Re: [tips] Haiti pat robertson
Robertson's approach to events is pretty constant. http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/funnyquotes/a/patrobertson.htm tay...@sandiego.edu wrote: UGH! How can people be such jerks and does anyone really pay attention to this crap other than to be abhorred by it? http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/01/us-televangelist-pat-robertson-links-haiti-earthquake-to-pact-with-devil.html Shades of The Secret--the people of Haiti must have wished this to happen to them. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 tay...@sandiego.edu --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] State Dependent Wine Perception/Appreciation
The topic of wine ratings also reminds me of the famous battles over whether better wines come from California or France. Wikipedia provides a good entry into the story, along with the individual ratings by the judges and the good question of whether differences in these ratings are meaningful... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine) Ken Mike Palij wrote: Some folks around this time of year start to wonder about what brand of champagne they should get for New Year's Eve, whether they should get something cheap like American sparkling wine (e.g., Korbel, which technically is not a champagne), a French champagne that that is moderate in price (for example, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/dining/reviews/23wine.html?emc=eta1 ) or something really expensive under the assumption that there is a strong linear relationship between price and objective quality. But it is refreshing to note that some people don't rely upon price or the score that Wine Spectator assigns to a particular wine to judge whether a wine is good or not (snob appeal aside). To see this attitude in people who recommend wines for a living is even more surprising. Which is why I suggest looking the following column by Brecher Gaiter on the Delicious Wines of 2009, see: http://online.wsj.com/article/tastings.html As they point out, the perception and appreciation of wine, as with many things especially works of art, is not just a function of the objective properties of the wine but also our expectations, the reasons why we are drinking it, the situation/environment in which we drink it, and so on, representing a very high order of interaction. What may be great one time, may not be great or even bad another. There is the old saying of you can not step in the same river twice which can be altered to you can not drink the same wine twice. -Mike Palij New York Unviersity m...@nyu.edu -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Three psychologists walk into a bar...
I am sure that Mike P will be able to provide a long list but here is a plug for the Museum of Modern Art. Along with must see and must do I try to get a list of must eat. NYC will be a great place for 'eats.' Ken tay...@sandiego.edu wrote: ps: My 21-year old son and his wife are leaving for New York city tonight (taking the cheap red eye) and coming home New Year's Day. Other than going to ground zero, skating at Rockefeller Center and watching the ball drop on New Year's Eve, any must do or must see suggestions? I recall seeing the Rockettes on my only real trip to NYC, other than quick drive-throughs with a quick stop to say I'd been there--but that was in 196? and I was 17, so maybe it's not a must see for a couple both 21.) Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 tay...@sandiego.edu -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] Another mystery for Stephen Black
The name of the school is Bishop's University but the email address is ubishops.ca. Why isn't the address bishopsu.ca? sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: - Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada --- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] lazy American students
Christopher D. Green wrote: Beth Benoit wrote: Wow. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/12/21/my_lazy_american_students/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed1 I got an interesting lesson in this issue from my son -- prior to Beth's post. He was home from a pretty-decent engineering school and he was feeling discouraged. I asked him what was the problem and he said that the school had turned into a diploma mill. I asked him what he meant by this term since this is a well-known institution. He said that foreign students were coming to the US to get a US-institution-degree because that was the gateway to advancement in their countries. He was discouraged that they were focused on what to do to get the grade alone and would never disagree/take an independent stand if it might affect their grade. So, I will point out that we may have a correlation between American-citizenship and GPA but, like all correlations, the causality is murky often. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Anybody See Any Snow?
Mike Palij wrote: On the east coast of the U.S. there is supposed to be this lollapalooza of a snow storm moving north which is supposed to hit NYC and leave 8+ inches of snow (*yawn*). So far, no flakes (outside of the usual ones that one encounters on the streets of NYC). But I hear that there is a little bit of snow now around Maryland, round a place called Frostburg. Is this true or another misrepresentation by the eastern liberal elite media establishment? By the way, anyone have a favorite Holidays song? I'm partial to Annie Lennox's version of Winter Wonderland. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu We have about 16 in our front yard. We live at the end of a road and the snow plow left a 6' high by 15' wide pile of snow at the edge of our yard. I don't have a favorite song but I have favorite CDs - Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown Christmas and Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful Christmas. This year's addition to the Christmas CD collection is An Oscar Peterson Christmas and an Alligator compilation disk called Genuine Houserockin' Christmas. Both are highly recommended I can't listen to Nutcracker because I have danced in a local production for many years and the music elicits strong imagery related to the performance (costume changes, etc). Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Who put the Little in Little Albert?
My assumption was that the name was a reference to the case of Little Hans, also. Note that the Watson Rayner (1920) article ends with a discussion of how a Freudian would try to explain Albert's fear as coming from a sexual event. Here is the next to last paragraph of Watson Rayner -- The Freudians twenty years from now, unless their hypotheses change, when they come to analyze Albert's fear of a seal skin coat - assuming that he comes to analysis at that age - will probably tease from him the recital of a dream which upon their analysis will show that Albert at three years of age attempted to play with the pubic hair of the mother and was scolded violently for it. (We are by no means denying that this might in some other case condition it). If the analyst has sufficiently prepared Albert to accept such a dream when found as an explanation of his avoiding tendencies, and if the analyst has the authority and personality to put it over, Albert may be fully convinced that the dream was a true revealer of the factors which brought about the fear. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- Lilienfeld, Scott O wrote: Michael - I'll leave that interesting question to the historians on this listserv, but I'll advance one hypothesis (maybe others can confirm or refute): Perhaps Watson was trying to counterpose his case against Freud's Little Hans case of a phobia supposedly acquired through psychoanalytic mechanisms. ...Scott Scott O. Lilienfeld, Ph.D. Professor Editor, Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice Department of Psychology, Room 473 Psychology and Interdisciplinary Sciences (PAIS) Emory University 36 Eagle Row Atlanta, Georgia 30322 slil...@emory.edu (404) 727-1125 Psychology Today Blog: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-skeptical-psychologist 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-140513111X.html Scientific American Mind: Facts and Fictions in Mental Health Column: http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciammind/ The Master in the Art of Living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his intellectual passions. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him - he is always doing both. - Zen Buddhist text (slightly modified) -Original Message- From: Britt, Michael [mailto:michael.br...@thepsychfiles.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 8:56 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] Who put the Little in Little Albert? I've been preparing an episode in which I'll be reviewing Hall Beck's recent article, Finding Little Albert which recently appeared in the American Psychologist and I asked Dr. Beck who is responsible inserting the word Little in front of Albert. His research didn't turn up an answer to this question. Anyone have any ideas on where the Little came from? Michael Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.com www.thepsychfiles.com Twitter: mbritt --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Who put the BF in Skinner?
