The Seven Failings of Expertise

According to the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance there are seven failings of expertise. As an educator I am extrememly interested in these. Every year in our country over 100,000 people die in hospitals because of the mistakes of experts. I would like to know what medical schools are doing about this? What can be done? Are experts even aware of these failings.

Here they are:
Seven Ways Experts are Limited

1. Domain Limited
2. Over Confidence
3. Glossing Over
4. Context Dependence within a Domain
1. Medical Experts see specialty in treatments and diagnosis
2. Baseball experts were screwed up by plate in a word series because of "home" plate.
5. Inflexible
6. Inaccurate Prediction, Judgement and Advice
1. Experts have difficulty in predicting the abilities of novices.
7. Bias and Functional Fixedness

The Rick Holte Education Center site

Aside from this blog, I also manage the website of the Rick Holte Education center which you can find at http://RHEC.NET. Here you can find a number of instructional documents that will help you perform various computers tasks. Go to RHEC.NET to see more.

Archiving Your DVD Movies Using Free Software located at http://web.rhec.net/1/pdf/archiving_dvd.pdf

Subscribing to Podcasts Using iTunes
http://web.rhec.net/1/pdf/PodcastsiTunes.pdf

Recording from the Radio to MP3
http://web.rhec.net/1/pdf/radio2mp3.pdf

Coming Soon: Notes on Expertise and Expert Performance

Learning About Choices

As an educator, I have often found myself at the receiving end of parent's questions about their children. Usually, their child isn't acting the way they would like. Usually, this means that their child isn't acting like them - like an adult. I then remind them that their child is a child and not an adult. This is about the time their eyes gloss over because it isn't what they really want to hear. However, I am a professional and telling them what they want to hear over the reality of the situation would be unethical. Children need to act like children. They need to make mistakes. They need to make bad decisions. Without bad decisions, how will they learn to make good decisions.

Learning to make good decisions as well as good choices is important to a child's development. However, in the area of education and learning most choices have already been decided by the state. Few parents or children get to decide where they will go to school, the educator they will have or even the curriculum they will receive. Educators will talk about creating good citizens who are not apathetic and are involved in civic life yet deprive these same children of any of the decisions in their formative years.

School choice isn't just about private schools being paid by the state, it's about people being free to make decisions about their lives with their money. It's about liberty.

Using YouTube for Learning

My seven year old daughter wanted to learn to use Premiere Pro. However, she didn't want to read the 700 page manual. So, what to do? Perform a YouTube search for videos with the title of "Adobe Premiere animating". You can perform all kinds of searches for all kinds of programs. It is especially useful for graphics oriented programs such as Flash, Premiere, Inkscape and many more.

Here is an example of an instruction video I did on how to draw an eyeball using Inkscape (opensource Illustrator clone).

Why is my Internet Slow? Using Tracert.

Unlike the phone which tells us when the line is busy, the Internet doesn't tell you anything when it is busy or a router has dropped out. Well, Tracert is a nifty DOS based utility that helps us see why the Internet is slow. Click on the image below to see a bigger version.

Defragmenting a Hard Drive

I created this for my Simple Computer Repair Manual which I will be adding more and more of to this site.

The Black Swan: A Book Review - Author: Nassim Nicholas Teleb

I always tell my students that life is about risk. How we assess it, how we approach it, how we make decisions based upon it. The Black Swan is about risk. The Black Swan represents some of the greatest risk because it is difficult to guard against. The Black Swan is the stock market crash of 1987, the automobile, the airplane, the internet, the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Our human frailties, our confirmation bias, our inclination towards the narrative, Taleb reminds us time and again, are what prevent us from predicting future risk with barely any degree of accuracy. And herein lies the problem. These things occur. Period. Pretending that these inconvenient outliers don't exist because they don't fit into our nifty mathematical models (Bell Curves) is delusional to say the least. Basing individual's retirements, pensions and maybe someday social security on models that don't match reality is bordering on fraud.

In conclusion, this is a must read book. However, it was too long with too much devoted to the narrative and not enough to the technical ways of applying fractals to stock markets. The thought experiments were excellent as were the way he would use reality to bash the current social scientists over the head with empiricism. It made me feel warm inside. Reality has a way of smashing bad science into place like the vulcanologists who died in Peru after being warned by a lesser about the impending disaster.

This book had lots of great quotes, however, it left the best one I have ever heard on the subject. It is by Richard Feynman: for any invention, all the marketing and propaganda doesn't matter, because nature cannot be fooled.

Taleb's Site http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/