Information “overload” and the 24-hour News Channels

So it’s politics season. With less than 6 weeks left until the election, more people (hopefully) start paying attention to the news. Most likely, they get their news from CNN or Fox, the 24-hour cable channels. They seem like a good idea - constant information that can be accessed at any time. There is no more having to stay up until 10 PM to get the news.

Leave it to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (in an Entertainment Weekly interview) to discuss the human factors of this information overload (emphasis mine):

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You guys regularly make a mockery of the 24-hour news networks. Do you see anything good about the format?

[snip]


STEPHEN COLBERT: There’s not more news now than there was when we were kids. There’s the same amount from when it was just Cronkite. And the easiest way to fill it is to have someone’s opinion on it. Then you have an opposite opinion, and then you have a mishmash of fact and opinion, and you leave it the least informed you can possibly be.

STEWART: We’ve got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, ”I don’t know!” It’d be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, ”I don’t know what the f— is going on! I’m getting wet and it’s windy and I don’t know why and it’s making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?” By being on 24 hours a day, you begin to not be able to tell what’s salient anymore.

Not being able to tell what’s salient anymore. Amongst all the e-mail and blogs and 24-hour cable news chatter, we can’t tell what’s salient anymore. Googling the term “information overload” gets around 2 million hits, and it’s the new buzzword used to describe the phenomenon of people who can’t manage their e-mail, websites, or other information sources. This is new - within the past decade for most people - and they just can’t cope with it.

The computer scientists’ answer is, of course, technology based. Build better software that can help you condense the information. Better spam filters, RSS feeds to bring information to you, and the list goes on. Yes, the problem of information overload was created by software, so software should adapt. But what about the human? Information isn’t going away; people need to adapt to and learn how to manage this information.

Clay Shirky, a web 2.0 guru, recently gave a wonderful talk on information filtering called “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” Think about that: it’s not information overload, but a failure of information filtering. People need to learn to better filter the information coming into their brains and decide how best to act on the most relevant stuff.

This gets into the heart of psychology: how do brains pay attention? How can we teach adults to use that knowledge in the real world, and how do we give children the skills to cope with it later? In fact, are the youth of today better equipped to handle all this information? What makes them so? Coping mechanisms? A different brain organization? This all falls into a research area that needs more effort: the psychology of information management. It’ll be huge.

Exquisite New York Times piece on teaching evolution

The New York Times ran an article (website link, PDF version) this past Sunday profiling a Florida teacher grappling with the new science curriculum standards he helped create. Florida now requires teaching evolution as part of the biology curriculum.

The article illustrates how tough it is to teach evolution. Even teachers who strongly believe in evolution can’t just teach their students that “Evolution is science and the Bible is not.” All teachers must do what they can to have their students understand the material. This is harder than it sounds, as those students who are very religious may not only choose not to believe in evolution but also choose not to learn anything about it.

The teacher who is profiled in the article (David Campbell of Orange Park, FL) believes in evolution and truly cares that his students at least bring an open mind to the subject. As someone who has taught several classes, his story is inspiring. The content of my classes (cognitive psychology and introductory psychology) is certainly not as controversial as biology class is, but both classes do touch on evolution. I always wonder if anyone is rolling their eyes at me when I talk about it.

But Mr. Campbell truly epitomizes what teaching should be all about: even if students don’t believe in something, the goal is to get them to open their minds and try to understand it. Students should critically think about the material and integrate it into how they see the world.

That kind of thinking about teaching is music to my ears.

“Faith is not based on science,” Mr. Campbell said. “And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.”
“But I do,” he added, “expect you to understand it.”

Is the Internet Bad for Science? Not really!

In continuing with the controversial blog posts about science, Wired has a preview of an article coming out in the prestigious journal Science, which hypothesizes that the Internet allows for such pinpoint precision in finding an article that researchers miss out on interesting topics because they don’t have to leaf through paper journals. The article author, James Evans, has data to back it up. From the article:

“As more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of the citations were to fewer journals and articles,” writes Evans, who analyzed the citation patterns of 34 million journal articles that went online between 1998 and 2005.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, and it makes some sense. The method I use for keeping up with research is to get e-mail alerts from the journals I read updating me with their new issues and sending me the Table of Contents. It is automatically sent, then I can scan the titles to find something interesting.

This has the benefit of keeping me up to speed on the most recent research, but does not let me find old research on a topic that may interest me. This the main points of the article, and that may be a shame. Literature reviews may just not be as thorough as they used to. Also, though, some sciences (such as cognitive psychology) have really exploded recently, and only the more current articles are the relevant ones. I tend to cite a few tried-and-true articles, but most of my literature review focuses on the recent stuff. I’m curious to see how it breaks down by the age of the field.

Still, food for thought.

The End of Theory? Unlikely!

Wired Magazine posted an essay online that proposes that:

1. We have a ton of data and because of how much information we can store (what Wired calls “The Petabyte Age”), we can always have it on hand.
2. The incredible amount of computing power we have allows us to sift through data and run every possible statistical test on it until something comes up significant.

From the article:

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

The author of the article, Chris Anderson, is not a scientist, and it shows. Researchers already get enough false correlations without running thousands of statistical tests - five or ten is often enough to find some significant correlation, let alone thousands.

What Mr. Anderson is proposing is a reversal of the scientific method. First, collect a bunch of data. Then, run thousands of statistical tests to see what correlated. Then, invent a theory to explain that correlation. It’s so painfully simplistic and shows such an utter lack of understanding about the way science is done that it’s laughable. In psychology, how do we know what data to collect? If we go about research atheoretically, then we would need to collect every possible piece of data about every person so that we can throw it at the computer to see what pans out. Without theory, there is no place to begin.

Sadly, even the editor-in-chief of Wired does not understand science well enough to write an informed article.

Visit the Air Force Web Sight for more details

The military, being what it is, is very competitive. There are rivalries between the Army and Marines, for example, because they’re both ground forces. Another big rivalry is between the Navy and the Air Force to determine who has the better toys (nuclear submarines win over fighter jets, of course).

Nonetheless, after seeing a banner ad on the NBC website, I can say that at least the Navy knows how to spell, unlike the Air Force:

The only human factors lesson to be learned is to proofread your work to make a good impression on the one who is reading the advertisement. They are much more effective that way.