Thank goodness that Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was not a member of the Harvard faculty. Ken Jim Dougan wrote: I am told by my graduate advisor (F.K. McSweeney) that it is something of a Harvard tradition to publish that way. Herrnstein sometimes went as R.J. Herrnstein. Stevens went by S.S. Stevens, etc. They are respectively called Fran Dick and Smitty by friends - but they published using initials. Of course, Skinner's friends called him Fred so he does not break the pattern. Of course there is JER Staddon and MEP Seligman if we want to go to 3 initials. -- J.D. Dougan --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] MBTI -- True Colors
Wuensch, Karl L. wrote: I was dismayed to learn that my university made a major investment in http://www.true-colors.com/ . Karl W. Karl I feel your pain. http://www.true-colors.com/whatistruecolors.htm As a native East Tennessean, please note the description of orange and the presence of a validity study from TN. For our non-SEC and non-USA colleagues, see http://www.utk.edu/ a wholly-owned subsidiary of http://www.utsports.com/ And you should be listening to http://www.utk.edu/athletics/rocky-top.mp3 while looking at the orange. You will feel the energy and the action. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] fear, conditioning, and memory
Here is a link to the original paper - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08637.html or http://tinyurl.com/yfy7xph Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] more media madness
Here is her research page - http://www.psychology.sdsu.edu/new-web/FacultyLabs/twenge/TwengePublications.htm The titles of her most recent work do not seem to match the content of the ABC story. --- Twenge, J. M., Campbell, W. K. (in press). Increases in positive self-views among high school students: Birth cohort changes in anticipated performance, self-satisfaction, self-liking, and self-competence. Psychological Science. [PDF] Twenge, J. M., Konrath, S., Foster, J. D., Campbell, W. K., Bushman, B. J. (2008a). Egos inflating over time: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Journal of Personality, 76, 875-901. [PDF] Twenge, J. M., Konrath, S., Foster, J. D., Campbell, W. K., Bushman, B. J. (2008b). Further evidence of an increase in narcissism among college students. Journal of Personality, 76, 919-927. [PDF] -- Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- Lilienfeld, Scott O wrote: I continue to be amazed - although I probably shouldn't be - at the way the media prematurely disseminates findings prior to publication or peer review. In this case, they not only report the finding as the lead headline, but then go on at length to try to explain it. http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=9281013 Is it a real finding? I don't know, and there's no way to evaluate it. I can't even tell whether it was presented at a conference. Moreover, I can't even tell how they dealt with the minor item changes from the MMPI to the MMPI-2, or whether these changes were merely ignored in the analyses. ...Scott Scott O. Lilienfeld, Ph.D. Professor Editor, Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice Department of Psychology, Room 473 Psychology and Interdisciplinary Sciences (PAIS) Emory University 36 Eagle Row Atlanta, Georgia 30322 slil...@emory.edu (404) 727-1125 Psychology Today Blog: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-skeptical-psychologist 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-140513111X.html Scientific American Mind: Facts and Fictions in Mental Health Column: http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciammind/ The Master in the Art of Living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his intellectual passions. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him - he is always doing both. - Zen Buddhist text (slightly modified) This e-mail message (including any attachments) is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this message (including any attachments) is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please contact the sender by reply e-mail message and destroy all copies of the original message (including attachments). --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] A new Mozart effect...[comments]
Thanks to Rick for posting the link to this new Mozart effect study. I have read the study and here are a few comments... The authors cite studies which report benefits to playing music in neonatal ICUs, including weight gain, and hypothesize that the weight gain is due to reduced energy expenditure while resting. They cite no literature to support this contention nor do they postulate a mechanism by which music should produce this effect. This type of reasoning is common in the Mozart effect literature. Miraculous outcomes are predicted and there is only handwaving when one asks how and why questions. One consequence of the vagueness of mechanism is that one doesn't know what is the appropriate control condition. In this report, the comparison is Baby Mozart CD vs silence. There are lots of possible controls: music of other genres, mozart music played backwards, repetitive beeps, the mewing of kittens, white noise and so forth. The choice of the control condition depends upon the hypothesized mechanism of action. If the effect is produced by general auditory stimulation then the mewing of kittens or repetitive beeps may be just as effective as Mozart. The design of the study is fairly simple but there are some oddities in the procedure worth mentioning. The study used a mixed-design with each subject experiencing either silence or music in separate sessions and order was counter-balanced across subjects. Each session was 30 min long with the 1st 10 min serving as baseline. The measure of interest was consumption of oxygen and production of CO2. Here are some of the oddities: Random assignment and order counter-balancing: The study began with 20 infants; 2 were excluded prior to the study. The remaining 18 were divided in the following fashion: n = 13 for silence-first and n = 5 for music-first. If there is a concern about measurement drift (see below) then the unbalanced order is a problem. Measurement of metabolic activity: Measurement was not done directly but indirectly. There is some technical measurement issue here that is beyond me but the article then states For controlling for interobserver variation, all measurements were performed by a single investigator (Dr Lubetzky). Here is what I take from that sentence. The scores you get from this measure depends on both the machine and the person operating the machine. The person operating the machine is the lead author of the study. The person operating the machine was not blind to the hypothesis or group assignment. This statement is not meant to accuse Dr Lubetzky of impropriety but that there may be a genuine methodological danger here. Ken PS - As a freebie, here is an alternative interpretation of the study which assumes the difference is real and postulates the mechanism of action. When is an infant showing low metabolic activity? One safe guess would be when it is quiet and not moving about. In other words, when it is asleep. (Measurements in the study were taken during nap time in the study.) Loud transient noises in the ICU produce startle-like twitches and other responses which lead to increased metabolic activity associated with the movement. The Mozart music is a masking noise that blunts the effects of noise in the ICU. If this is true then any masking noise (like white noise) should be just as effective in blocking responses to ICU noises. So the metabolic prediction is Mozart == white noise no stimulus. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- Rick Froman wrote: ...on weight of pre-term infants. The abstract is here: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-0990v1?papetoc and the pdf of the article is here: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/peds.2009-0990v1 Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences John Brown University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 rfro...@jbu.edu --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] HM brain dissection: Live - technical question
It looks like they are using a cryosection procedure instead of a wax-embedded preparation. Does anyone know why? Ken Frantz, Sue wrote: Hi all, You can watch HM’s brain being thin-sliced, happening live: http://thebrainobservatory.ucsd.edu/hm_live.php -- Sue Frantz http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/ Highline Community College Psychology, CoordinatorDes Moines, WA 206.878.3710 x3404 sfra...@highline.edu mailto:sfra...@highline.edu Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology, Associate Director Project Syllabus http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/syllabi.php APA Division 2: Society for the Teaching of Psychology http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/syllabi.php APA's p...@cc Committee http://www.apa.org/ed/pcue/ptatcchome.html --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] H.M. online
Claudia Stanny wrote: I can't offer any explanation, but if someone else can, would you please explain how they unfold those slices without tearing them up? I don't know exactly what they are doing but when I did rat brains then the slices are being placed into some liquid medium in a petri dish. A glass plate is immersed in the medium and the camel-hair brushes are used to float/unfold/coach the slices onto the glass slide. You need to develop a light and delicate touch otherwise you will tear the the slices. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Peer review
I have been in meetings like that, and I wasn't the one doing the yelling. Adolf is right; it is always the third reviewer. Ken sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: Ever had this problem? http://tinyurl.com/yl5omvk (flagged from _Chronicle of Higher Ed_) Stephen - Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada --- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] small minds preoccupied with small typographical errors
APA puts the spin on the 6th ed issues - http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/page/2/ --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] nature versus nurture: more general discussion
sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: For IQ, the figure for heritability is generally found to be higher, typically in the 0.70 range, although there is a wide range of estimates. In school-aged children, while they are still at home, the figure is lower, and there is a clear shared environment effect. . So parents do seem to matter. But there's a catch which many don't seem to know about. This is only true in the child. As the child gets older and leaves the home, less and less of the environmental component can be attributed to shared effects, and as a adult, the shared component largely disappears. So parents matter at first to IQ, but later, very little. Stephen's comment raises an interesting point is thinking about partitioning gene-environment effects. Would it be correct to say that the process of growing up produces an increase in homogeneity of environmental influences across individuals? Or, to put the issue differently, do environmental effects disappear (mathematically) because of loss of environmental variance? Ken Stephen - Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: _sbl...@ubishops.ca_ 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada --- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Behaviorism's Dark Side (Humorous...)
Paul Brandon wrote: Appears to be inspired by Skinner's 'Pigeon in a Pelican'. I agree. I sent copies of the link to friends and titled the email, Pigeon in a Briefcase. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Critique of Harris's book: The Nurture Assumption
Watson's (1924) book entitled Behaviorism is well-known as the source of his famous quote. Wikipedia has the wrong date. Here is a link to the page with the dozen infants claim from Google books. http://tinyurl.com/yjkyr62 Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] J R Kantor
One of my favorite Kantor stories comes from John Malone, UT-Knoxville. Kantor was visiting UT-K in the mid-1970's at the behest of Bill Verplanck, a strong supporter. Kantor was going about the department and talking to various faculty. Kantor and Malone were in Malone's office and the conversation turned to Dewey's Reflex Arc paper. Malone made a comment about the paper and Kantor replied I talked to Dewey about that... We are still a young science. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Text Messaging in Class
Paul C Bernhardt wrote: This policy could be a problem at many schools, including ours, that use a text alert system in case of a lock-down or other emergency, you have to assure the students (I put it in the syllabus, also) that you will have your phone in the class in case an emergency message is sent. I take out my phone each class and put it on the desk in plain view. If my phone buzzes/lights up I glance at it to see what the message is. There has been an amusing (to someone on the sidelines) turn of events at ASU. Various faculty groups have been working on a cell-phone policy for a number of years regarding issues of consequences for failure to turn off a cell phone during class. Then ASU rolled out a bally-hooed text alert system that tried to enroll all people on campus following the Virginia Tech tragedy. Currently we have the two groups in conflict. The former group wants cell phones turned off in class. The latter group wants cell phones turned on in class so that students can receive an alert. The proposed policies now read like credit-card agreements, with enough loopholes and escape clauses, that any action is simultaneously approved and disapproved. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Intro Statistics Text recommendation
