College Football Championship

More than anything, I watch English Premier League soccer. I have a huge AT&T Uverse package to watch as much European soccer as I can. Along with all the other activities I have going on, I have little time for much other tv watching. But I do my best to watch LSU football. And since the LSU Tigers are facing the Clemson Tigers in the college football championship tomorrow, I could take some time to contemplate sports writing.

Since the championship match-up has been set, I've been checking in on what writers have to say about it. I've looked at South Carolina newspapers, with little of the biased coverage that I expected. I've checked in on Baton Rouge and New Orleans writing, with all of the bias to LSU that I expect. I go to ESPN every day to read about something, and mostly I'm underwhelmed with what I find there. But today I read a lengthy and detailed analysis that is worth sharing.

College football championship--LSU-Clemson analysis, prediction, and more from Bill Connelly from ESPN provided more substantial writing than I have yet to encounter on the topic. Maybe that's what's been most disappointing. I feel like I've been hit with more analytical writing on the wild card match-ups in the NFL than in the actual college football championship.

I feel like Bill Connelly produced one of those detail-oriented, statistics-heavy, jargon-rich lengthy pieces that we used to get from Bill Simmons, and which I loved so much. I can remember, as a college freshman in 1999, tearing out Bill Simmons' articles from the actual ESPN The Magazine, to post on my dorm room wall. I love Bill Simmons' writing so much, and while I don't encounter the same voice here, Connelly does have some of the pieces that left me satisfied after having read for multiple sittings.

I've checked fivethirtyeight.com (Nate Silver) and theringer.com (Bill Simmons) and have been significantly underwhelmed. Fivethirtyeight is focused on politics and the NFL right now, and The Ringer is full on with NFL and NBA coverage. Both of those focal points should be assumptions, given who is driving the car, but I guess I would just like to see more substantial coverage of college football. Is that too much to ask?

At the end of the day, more than wanting a good football game, I want LSU to win. I'm highly biased. I'm highly invested. I can't justify it, but I could say that I need an LSU win. That wouldn't be true, but it would feel true. And that's a bit of a problem, right? When I feel like I need a time to win a game to be happy, I've got problems. I have even more problems when I'm complaining about the media coverage of said game and team.

Ambitious

I read The Lesson to Unlearn because it was recommended in Daniel Pink's newsletter. I didn't even know who the author was.

Questions:

1. What level of respect and awe does an individual have to achieve to make recommendations that other people follow without even considering the ultimate source? I must love Daniel Pink so much that I'm willing to follow his advice without even considering who is influencing him. As I'm having this thought, I'm recognizing that I need to reconsider my stance. I need to evaluate who is influencing Daniel Pink. That stuff matters. 
2. How self-important does an individual have to feel to call for an entire society to change? I learned that Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. He's immensely smarter than I am. He makes interesting and thoughtful points. But he legitimately ends The Lesson to Unlearn with a call to action by our entire society (I don't think he defines what his/our society is, but I'm pretty sure he's talking about the USA) using the third person plural. 

I can agree with Mr. Graham on multiple levels, including that college entrance exams are hackable, which make them deceptive and bad rather than predictive and meaningful. I can agree that grades often do not reveal learning, and that tests often don't measure learning. But in making a hard point that ends with a call for societal reformation he must write and argue in extremes. That's the weakest part of his argument, and the most provocative.

I think there is potential for people of influence to advocate for reforms in assessing student learning, throughout all of formal education. I think there are opportunities for anecdotes from lived experience as well as data from formal education to be used to change how learning is valued and assessed. I wonder what it would take for Mr. Graham to invest in a startup that pitched that.

Understanding?

It took me a few days, but I recently finished the Quanta Magazine article, Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand? There's something interestingly satisfying about reading a lengthy article over the course of several days. I encounter the reading like I do with a book, based on the day's events and my mood and appetite. Congratulations to John Pavlus for what I can tell, as a serious novice, is excellent reporting. I appreciate how he connected with so many different sources and asked questions of the technology and the promised progress.

There's a whole bunch of details in this article about AI and neural networks and technical pieces that I won't pretend to understand. But there are some fun things to think about from this article. Below are my favorite quotes followed by my mundane brain.

It might be the case that understanding language in a linear, sequential fashion is suboptimal.

