he observed that the number of transistors that could be placed on a circuit board had doubled every two years since the invention of the integrated circuits in 1958.


Further, predicted that this exponential growth would continue unchecked and so far, he has been right. 


This law of exponential increase in computing speed and memory capacity is what has fundamentally changed our methods of communication. In the industrial age, media were expensive. Movies relied on people and technology to create them, and time, space and money to distribute and store them.


Newspapers are hugely labor intensive to write, expensive to physically print, and had to be distributed quickly to maintain demand. The increase in processing power and storage predicted by Moore’s Law means that digital production and storage is now virtually free.


The internet means that distribution is virtually free.

Information and entertainment is now nearly infinite, but economics is all about supply and demand, so scarcity has a lot to do with creation of value.  A virtually infinite amount of information and entertainment is a drain on the finite amount of attention available to consume it. What is scarce, and therefore valuable, is attention.


There are seven commonly understood mass media:  print, audio, cinema, radio, TV, internet and mobile. There are many “experts” predicting that soon these will all just be different channels on the internet, and that mobile will presumably be the most important access point because it is always with us and always on.


At my house, we have clipped the television cable. We watch what comes over the antenna and programs that are streamed to us via the internet. After six months, no one at my house misses it.


To bring us back again to what this all means, I’ll frame it in terms of Parkland College. 


We are actively using these resources and have made a conscious decision to hire talent into our marketing and PR department with experience and understanding of the power and value of this shift. There are over 20 different Facebook pages related to Parkland College and a half dozen or so Twitter accounts.

We want our fans (in our case they happen to be students) to engage. 

We know -- it has been proven over and over again -- that the more engaged out student are with some (any) aspect of the College, the better they will perform in terms of grade point average and the more likely they are to graduate.


So we go where our students are.



It is probably the same for us as it is for the brands you represent, whether it’s yourself or your employer. 


Being part of the social media is a two way thing though, and while we may have Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace profiles (and if you don’t, I recommend getting one of each, and trying it out for a while) so do most of our clients. The marketplace is heating up.

One last video.

As science fiction author William Gibson said, “the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed”. 


Bonus points if you can read this:

RdE 4 Nw Jb – Strt 2day – W00t – K -Cya L8r -Bi.

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