Hi Nancy: Check out textbooks by Fred Gravetter. Gravetter Wallnau Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences has lots of practice problems. The authors have a lighter version of the text, Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences that may be worth checking out. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- drna...@aol.com wrote: Hi, I have been asked to teach baby Stats (again) for psychology at a school where my teacher evaluations have been generally decent but the faculty evaluator, who looks at our course materials, does not like my choice of book. I use Bluman Brief Edition (4th) which is not a Psych Stats book. The examples and practice problems (of which there are a lot, that's why I like the book) cover a variety of social, educational, criminal justice and business applications...there are a few pure psych problems mixed in, not many. The course includes lecture time (during which I teach concepts and lots of by hand-solving of problems) and an SPSS lab. I would like to keep my job at this CSU (a concern in our current budget environment), but I am reluctant to part with my book. I like it. Other stats for psych books I've used have had far fewer practice problems available and emphasize teaching the concepts. I hate that. I know I can supply my own problems but I was hoping that someone out there knows of a stats for psych book that at least provides a balance between conceptual understanding and teaching students to grasp and perform the processes of statistical calculation with lots of real practice problems, related to psych and the social sciences closely allied to it. Before I go through the nuisance of doing this and having to learn someone else's way of doing some of the procedures (every book has a few of its own idiosyncratic presentations of formulae), I thought I might at least find a book, with your help, that provides a decent number of practice problems. PS. I don't want to discuss whether teaching the hand calculations is necessary. I could never learn mathematics by reading descriptions of how to do it. Before they learn SPSS, they need to learn at least a very basic version of what SPSS does. It's like teaching someone to use a calculator without teaching them to add, subtract, multiply etc. with his or her own brain first. Thanks for your help - and have a good weekend too. Nancy Melucci Long Beach CIty College Long Beach CA --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] APA 6: s = estimated (from sample) population standard deviation
So now we will need to teach students how to read pre-2009 vs post-2009 indexes of variability. Students are going to enjoy that wrinkle. Ken Wuensch, Karl L wrote: I just noticed that the APA now indicates that “/s/” should be used for the “Sample standard deviation (denominator SQRT(/n/ – 1), while “/SD/” should be used for population, denominator SQRT(/n/) “Standard deviation. The addition of “/s/” to the table of statistical abbreviations and symbols is new to the sixth edition. Since it is the statistic rather than the parameter that we almost always report, I expect that “/SD/” will pretty much disappear from the future literature. Cheers, http://www.ecu.edu/ECU Centennial Logo http://www.ecu.edu/ http://www.ecu.edu/Karl L. Wuensch, Professor and ECU Scholar/Teacher, Dept. of Psychology East Carolina University, Greenville NC 27858-4353, USA, Earth http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/Earth.htm Voice: 252-328-9420 Fax: 252-328-6283 wuens...@ecu.edu mailto:wuens...@ecu.edu http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/klw.htm -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] APA 6: CI, no italics
I thought the rule was that if the letter/abbreviation could be confused with some other meaning then the use of italics indicated that the term was being used for its mathematical meaning. So I could have a study that used two groups: Special Delivery (SD) and Ordinary Delivery (OD). In that case, SD would not be italicized and when I saw an italicized SD then I would know I was looking at a math measure of variability. ANOVA is not likely to be confused as anything other than the stat procedure. I am with Karl on this point, CI, the confidence interval, should be italicized to distinguish it from CI, the Contingent Instruction group. Ken Serafin, John wrote: Heh, trying to figure out why some things are italicized and other things are not has always baffled me. The closest I've ever come to understanding it is to try to distinguish between symbols vs. abbreviations. So, for example, ANOVA is an abbreviation (and therefore not italicized); M is a symbol (and so is italicized). What is CI? Perhaps APA has decided it's an abbreviation, just as they've also apparently decided that HSD is an abbreviation rather than a symbol. shrug What I tell my students: Please don't ever ask me to explain or justify these details of APA formatting. All I do is enforce them. John -- John Serafin Psychology Department Saint Vincent College Latrobe, PA 15650 john.sera...@email.stvincent.edu From: Wuensch, Karl L wuens...@ecu.edu Reply-To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) tips@acsun.frostburg.edu Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:27:28 -0400 To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) tips@acsun.frostburg.edu Conversation: APA 6: CI, no italics Subject: [tips] APA 6: CI, no italics I also noted that CI (NOT set in italic font) is now the approved symbol for confidence interval, as in p = .006, CI [.13, .27]. Why not italic font? I have always though of a confidence interval as a statistic. Cheers, Karl W. -Original Message- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Fechner Day! -- that darn date
I have been wondering about the report of that dream, because it is repeated so often--but without attribution. I looked at the 1966 English translation of Elements of Psychophysics (Vol I) and no mention of the date or a dream occurs in the text. (The translation of the volume was NIH-funded to celebrate the centennial of the publication of E of P. I guess we will need to wait until 2066 to see the translation of Vol. II). E G Boring does the introduction to the translation and repeats the dream story--without attribution of course. Even more irritating is an article by Boring (1961), in which the date/dream story is higlighted several times, still without attribution. However, Boring (1929/1950) does provide an interesting bit of info in his Experimental Psychology. Fechner wrote a book, Zend-Avesta, oder uber die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits, which was published in 1851. Boring (1929/1950, p. 279) notes: Oddly enough this book contains Fechner's program of psychophysics... 1851 would be a year after the famous dream and the dream/idea would still be fresh. The Elements contains mainly the results of the program Google books has the Zend-Avesta online but my rusty knowledge of German and the old font system have managed to block my efforts to find the psychophysics section. Perhaps another scholar will have better luck. Happy Fechner's Day, Ken Boring, E. G. (1961). Fechner: Inadvertent founder of psychophysics. Psychometrika, 26, 3-8. -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- Christopher D. Green wrote: Today is Fechner Day! It celebrates the day on which, according to legend, Gustav Theodor Fechner developed the psychophysical method by which an experimenter manipulates the intensity of a physical stimulus, and then asks (what we would now call) a participant what sort of change, if any, s/he perceives. By doing this repeatedly, one can build up a geometrical curve of the relationship between the physical and the psychological, and then fit a mathematical equation to that curve. Fechner found that the relationship is logarithmic. Smitty Stevens later decided that the relationship was a power function instead. The debate continues. Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ == --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] response to Ed Callen
I have tried to avoid commenting on this issue since it provides more social attention to the problem poster. But the offensive trolling is crippling the list. I would vote for a temporary suspension and then a series of steps to achieve readmission. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- Marc Carter wrote: I first started reading and writing to TIPS in the early 90's (somewhere around 93 or 94 I think), so I'm not going anywhere either. Dammit. I went and voted in the poll, to boot. (Yes, the ambiguity is intentional.) m PS Interesting to see only the fallout from the posts and not the actual posts. Email filters are pretty nifty. -- Marc Carter, PhD Associate Professor and Chair Department of Psychology College of Arts Sciences Baker University -- -Original Message- From: Gerald Peterson [mailto:peter...@vmail.svsu.edu] Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 11:13 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] response to Ed Callen I agree and so voted. Hope Bill can resist any intimidation or threat and just get the bozo off the list. Wow 15 years or more. Generally been a good group with some helpful ideas and tips! Gary Gerald L. (Gary) Peterson, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology Saginaw Valley State University University Center, MI 48710 989-964-4491 peter...@svsu.edu - Original Message - From: Tim Shearon tshea...@collegeofidaho.edu To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) tips@acsun.frostburg.edu Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:04:29 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: RE: [tips] response to Ed Callen All I agree primarily with the idea of elimination of behavior through extinction. However, as the person-of-interest already pointed out, it doesn't work if a behavior is self-reinforcing. It clearly is- and for what appear to me to be mean-spirited reasons. The comment came from this individual recently was something to the effect that good luck finding people who agree with you. Add my name. A list is a community- participation in which requires a certain degree of self-control and empathy. Self-proclaimed superiority hardly matches the claims of community and egalitarian principles necessary in an open forum. Bill, I appreciate your patience and I respect your efforts running the list- it is, almost without exception, my favorite list * because of * the lack of rules and structure- but I do think it is possible to go too far. Tim From: Dennis Goff [mailto:dg...@randolphcollege.edu] Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 10:35 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: RE: [tips] response to Ed Callen I know that I am quiet on the list, but I have been here a long time and am not leaving. There is too much of value here to let one person drive me away. As others have pointed out, that monitored list is not a replacement for the knowledge or sense of community on TIPS. I have used filters for the list for much of the time that I have been here so I do not see the exuberant posts that begin these discussions. Those messages go straight into my delete folder. My guess is that Bill Gates and his minions invented the delete folder for exactly this purpose. Thanks to Bill Southerly for maintaining the list. It must seem something of a thankless job at times like this. Dennis -- Dennis M. Goff Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology Department of Psychology Randolph College ( Founded as Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1891 ) Lynchburg VA 24503 dg...@randolphcollege.edu From: Frantz, Sue [mailto:sfra...@highline.edu] Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 11:04 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: RE: [tips] response to Ed Callen I, too, have been on this list for 15 years, and I'm not going anywhere. This community has been too valuable to me. For those of you who lean toward public protests, I've set up a poll on the TIPS subscribers page ( http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/index.htm ) where you are welcome to vote on whether M.S. should be retained or removed from TIPS. I'm not saying that the voting will have any impact one way or another, but raw numbers are easier to see, for everybody here, than speculation. For those who are more likely to protest in a less public manner, here again are the instructions for setting up filters in Outlook. If you use a different email system and would like assistance, you are welcome to email me off-list. Best, Sue From: Frantz, Sue
Re: [tips] Learning and Behavior
Hi Marc: I think that you are conflating two different pedagogical goals. Sniffy is pretty narrow in scope and assumes that the analytic language has been decided. All you need to do is see a simulation of the principles in operation. Skinner is obviously important but the question is not Skinner vs. not in learning theory. A theories of learning course is really an argument about what are the entities/analytic language that should be used in describing why the rat presses the bar, runs down to the end of the maze, or goes left more frequently than right at a choice point. Much of my course centers around the question of whether we should assume a law of effect is the important answer and if we assume so then how do we explain the operation of this principle. Sniffy assumes the former and doesn't really address the latter question. I would try to find an early textbook like Hilgard's Theories of Learning (or an early Hilgard Bower) and use that to find some classic articles. Another source is Chris Green's psychclassics web site. Many of these early articles are very meaty in terms of concepts: Hull's rg-sg explanation of the relationship between consciousness of action and determinism of action or Guthrie's insights about the abundance of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies in the descriptions of goal-directed behavior are very applicable today. Apply those ideas to the question of why Sniffy is pressing the bar and I think that you can have some interesting disucssions. Good luck. Ken Marc Carter wrote: Hi, All -- I'm doing a class in Learning and Behavior next semester, and this time I'm going to use Sniffy (in the past it's been a real rat lab, but what with budgets and failing equipment, I'll only get one example rat and have them do exercises with Sniffy). Anyway, I want it to be a course that does not only the psychology of learning, but the philosophy of behaviorism. Sniffy learns fast, and I have a 3-hour lab, so we can move fairly quickly, and spend probably the last month of the semester doing more of the philosophical underpinnings. I want them to have a fairly deep understanding of both epistemological (methodological) and metaphysical behaviorism (umm, determinism). I'm wondering if someone out there has taught a similar course. I've read a bunch of Skinner and about-Skinner, but am just wondering what others have used in courses. I'm also interested in a text to supplement Sniffy (the learning in there doesn't go as deeply as I would like). So, ideas? I'll repay with reporting about how it goes... m -- Marc Carter, PhD Associate Professor and Chair Department of Psychology College of Arts Sciences Baker University -- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] question about faculty missing classes
We have a form that must be signed by the chair to approve an absence to attend professional conferences or other such activities. Ken Also, I am wondering whether, in other colleges, chairs are asked to approve absences for professional conferences, etc. Alice LoCicero Alice LoCicero, Ph.D., ABPP, MBA, Associate Professor and Chair, Social Science Endicott College Beverly, MA 01915 978 232 2156 -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Recent Research using Classical Conditioning?