From Jakob Uszkoreit, an engineer at Google Brain. How absolutely wonderful is that statement? If we want to train computers to learn language, or equip computers to learn language, why do they have to do it in the typical, linear, left-to-right sequence that humans use? Computer "brains" are much more powerful than our own. If they piece language and words and sentences together in both directions, wouldn't they learn faster and have a higher probability of being correct?

It's a bit counterintuitive, but it is rooted in results from linguistics, which has for a long time looked at treelike models of language. 

Again from Jakob Uszkoreit. In this case he's referring to how the nonsequential processing of sentences produced treelike expressions. The neural network made connections between words throughout text, much like a tree or a sentence that was diagrammed by an elementary student. It allows for "associations between words that might be far away from each other in complex sentences." So, looking at text from both directions allowed the computer to create treelike structures of the sentences in order to learn the syntax of the language, to increase it's capabilities in natural language processing (NLP). Is this not why we ask students to diagram sentences? It's based on teh postulation that there's a static, highly structured task and expectation of what natural language is, and in order to engage in natural language you must understand how each word works and connects throughout a sentence. If we agree to the starting point and the end goal, sentence diagramming is worthwhile. It's teaching computers how to learn our own language at a faster rate that we can learn it. Why can't it work for us?

It seems like we have a model that has really learned something substantial about language, but it's definitely not understanding English in a comprehensive and robust way.

It's okay everyone. You can catch your breath. (That's from Sam Bowman, a computational linguist at New York University.)

According to Yejin Choi, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and the Allen Institute, one way to encourage progress toward robust understanding is to focus not just on building a better BERT, but also on designing better benchmarks and training data that lower the possibility of Clever Hans-style cheating.

This is sort of a confusing statement, but it lets me go off about education again. The people who are trying to enhance artificial intelligence--they're trying to propel the capabilities of computer learning--understand that formative assessment and responsive instruction are the methods for improving learning. Building a better brain won't stop cheating. Building a better student won't fix education. Building a better BERT won't prove much until the benchmarks and training are to a similarly high quality.

Bowman points out that it's hard to know how we would ever be fully convinced that a neural network achieves anything like real understanding. Standardized tests, after all, are supposed to reveal something intrinsic and generalizable about the test-taker's knowledge. But as anyone who has taken an SAT prep course knows, tests can be gamed. 

This is where I really was won over by the author, John Pavlus. He moved through a bit of history and some serious explication regarding NLPs and the tasks to assess AI capabilities, and eventually he came around to the quality of the assessment, the bias of the assessment, and the capabilities of a computer to learn how to do well on a specific test/task. And he pushes the issue by asking the validity of the results of the assessments. We're making newer and harder tests. Are the computers getting better at taking those tests at faster rates than humans? Do the results really tell us anything? This is my question every time we promote the ACT or some other standardized test. We subject every student to a standardized test to measure their learning, to judge the quality of instruction, the score a school and district. But what are the results really telling us?

We're definitely in an era where the goal is to keep coming up with harder problems that represent language understanding, and keep figuring out how to solve those problems.

Again from Sam Bowman. Why can't this be our drive as humans? Why can't we live in a time, every time, the present, when we're coming up with harder problems that represent improvements in our quality of life, and then keep figuring out how to solve them? One of those problems might be enhancing AI capabilities in language acquisition and understanding. Another of those problems might be health care in remote areas. Why can't we measure our success on those types of problems, instead of some standardized questions in a timed assessment?

Read the article. Even if it takes you multiple days, you'll have new thoughts and ask yourself some interesting questions. And the writing will be much better than this.

I'm waiting.

A central measurement of a democratic regime can be gauged by questions its leaders share with the public, how important decisions are explained and defined for the country at large. The business of war entails the severest sacrifices that can fall on ordinary men and women. In war, more than at any other time, the people must be sufficiently informed to understand the choices that are being made. In the end, no statesman can successfully pursue a war policy unless he has instilled a sense of shared direction and purpose, unless people know what to expect and what is expected of them. By all these standards of candor and collaboration between a leader and the people in the critical time of war, Lyndon Johnson had failed.

Page 342 in Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Today is Sunday, January 5, 2020. Three days ago, on Thursday, January 2, 2020, President Donald Trump moved the United States one step closer to another war in the Middle East. NPR has a nice timeline available in Timeline: How The U.S. Came To Strike And Kill A Top Iranian General. The quote regarding Lyndon Johnson, which I read just last night, seems timely.