I second Stephen's suggestion. Ken sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: On 18 Oct 2009 at 12:17, Britt, Michael wrote: I haven't done an episode on classical conditioning so I'm looking around to see if there has been anything interesting on the topic. Just wondering if anyone had heard of any neat applications of classical conditioning in recent research? How about this? Bekinschtein, T. et al (2009). Classical conditioning in the vegetative and minimally conscious state. Nature Neuroscience, published online 20 September. Stephen - Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada --- -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] On chick
Robin Abrahams wrote: I have no objection to movies marketed to women being referred to as chick flicks, as long as movies marketed to men are similarly referred to as dick flicks. I wanted to object that this suggestion by Robin is outrageous but I was halfway through my Kill Bill I and II home-extravaganza and my microwave beeped that the popcorn was done. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] question about op cond and drug use
Carol: I am not sure where you are going with this. Is this what you want? Positive reinforcement: Substance produces effect. Subject makes response to produce substance and its effect. Negative reinforcement: Substance produces effect. Lack of substance produces different effect. Subject makes response to avoid or escape from different effect. In other words, the analysis depends on whether your consequence is the effect produced by the presence or the absence of the substance. Ken DeVolder Carol L wrote: I am embarrassed to ask this question because I should know the answer, but I have a bad cold and am on lots of drugs (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it). How is drug addiction explained in terms of operant conditioning? I can explain it using words, but when I try to employ my four-cell contingency table I screw myself up. I realize this model is an inadequate explanation for drug addiction, but I need to present it clearly before I critique it. Thanks, Carol (who really does know more about operant conditioning than this message implies...) Carol DeVolder, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology Chair, Department of Psychology St. Ambrose University Davenport, Iowa 52803 phone: 563-333-6482 e-mail: devoldercar...@sau.edu -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Two questions
DeVolder Carol L wrote: The first question has to do with face recognition. I have a group of students who want to manipulate context and look at face recognition, but they’ve been having trouble finding existing stimuli. Can anyone give me a quick suggestion that I can pass on to them? There are a bunch of face databases available. Here is one link to a list of face databases: http://web.mit.edu/emeyers/www/face_databases.html My second question is very trivial and if you have to choose, the first question is the one for which I really want the answer. I have noticed that sometimes people with GPS units in their cars name them. I find this quirky and interesting, and I wonder how many people do that. If you are one of them, please let me know off-list. Mine is named Sybil. J I don't have a GPS device and I don't give names to the devices I work with. I do call them names on occasion. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Kitty Genovese/The Windy City
The news reports that I saw suggested that it was a wild melee with lots of teens (from 2 different groups) swinging wooden planks. I don't think bystanders were being apathetic but avoiding being clubbed. Ken michael sylvester wrote: Well we had another case of bystanders' apathy in the recent killing of a Chicago honor student beaten to death by four black youth.Lots of folks gathered around while the beating was going on and no one ventured to help. Send me something. Michael Sylvester,PhD Daytona Beach,Florida --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] Job Ad - Appalachian State University
The Department of Psychology at Appalachian State University invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of assistant professor beginning in August, 2010 in the area of Experimental Psychology with an emphasis on Judgment and Decision Making. Successful applicants will be expected to provide instruction and mentoring at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Preference will be given to candidates who are committed to excellence in teaching and mentoring of students and who have a well-developed research agenda. Instructional duties may include on-line instruction and/or instruction at off-campus sites. Scholarly duties include publication, thesis supervision, and a willingness to seek external funding to support research. This is a 9-month position with opportunities for summer teaching. Appointment is contingent upon completion of all requirements for the doctoral degree in psychology. Appalachian State University is a member institution of the sixteen-campus University of North Carolina System. Located in Boone, North Carolina, the University has approximately 16,000 students and has been ranked by US News and World Report as one of the top 15 among southern regional universities since 1986. The Department has 33 full-time doctoral level faculty members, approximately 700 undergraduate majors and 80 full-time graduate students in four master’s degree programs and is pursuing permission to plan a Ph.D. program in Rural Clinical Psychology. Applications consisting of a vita, statement of teaching and research interests, photocopy of graduate transcripts, and three letters of recommendation should be sent to James Denniston, Chair, Department of Psychology, Appalachian State University, Box 32109, Boone, NC 28608. Applications will not be accepted by e-mail. A review of completed applications will begin on October 26th, 2009 and continue until the position is filled. Appalachian State University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Applications from minority candidates and candidates with disabilities are encouraged. Additional information about the Department of Psychology, the University, and the surrounding area is located on the Psychology web site at: http://www.psych.appstate.edu/ --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Psychological research involving food
Check out Brian Wansink's work. http://www.mindlesseating.org/ Ken Britt, Michael wrote: I'm noodling with an idea and I was wondering if anyone in tips land can help. Do you recall any research studies involving food in any way? Thanks, Michael Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.com www.thepsychfiles.com -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Are We All Doomed?
Mike: I am yawning and make that a BIG YAWN (sorry for the excessive noise). Here is the mistaken assertion from the editorial... Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. You can walk into any chain bookstore and buy a copy of the Bible (King James or other), Darwin's Origin of Species, Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics, and the complete works of Shakespeare. A truly complete education is available for under $1000. What newspapers and universities are selling is the opportunity to learn how to tell the difference between Dan Brown's DaVinci Code and true mysteries like the uncovering of DNA encoding and how they will affect our lives. I grew up when the fear and hope (depending on your group) was that televised lectures on Public TV were going give you knowledge and that would replace the cost of attending college. Here was a case of the government actually trying to help you bypass the cost of a college education. Nothing of the sort ever happened. One reason is that having a copy and reading the King J, Feynman, Darwin, or Shakespeare does not teach an unprepared person about Christianity, physics, evolution, or social issues. Nor will watching a lecture or reenactment on YouTube or watching a PP slide show a dozen times replace the classroom experience for an unprepared person. What happens, importantly, in class is that students ask idiosyncratic, personal questions which call on a lot of experience to frame an effective answer. We have all experienced the futility of trouble-shooting computer FAQs that don't contain anything related to our question. A good answer often involves a search pattern for relevant information. Minimally-experienced faculty don't have that knowledge. In the classroom to reach other students, the trick is framing the question in a more general manner and showing how the answer is part of that general issue. I look to mechanized education programs taking over (meet George Jetson) when I get a personal air transporter, a robot who cooks and cleans for me, I get universal health care in the USA (issue may not apply in certain non-USA localities), and live in a pollution-neutral environment. I am not against mechanized educational programs, I am strongly in favor of good ones. But I am not worried that they are available now and will take over soon. Mike Palij wrote: A curious article in the in Washington Post about how Colleges, as we currently know them with buildings and campuses, may be gone in 10 to 20 years as online courses serve as inexpensive alternatives; see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/11/AR2009091104312_pf.html -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Fast Flip on The Google
Fast Flip looks to me like a software emulation of an e-book reader like Kindle. The FF format is OK but I prefer printer format because it shows more informative text per screen. I think Google is headed down the road of self-immolation, following Yahoo. Google, originally, destroyed the competition by offering lots of information and separating that info from advertising. But Google has fallen prey to the slippery-slope one-more fallacy (One more ad won't be noticed and will add to the bottom line.) The issue with many so-so web aggregators (web sites that collect and report other web sites)is that the information area has shrunk to a tiny center surrounded by a large area of ads. The Fast Flip interface looks like a strong candidate for this problem. (Move the next/previous page buttons closer to the text. Squeeze the center text in another 10% and look at all of that prime screen landscape open for development.) The problem for web aggregators is that I (as a typical web consumer) have no brand loyalty--once I spotted that Google provided more usable information and was less heavy on advertising than Yahoo then I never went back to Yahoo. Never. Once I find something better than Google then I will never return to Google. Google has a real problem. Many searches pull up Bizrate and other links as the first choices. I have no idea whether Google's search technology is being gamed* or they are pulling in a few extra pennys to put some sites first but these sites are weak, bad, and obnoxious ad-shill aggregators. They are not providing practical information. If Google and FF becomes an ad-hog like a lot of sites then a stream-lined competitor will pop up and Google will go the way of other net-zombies like AOL and Yahoo. Ken *maybe by hemp seeds - see Skinner (1960) and http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- Mike Palij wrote: Has anyone taken a look at the new product by Google called Fast Flip? It's supposed to make reading articles from newspapers and magazine easier. Here's a news article on the website: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090915/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_google_news_flipper And here's a link to Fast Flip where I've selected coverage of Science and Technology: http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/search?q=section:Scitech Note that Google provides news via news.google.com but the Fast Flip format is supposed to make the interface more useful/prettier/etc. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Correlation and Causation Video
Michael Britt wrote: Couldn't help it. I must have had too much time on my hands. Here's a humourous video (hopefully) on correlation and causation. A little mashup of green screening, Google Earth and some bad accents. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNonyq1yhiE Michael Michael: Well done! I will share this with colleagues. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] So You Want To Be A Billionaire, Part 2
Another way to express the issue is that your chances of being one of the 400 richest billionaires are slightly less than playing in the NBA. Ken Rick Froman wrote: In summary, what can one say about the richest 400minus2 people in the U.S.? I can say that the probability of a person living in the US being one of them is approximately 0.013 so you might not want to choose your educational goals based on your dream of becoming one of them. Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences Professor of Psychology Box 3055 John Brown University 2000 W. University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 rfro...@jbu.edu (479)524-7295 http://tinyurl.com/DrFroman -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] H1N1 placebo captured live
But since they are dead, then they won't hear your apology. So you can skip that step. Ken Michael Smith wrote: Except they didn't get the H1N1 shot they came in for. So later, when they all died, you would have to say you were sorry. --Mike On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:28 PM, michael sylvester msylves...@copper.net mailto:msylves...@copper.net wrote: Hey tipsters,what do you think of this idea: you want to do a study on the placebo effect.You arrange wilh a medical clinic and arrange to have clients injected with a saline solution.If clients report that they felt better after injected with those saline shots ,wouldn't you be demonstrating a plcebo effect? I don't imagine there are ethical concerns here since you did no harm. Michael Sylvester,PhD Daytona Beach,Florida --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] No-Show penalty -- still in use?
It is the beginning of the semester and the faculty are hot to snuff the infamous no-show with various consequences like extra requirements, extra participations, loss of points, etc. I seem to remember a discussion that concluded that these kinds of consequences were no longer permitted. Can anyone point me to the definitive answer to this question (definitive for 9/25/09, speed of change may vary with location.) Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] No-Show penalty -- still in use?
Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) of HHS. There are two or three issues involved... 1. Do the extra-work consequences constitute undue influence or coercion? 2. The fuzzy legal-status of someone in a subject pool. They have not legally consented when they sign up for an experiment because they have not yet received and indicated informed consent. See, for example, the info in this question: http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/informconsfaq.html#q9 Ken Helweg-Larsen, Marie wrote: You mean for participant pools? No longer permitted by whom? We have no-show penalties for our participant pool but still had a large no-show rate until we switch to SONA which uses automatic reminders. Marie Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D. Department Chair and Associate Professor of Psychology Kaufman 168, Dickinson College Carlisle, PA 17013, office (717) 245-1562, fax (717) 245-1971 http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/psych/helwegm -Original Message- From: Ken Steele [mailto:steel...@appstate.edu] Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009 3:36 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] No-Show penalty -- still in use? It is the beginning of the semester and the faculty are hot to snuff the infamous no-show with various consequences like extra requirements, extra participations, loss of points, etc. I seem to remember a discussion that concluded that these kinds of consequences were no longer permitted. Can anyone point me to the definitive answer to this question (definitive for 9/25/09, speed of change may vary with location.) Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Running head
Stuart: I am truly shocked by this news as I have never seen a ms rejected because of failure to follow APA format. I have seen papers where they have asked for resubmission following APA rules but these were papers that were not written by psychologists and so off the mark as to be unreadable; not a paper that would be written by someone like Stuart. In related news, I knew an editor (the editor...not consulting, etc.) of a JEP journal who said to a colleague complaining about changes in to an earlier format manual that he never paid attention to the manual because that is what APA copy editors are for. Since I am a habitual scofflaw of only 1 space after the period, I can support the two-spaces change in the 6th ed. And doesn't that wee bit of extra space look nice! Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- Stuart McKelvie wrote: Dear Jim and Tipsters, Perception Psychophysics returned a paper to me unread because it did not follow APA format. Sincerely, Stuart _ Floreat Labore Recti cultus pectora roborant Stuart J. McKelvie, Ph.D., Phone: 819 822 9600 x 2402 Department of Psychology, Fax: 819 822 9661 Bishop's University, 2600 rue College, Sherbrooke, Qu¨bec J1M 1Z7, Canada. E-mail: stuart.mckel...@ubishops.ca (or smcke...@ubishops.ca) Bishop's University Psychology Department Web Page: http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy Floreat Labore ___ -Original Message- From: Jim Clark [mailto:j.cl...@uwinnipeg.ca] Sent: August 24, 2009 3:26 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Running head Hi Has anyone ever had a manuscript rejected because of an APA style error? I haven't despite numerous violations. I wonder if we spend too much time on niceties of apa style given APA itself can't seem to get it correct, adherence does not really matter except for classwork, and clear communication is more important than style issues (I do appreciate the aspects of the APA manual that address writing clearly). Take care Jim James M. Clark Professor of Psychology 204-786-9757 204-774-4134 Fax j.cl...@uwinnipeg.ca Deb Briihl dbri...@valdosta.edu 24-Aug-09 1:07:38 PM One of my coworkers contacted the APA gurus about the Running head. The sample paper is incorrect (why is this a theme?) - the running head is to be on each page to the left - the words Running head are not to be included. Deb Dr. Deborah S. Briihl Dept. of Psychology and Counseling Valdosta State University Valdosta, GA 31698 (229) 333-5994 dbri...@valdosta.edu http://chiron.valdosta.edu/dbriihl/ Well I know these voices must be my soul... Rhyme and Reason - DMB --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Question about research project in cognitive psych
Mark A. Casteel wrote: I've often wondered if anyone has had students try to research topics like (1) the negative effects of texting while performing other activities or (2) the influence of the presence/absence of a gun on memory for a simulated crime, without requiring working with experimental software like E-prime or PsyScope. In other words, has anyone thought of a fairly easy way that students could research a topic like this, and collect data that would be both meaningful and (to their way of thinking) more interesting? If I could provide guidance with something like this, so the students don't waste the entire semester simply coming up with a workable protocol, that would be fabulous. Hi Mark: Since most of the arguments on TIPS has been about students texting in class then why don't you do a study on that situation. You could present information on ppt slides while the students are texting back and forth. They are responsible for information that is being presented on the ppt slides and responding in a quick fashion to the text mesages. You could manipulate the rate of text messages sent and received and the rate at which ppt slides are presented. The ppt slide show could be modeled after a typical class, with names, theories, dates, and experimental results presented across slides. Good luck, Ken * Mark A. Casteel, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology Penn State York 1031 Edgecomb Ave. York, PA 17403 (717) 771-4028 * -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] He won't open up
I say psychobabble hogwash. Generally, when someone asks me what I am thinking about and I say nothing then I am being as truthful as I can be. Ken Allen Esterson wrote: From the Boston Globe: He won���t open up? There���s a reason, by Stephen Berman http://tinyurl.com/ngqm4z Insight or psychobabble? Let's hear from you guys and gals! Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org http://www.esterson .org/ http://www.esterson.org/ -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Passing of an icon
michael sylvester wrote: We in Daytona are mourning the death of Bruce Rossmeyer.He was killed in a motorcycle accident in Wyomng. Any bikers in Tipsville? Sorry, Mikey, but I have seen too many people that have been either crippled or killed in motorcycle accidents to have much interest. Highway speeds are too high; roads are too crowded; and there are too many drivers who are distracted by eating, texting, and other activities. Two weeks ago I was returning from a friend's house when I was stopped while they cleaned up the mess of a head-on collision. The SUV looked like it had been karate-chopped in the front grill work. I looked for the other vehicle without success. It took me a moment to realize that the indent was the imprint left by a motorcycle going in the opposite direction to the SUV. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Passing of an icon
michael sylvester wrote: Ken: Bikers are an important part of the American culural landscape.Would rather be in their midst than those NASCAR redneck fans in Boone,dude. Michael Yo Mikester: I have no animosity towards motorcyclists. Google tail of the dragon to see what the rides are like in WNC. Rides are dangerous for everybody: NASCAR redneck-fans driving cars, motorcyclists, Tour de France-inflamed bicyclists, and even runners/walkers--but motorcyclists are in an especially vulnerable situation. They are not as nimble dodging as the bicyclists and runners but will always lose in a confrontation with a 4-wheel vehicle. Spin your platter, DJ, but make that your rotational excess. Party on. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Fuzzy math: O'Reilly
I nominate Bill O'Reilly's comment for the mid-week humor award. Ken Christopher D. Green wrote: Here's a teachable moment for your stats courses. Bill O'Rielly says that it is to be expected that Canada's life expectancy is higher that the US's because the US has 10 times as many people. http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907270052 Paul Krugman (who, despite his Nobel, apparently doesn't get out much these days) says he is left speechless by this inane claim. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/speechless/?emc=eta1 Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ == -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] A New DSM Category?