Doris Kearns Goodwin worked for Lyndon Johnson, standing before him in the Oval Office of the White House. She went on to teach at Harvard. She worked with Lyndon Johnson on his memoirs, wrote one book about him, wrote the previously mentioned book which featured him, and is coming out with another book about his domestic affairs. She likes the guy's work. She admires him. But she minces no words when she says that he failed as a war time president and she is quite clear in her reasoning.

This quote is timely because I don't know if I've heard a good explanation for the killing of the Iranian general Suleimani. Although I am not a fan of President Trump, in this moment I'm awaiting to be convinced of the necessity of this act. I have not come to judgment yet. I've read some about it (example: Pompeo scrambles to defend Trump claim killing Suleimani will save US lives), and I'm still unconvinced. I acknowledge that there's a lot that I may not need to know, as I'm further than far from a need to know basis. But I'm pretty sure that details regarding why Suleimani might have been a bad guy and actively been against the US and its citizens could easily have been disclosed to paint a sufficient picture. Current details are insufficient. News that President Trump was golfing on Sunday while his Secretary of State was standing (and sitting on talk shows) to defend the actions does not give me great confidence. President Trump may have taken to Twitter to make his case, but I'm not going there. I probably should, to be more informed, but dear God, he's the president. Stand at a podium and tell us what is up.

In Leadership in Turbulent Times, Doris Kearns Goodwin shares how four presidents moved from ambition, through adversity, and into leadership as the President of the United States. Her depiction of Lyndon Johnson was nuanced. His ambition seemed selfish and self-righteous. He might have done good for others, but he seemed to only find worth in himself when he was in charge, hard-charging. His adversity appeared to be a mixture of nature--heart disease in his family--and the negative aspects of his ambition catching up with him. And then when he found himself in office as president, he did so much good, making so much progress domestically. I went from despising him to admiring him and thinking that I needed to read more about him. But Goodwin couldn't leave it there, because she knew how her description of Johnson would need to include reference to the Vietnam War. That is where the above paragraph was shared.

I've judged President Trump in lots of situations, but I'm forming my opinion on this issue. My mind is mostly made, but Doris Kearn Goodwin's writing has pushed me to welcome a message from our standing president after taking decisive war action. So I'm stepping back. I'm listening. I want the decision to be explained. I want to understand the choice. I want to know what to expect and what is expected of me. Given that information, I can support a cause and rally, but without it I can't.

I'm waiting.

Kowalski Christmas

We celebrated a Kowalski (in-laws) Christmas today.
The simple details: Brunch at our house at 10am.
More details: Gifts for grandparents and your own kids; variety of breakfast casseroles and cinnamon rolls, and cereals for the kids.
Fun details: We have a mystery gift tradition that we've started, where someone buys a mystery gift and we have to guess what it is. This year, my wife (I should introduce her, she's Kristin, pictured below), was the purchaser, and the item turned out to be unicorn tape dispenser. Also, we take a traditional kids picture on the couch each year.

Counter-clockwise from top left: Kristin is all about the details, including prepping the K-Cup drawer, the kids opening the mystery gift after Aunt Chelsea won, the family having fun, kids on the couch, parents taking pictures of the kids on the couch.

It's a bummer that we're not all together for Christmas day. This family is dispersed around the country, with us being in New Orleans with my family. This is the first year I've contemplated the fact that my family's traditions are my New Orleans family's traditions, not our own. I've never had a Christmas in Springfield; I don't know what it's like. However contemplative this prompts me to be, I haven't made any changes. And now, at the end of this day, I find it really wonderful to have had some time to rest and relax during our school's holiday break and then for us to come together to celebrate this Christmas. We were all together during Thanksgiving in Kansas City. Putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves to do something prior to Christmas, when we all disperse, would be foolish. This was a wonderful day that did drag on, just like a good family Christmas celebration should be. We had plenty of food, and went back for seconds and thirds whenever we wanted to. The kids played their guts out, spilled a ton and didn't finish any part of a meal they started, but that's the way it's supposed to be. So maybe I'm going to encourage this family to do it this way again next year. And maybe this can become our tradition as a Kowalski family for Christmas. If so, I think I would enjoy it.