Mike Palij wrote: An interesting if disturbing article in the NY Times on certain Japanese social trends, entitled Love in 2-D. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-2DLove-t.html?ref=worldpagewanted=all Perhaps a topic for legitimate multucultural discussion. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu 2-D love seems similar to the cases of hikkomori, the withdrawal from social interaction. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Help with Misery quote
michael sylvester wrote: I am trying to recall the details of an experiment that led to the quote like misery loves misery or misery love miserable company It may have something to do with subjects choosing to wait alone or with a group of other subjects.I suspect that it is relevant to the cognitive appraisal theory(Schacter-Singer) of emotion.It is the misery part that I am trying to figure out.Please elucidate. Michael Sylvester,PhD Daytona Beach,Florida Michael: You are remembering correctly. The phrase is connected with a study by Schachter (1959), The psychology of affiliation. The misery part was that one group of subjects was told that they were going to experience electric shock and given the opportunity to wait with other subjects or alone while the equipment was being readied. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] What is behavior?
I hate to accuse Stephen of speciesism but my thinking about the animal/plant distinction is based on a lifetime of fighting the invasion of thorny-bushes and kudzu. They move slower than some other creatures but are just as aggressive in the Southern USA. More seriously, talk to botanists and read: Darwin, C. R. 1875. The movements and habits of climbing plants. 2d edition. London: John Murray. Ken sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: My two cents. Whatever behaviour is, I'm sure that oak trees don't do it. So any definition which allows oak trees to behave will not do. The same goes for Canadian maple trees. Dogwood--maybe, because of their bark. Stephen - Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ --- -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Mid-week academic humor
Get a better reinforcer. I don't move for nuttin. michael sylvester wrote: Where is it? Michael --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] More Hebb Quotations
Stuart McKelvie wrote: Dear Tipsters, I thought you might be interested in some additional quotations from Hebb’s (1974) paper “What psychology is about”. Stuart: Thanks for reminding TIPS about this interesting and enjoyable paper. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Argh!
sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: On 19 Jul 2009 at 16:58, Christopher D. Green wrote: It turns out that (in the absence of any hard evidence) my suspicion was correct. The woman's story is, to put it bluntly, a lie I found the story related by this woman disturbing, and even more disturbing now that I know (thanks, Chris) that it was false, part of an organized effort to block health care reform in the US by unfairly disparaging the Canadian system. Stephen I saw the brain tumor ad and immediately doubted its truth. One of the problems in the US is that health-care reform has become such an emotion-laden issue (like abortion, Communism, terrorism) that there is almost no rational discussion. The moment that someone mentions that there needs to be a better system of providing health care to US citizens then a bunch of people start screaming about Socialism and people dying for lack of care. Frankly, as a US citizen, the whole situation seems bizarre. Ken - Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ --- -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Intro to psych for nonmajors
tay...@sandiego.edu wrote: Let me re-focus this discussion: Would one have different learning objectives for majors and for non-majors taking the intro to psychology course. This is one of the issues that has lead to debate. The instructions to the departments were that the introductory courses could not be just an introduction to the discipline but had to be linked to other courses in other departments in a manner that satisfied a general theme -- otherwise it was not a *general* education course. The themes and their approval were evaluated by another committee. The requirement that departments provide a general education experience devolved to the intro course because the course could not have prerequisites in that discipline. (Otherwise, it is just a course in the discipline.) One can imagine many linkages that psychology could make with other disciplines (sociology, biology, philosophy, ...). But consider the case of the Chemistry department. It is being asked to make the intro course something other than an introduction to Chemistry. The case of chemistry brought up another issue. We have several professional-training programs (like Nursing). Their certification requirements are specific on the courses and contents of courses in allied disciplines. For the program to receive national certification, course syllabi from chemistry must be provided that demonstrate the student had certain experiences in that class. Simultaneously, chemistry is being told by the gen ed people that the course can't just be about chemistry. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] Is this humor? Surely you can't be serious?
Two ions are walking down the road. Suddenly, one ion says: Damn, I think I lost an electron! The other ion says: Are you sure? The first ion turns to the other ion and replies: Yeah, I'm positive! Ken PS - Yes, and don't call me Shirley. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Florida State/no more land lines
I think the story is that many Florida universities are considering dumping landlines from dorms. See http://tinyurl.com/llaa9q and http://tinyurl.com/ldnztp michael sylvester wrote: The admin at FSU has decided that the Department of Business faculty will no lnger have land line services in their offices.They must arrange to be contacted and contact through their cells.Apparently this us a budgetary cost saving measure.Other departments are also considering this measure. Will this be a trend in academia? What are the pros and cons of this model? Can you imagine getting a cell call while having a two martini lunch or a three margarita breakfast? Send me something: you could be the next tipster of the week. Michael Sylvester,PhD Daytona Beach,Florida -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Michael Jackson phenomenon
tay...@sandiego.edu wrote: I am fascinated with society's fascination with the death of Michael Jackson. What? Michael Jackson died!?! I haven't changed TV channels since the Tour de France started ;-) Seriously, I think it is a combo of slow news and his trainwreck of a life. BTW, when people talk about his choreography. I say: hats, gloves, stylized gestures? Hasn't anyone heard of Bob Fosse? Check out this scene from The Little Prince (1974) with Fosse. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUTEhEPONgc Note Fosse doing a moonwalk at the 5-minute mark. Here is a link to someone who re-edited that scene to go with the song Billie Jean. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUlEBhGgEe0 Ken Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 tay...@sandiego.edu --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Thesis Woes
This is a problem I have faced on several occasions. One reason for the problem is that students have little experience in writing, very little experience in understanding editorial comments, and very little experience in rewriting. If the writing has not improved over successive iterations then my guess would be that the student is not understanding the editorial comments. I try to pick one goal for each set of revisions. For example, if the ms is poorly organized then my goal may be to get the student to understand how a ms should be ordered. (I ignore the dangling modifiers, unreferenced pronouns, and inconsistent use of plurals in that version.) I provide the student with a general flow for a section (past to present, general to specific, human vs. nonhuman subjects) and get the student to start cut-and-pasting and deleting paragraphs. Then my editorial comments begin to make sense. (Why is this animal study being included with the human studies and not with the other animal studies?) Once the organization is acceptable, then I may work on grammatical issues. I will take the 1st page of a section and explain the problem with and solution to some issue like unclear pronouns. Then I will circle the problem in the rest of that section and have the student work on correcting the problem. This task will take a couple of revisions but the student does understand the editing goal. Finally, I reassure the student that all writers must rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Ken Wuensch, Karl L wrote: Can you TIPSters offer any advice with the problem presented below? A friend who is an assistant professor at an institution that offers a masters degree asked me: I am trying to go over a thesis proposal so the student can get it out to his committee members, but I am having a good bit of difficulty with it. The information is there - in fact it is a rather exceptional review of the literature - but most of the manuscript is simply incoherent. We have had several iterations and his writing is just not getting any better. Do you have any suggestions? I am confident that this will be a problem when it comes to writing the thesis itself too. My response: I wish I could say that this is a problem I have never faced. My most recent experience with such a student damn near drove me over the edge. I have tried two basic tactics in the past, with limited success: * Keep sending the draft back with advice on what the problems are and how to address them. This is the high road, as it should result in the student learning how to write properly. Problem is, when YOU skid off the edge of the high road you have a helluva long drop. * Write the damn thesis yourself. This is the low road, as the student will not really learn much other than that passive aggressive behavior works. If, however, the student is simply incapable of professional writing, it may be the better choice in terms of the amount of YOUR time that is taken getting the thesis written properly. There are, of course, other options. One, which I have not taken, is to resign as chair of the thesis committee. Another is to insist that the student get professional help, either from your university’s writing center (if it has one) or from a paid professional. -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: Fwd: RE: [tips] Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance
The issue of the long-term is what concerns me. Technology and file-formats are changing very quickly. I have data, documents, and email that are no longer usable because the hardware and software are no longer in existence and little attempt is made to maintain backwards compatibility. Ken (Microsloth is the worst offender.) tay...@sandiego.edu wrote: That might work better than facebook! At least there is a log of everything. Just as with the server problems with tips right now, it seems that eventually all of these formats might have long-term existence problems. But then again, most of us will be retired by then ;) Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 tay...@sandiego.edu --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Famous People Die in 3's: proved again!
I saw this rule cited on another list. The writer cited Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett, and Billy Mays. I thought about poor Ed McMahon. Linda Woolf is right. A couple of other people should be shaking. Given Ed McMahon, should Chris O'Donnell be worried? Ken Michael Britt wrote: As we all know, famous people die in 3's and this past week proved this once again with the deaths of Michael Jackson, and, uh.. (what were their names again?), oh yes: Ed McMahon and Farah Fawcett. The reason for this uncanny phenomenon is no doubt linked to inexplicable forces..wait a minute..what's that? You say Billy Mays - the OxiClean pitchman - also died this week? Damn! Damn! Damn! Wait a minute now.was Billy Mays really famous ENOUGH to be included in the category of famous? I mean, how many people really knew him? I say that we declare him officially not famous enough to be included among the famous and therefore the phenomenon is intact. Either that, or the phenomenon has shifted somewhat (due, no doubt, to astrological forces) and famous people now die in fours. It has been so decreed. ;) Michael www.thepsychfiles.com --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] First, Do No Harm or Who Watches The Watchmen?
Don't miss the interactive graphic that describes the procedure. The last graphic shows what happened with two patients. The location of the seeds looks like the z-axis was misread/computed. The article makes it sound like the fault rests almost entirely with the oncologist but the graphic states that the oncologist is working with a physicist. One wonders how a team could continue to make repeated mistakes over many surgeries. Ken Mike Palij wrote: There is a very troubling article in the NY Times about the number of errors made in implanting radioactive seeds to treat prostate cancer at a Philadelphia Veterans Administration (VA) hospital; see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/21radiation.html?_r=1th=emc=thpagewanted=all Most of the errors appear to have been made by a single physician who is an M.D./Ph.D. (so much for being overeducated). Outside of the pain and suffering of the patients who were affected by the improperly placed radioactive seeds, it is disturbing how the system of review either didn't work or just broke down and several supervisory organizations failed to realize what was going on. Peer review of the treatment was supposed to operate but clearly failed in this situation. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Mid-week academic humor
Howard S. Hoffman used to tell this joke. What made it even funnier was that he would act the part of the student, and lift his trousers to reveal that he was wearing bright red socks. Ken John Kulig wrote: An old one ... A female student was about to graduate and needed a gen ed class and decided to take a freshman ornithology class, thinking she'd breeze through a large lecture class filled with freshmen. After 3 weeks of lectures and studying every aspect of birds - anatomy physiology, habitat, diet, migration, mating patterns, etc etc, she took the first exam. She was shocked to see the entire exam consisted of matching 50 bird names with pictures of just their legs. Outraged, she decided to drop the class, so she marched up to Professor Smith's podium, threw the exam on the ground and said this is the stupidest exam I have ever seen! I am a senior and I don't have to take a silly class like this. I'm dropping it As she was walking out the door, Professor Smith yelled Excuse me, miss, what is your name?. The student stopped, raised her skirt up high and said YOU figure it out! -- John W. Kulig Professor of Psychology Plymouth State University Plymouth NH 03264 -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Will PETA Protest Against Carnivorous Plants?
I don't know about the guilt issue but there is evidence on the second issue -- Armus, H. (1967). Conditioning of the Mimosa plant. Psychonomic Bulletin, 1, 31. Mike Palij wrote: All this, of course, leads to the following question: Do plants feel guilty and, if so, can it be conditioned? ;-) -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Remembering dreams
This technique seems to be a variant of the method of loci. I don't see any connection here between dream rememberance and self-hypnosis. Ken Rick Froman wrote: I have a colleague (in the English department) who is writing a book and the current part involves a technique for remembering dreams. She said she was told by a psychologist that she should find various items around the room that she would be most likely to see when she wakes up and make a conscious association between these things (like a ceiling fan or a poster or a clock) and remembering dreams such that when she saw the item she would remember to remember her dream. The psychologist called this a post hypnotic suggestion but her editor doesn’t think this is a really accurate term for this technique. The psychologist evidently thought this association was a type of self-hypnosis and the remembering of the dream would then be the result of a post hypnotic suggestion. What do you think? Is that an accurate term or can you think of a better way to label this technique (is it just an “association”)? Thanks, Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences Professor of Psychology Box 3055 John Brown University 2000 W. University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 rfro...@jbu.edu (479)524-7295 http://tinyurl.com/DrFroman --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Truman Show delusion
Beth Benoit wrote: Interesting article in this month's Monitor online about what might be a culturally based manifestation of psychotic thinking: the belief that one is the star of a reality TV show. Some people particularly identify with the protagonist in the 1998 film The Truman Show, in which Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, discovers his entire life has been fabricated by the media and he is the unwitting center of a reality TV show. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/06/delusion.html Beth Benoit Granite State College Plymouth State University New Hampshire I've had a variant of that delusion. Sometimes I find myself in a room full of young adults and they are writing down whatever I say. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] Dickens URL
http://dickensurl.com/ Inspired by a comment from reddit, this service has been created to convert long URLs into wonderful works by Charles Dickens. The fear of cryptic URLs, long or short, is now no longer a problem. Enter an ugly URL above and hit convert button. Soon you will be faced with beautiful words of Charles Dickens. Forget tinyurl.com, now you have dickensurl.com! --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Milgram Study: how long the button was held down?
If Milgram was using an event recorder (which is consistent with apparatus technology at that time) then one is talking about yards of paper to measure and convert to shock durations, latencies, and progressions rates through the sequence for a session. At the least, one would need to normalize by individual. (Are Subject A and Subject B both both shocking faster than typical at this level--then you need to be able to compute what was typical for the individual subject.) Milgram was probably overwhelmed by the amount of data conversion. Finally, if one was missing a relevant transition point, time in session, shock level, etc. then the record is garbage. I have used event recorders before and the mistake is not to record enough events so that you can measure transition/event probabilities/durations. That mistake is one reason why you see so little use of event/transition probabilites even though psychologists often talk about the importance of the sequence of events. Ken Jean-Marc Perreault wrote: This is mentioned in his biography: The Man Who Shocked the World (Blass, 2004). The exact reference to this is at the bottom of p. 79, and top of 81 (as p.80 is a graph). The author states: Connected to the schock machine was an apparatus that automatically recorded not only the shock levels, but also the duration and latency of each shock to 1/100th of a second. Cheers. JM Jean-Marc Perreault Chair, School of Liberal Arts 500 College Drive, PO Box 2799 Whitehorse, Yukon Y1A 5K4 Canada t 867.668.8867 f 867.668.8805 www.yukoncollege.yk.ca -Original Message- From: David Hogberg [mailto:dhogb...@albion.edu] Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 7:54 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Milgram Study: how long the button was held down? What I remember from the film is that he showed an event recorder (and a sample of its record) to display latencies and button-down duration. I don't have access to the article right now, but as Jamie Davies said, there was no mention of such data in his results section. DKH David K. Hogberg, PhD Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Albion College, Albion MI 49224 dhogb...@albion.edu home phone: 517/629-4834 Jamie Davies jamiedav...@gmail.com 06/01/09 10:18 AM Both the latency and the duration of the shocks were measured by Milgram (he states this in his method section) however on a re-read of the original article he doesn't refer to this in the results section. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Reality check
One cause of these almost-plaigiarism stringing together of words from articles is that students lack both vocabulary and understanding. They are afraid to change material too much and the text becomes wrong. Ken DeVolder Carol L wrote: What I'm finding is that, rather than explaining things in their own words, students are stringing together phrases lifted directly from articles. It makes me very angry that students think I'm dumb enough to know when they do or don't know what they are talking about. This is an upper-level course. I realize I asked for it by requiring a brief paper (5-7 pages, 3 refs from primary sources, etc.). It is my deeply-held belief that I should not lower my standards by having them do things that don't require writing. I have them write short papers throughout the course that involve critical thinking and reasoning, and are not APA-style activities, but I think they should be able to complete this brief assignment without plagiarizing. Carol L. DeVolder, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology Chair, Department of Psychology St. Ambrose University 518 West Locust Street Davenport, Iowa 52803 Phone: 563-333-6482 e-mail: devoldercar...@sau.edu web: http://web.sau.edu/psychology/psychfaculty/cdevolder.htm The contents of this message are confidential and may not be shared with anyone without permission of the sender. -Original Message- From: tay...@sandiego.edu [mailto:tay...@sandiego.edu] Sent: Sun 5/10/2009 1:57 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Reality check I think it boils down to how many different ways can you paraphrase that sentence? I suspect if it's a limited report without a larger context from which to paraphrase, that you might see a lot of similar sounding attempts at paraphrase. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 tay...@sandiego.edu Original message Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 13:17:19 -0500 From: DeVolder Carol L devoldercar...@sau.edu Subject: [tips] Reality check To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) tips@acsun.frostburg.edu OK, I need a quick show of hands--plagiarism or not? Here is the sentence from the paper: When hearing loss exists, the main cause is damage or complete destruction of sensory hair cells. Here is the sentence from the article: The principle cause of hearing loss is damage to or complete destruction of sensory hair cells. I am encountering this so often, I'm starting to question my own judgment. Thanks, Carol Carol L. DeVolder, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology Chair, Department of Psychology St. Ambrose University 518 West Locust Street Davenport, Iowa 52803 Phone: 563-333-6482 e-mail: devoldercar...@sau.edu web: http://web.sau.edu/psychology/psychfaculty/cdevolder.htm -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know It - NYTimes.com
The change that Taylor called for is in progress here at ASU. We will find out whether a collaborative program with the humanities in the themes of Water or the Mind (which are in progress) is going to be an improvement on the programs of Hydrology or Philosophy. Christopher D. Green wrote: Well, this proposal for the overhaul of the university ought to get some people riled up. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=1 Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Uneasiness with Evolutionary Psychology
Hi Michael: One common concern is that some accounts of behavior may be described as just so stories, named after a group of stories by Rudyard Kipling (e.g., How the lepoard got its spots). The concern it this: If the behavior is present then the investigator assumes it is there for an evolutionary reason. The investigator then makes an attempt to describe a plausible basis for its existence as a response to some speculative set of selection pressures. Generating hypotheses is just part of the game. The issue is that the hypothesis must be falsifiable just like any other scientific hypothesis. If the hypothesis can't be falsified or otherwise empirically investigated then it becomes a just-so story. Ken Michael Britt wrote: David Buss wrote a very good summary of the main ideas and some of the recent research in the area of evolutionary psychology in the most recent edition of American Psychologist (The Great Struggles of Life, February-March 2009). It's really quite an interesting article and since I've received a number of emails asking me about evolutionary psychology I thought I would discuss the article in an upcoming podcast. In doing this I don't really want to enter into the debate over religion vs. science (though in some ways I guess it's going to be unavoidable). I do, however, want to make sure I understand the concerns/criticisms/uneasiness some people have with this area of psychology. If I understand it right, some people are concerned about this perspective because, for example, even though animals demonstrate a behavior that is in some way similar to what humans do doesn't mean that the reason animals show this behavior (which is probably related to increasing species' survival) is the same reason humans do it. We shouldn't jump to an evolutionary psychology explanation for every behavior we see. Also, even if the behavior can be shown to evolutionary roots, there may be a concern that some people might use this as an excuse to continue doing something that we, as intelligent and caring beings, should be able to discipline ourselves not to do. If I understand these two positions correctly then I think these are valid points. Feel free to expand on this if I'm not getting it correctly. What are some of the other reasons people criticize, or are uncomfortable, with this perspective (aside from the religious issue)? Thanks, Michael Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.com mailto:mich...@thepsychfiles.com www.thepsychfiles.com http://www.thepsychfiles.com -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] Impact of evolutionary theory on psychology
Note that the Feb/March 2009 issue of American Psychologist contains several interesting articles about the impact of evolutionary theory on psychology, including one by Chris Green. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] info: pigeons or rats
sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: Of course if you want _really_ high rates, you have to selectively reinforce for them (progressively targeting shorter inter-response times). I've heard that you can get a pigeon to peck fast enough that way to melt its beak, undoubtedly an exaggeration, and fortunately, because the PETA people would be rather put out if it were true. Melting beaks sounds like an urban legend but I lost one pigeon from a study using VR schedules. The bird was pecking so fast and hard that it split its beak. The bird was fine after a few weeks of R R. Ken - Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ --- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] info: pigeons or rats
msylves...@copper.net wrote: Are pigeons preferred in demonstrating conditioning principles than rats or vice versa? It depends on the phenomenon under investigation. One advantage of pigeons is that they are very long-lived. You can run a variety of parametric manipulations for years without worrying that your subjects may die of old age. They also produce a wider range of response rates--which makes it easier to demonstrate differences. On the other hand, about all pigeons can do easily is peck at objects. Rats can press levers, turn wheels, jump, swim, run in wheels, run through mazes, pull on strings, etc. Many people who work with rats for a long time develop various kinds of allergic reactions to the rats. The incidence of allergic reactions to pigeons is lower in my experience. But pigeons are a source of histoplasmosis (and other nasty infections) due to the inhalation of fecal material in the clouds of pigeon dust that are produced when one walks into a colony. Rats can bite but pigeons have soft beaks that can't break the skin. (But don't run with a pigeon or you may put out an eye.) Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] info: pigeons or rats
Paul Brandon wrote: On Apr 21, 2009, at 2:40 PM, Ken Steele wrote: msylves...@copper.net wrote: Are pigeons preferred in demonstrating conditioning principles than rats or vice versa? It depends on the phenomenon under investigation. One advantage of pigeons is that they are very long-lived. You can run a variety of parametric manipulations for years without worrying that your subjects may die of old age. They also produce a wider range of response rates--which makes it easier to demonstrate differences. Actually, this is a manipulanda artifact. I've used pigeon response keys with rats, and gotten rates over 5 responses per second. Paul's point is important. There is an issue when you try to compare performance across species. Species differences are confounded with apparatus differences in many instances. I have had a few rats that have produced very high response rates. In one case, the rat was grabbing the bar with its teeth and shaking the bar like it had caught a prey. On the other hand, about all pigeons can do easily is peck at objects. Rats can press levers, turn wheels, jump, swim, run in wheels, run through mazes, pull on strings, etc. Paul Brandon Emeritus Professor of Psychology Minnesota State University, Mankato paul.bran...@mnsu.edu --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] News: The SAT 'at War With Itself' - Inside Higher Ed
The SAT is at war with itself on many fronts. http://professionals.collegeboard.com/testing/sat-reasoning/scores/policy Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Help with sexting
Post them on his facebook account like everybody else. msylves...@copper.net wrote: A colleague has told me that one of his female students has been sexting photos to him. What should he do? Michael Sylvester,PhD Daytona Beach,Florida -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Rick Steves: Travel guru reports on a little psychology
I agree with Rick that there are two aspects to this calculation when you are trying to describe whether a greater fear of flying is irrational. The personal base rate of driving relative to flying would suggest that driving is a safer activity in that we have more experience of safe driving trips. The lack of knowledge of the base rate of trips in the air would contribute to this fear. But here is the question for me. Assume that people don't know the actual number of flights per day and underestimate that value. If they base their decision on that underestimate, are they being irrational? Or are they being rational, but working with incorrect assumptions about the data? Ken Rick Froman wrote: I think there could be some other factors operating in this overestimation of the danger of air travel. First, everyone travels in cars all the time and we have long ago become habituated to the danger (which doesn’t actually bode well for the safety of car travel but does explain why it feels safer). Most people don’t travel by air frequently enough to become habituated to it (more people are probably sensitized to it). Those that do travel by air frequently enough to be habituated to it probably do not have a hard time believing it is safer than car travel (also based on personal experience and therefore, no more statistically valid than those who fly rarely who fear air travel). There is another factor related to the availability heuristic that you don’t often see addressed. Of course, plane crashes, due to the news, will be more available to memory than car crashes (of which there are so many that only the most horrific would end up on the news). A largely unconsidered factor that relates to the availability heuristic is the frequency of car travel vs. air travel. We see cars all the time around us and planes only when we go to the airport so I think people don’t have a good idea of the base number of plane flights there are every day and the number of people who fly each day to compare to the fatalities of the occasional plane crash. According to Wikipedia, on 9/11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_on_9/11), Canadian and American air traffic controllers had to land 6,500 planes carrying close to a million people. And that was just at one point in time, not the total number of air travelers scheduled to travel on that day. Checking a flight tracker such as http://flightaware.com/ gives you some perspective about the number of flights each day. When I checked it today at 3:30 pm CST, it claimed to be “tracking *4,849* airborne aircraft” and to have “tracked *44,851* arrivals in the last 24 hours”. Clicking on the map with the red dots gives you some idea of how many flights there are in the air at any one time. Of course, this doesn’t compare to the number of cars but the planes carry many more passengers than the cars and they crash much less frequently than the cars. Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences Box 3055 x7295 rfro...@jbu.edu http://tinyurl.com/DrFroman Proverbs 14:15 A simple man believes anything, but a prudent man gives thought to his steps. *From:* Claudia Stanny [mailto:csta...@uwf.edu] *Sent:* Wednesday, March 25, 2009 3:10 PM *To:* Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) *Subject:* RE: [tips] Rick Steves: Travel guru reports on a little psychology The short-term probability calculation is an interesting consideration. However, the relative risk of air travel compared to travel by automobile is consistently in favor of air travel as the safer option. Nevertheless, people consistently prefer travel by car as the “safer” option. Much of this fear is driven by ease of retrieving examples of fatalities in air crashes and overweighting this risk. Fatalities in auto crashes are mundane, not covered well in the media, and their risk is underestimated. 911 enhanced the ease of retrieval of air crashes with fatalities (and may have marginally increased the “real” risk of air travel). I doubt that the safe “soft crash” of an airplane in the Hudson River with zero fatalities did anything to reduce this overestimation of the risk of air travel. But that is an empirical question. Anybody working on it? J Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. Director, Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Associate Professor, Psychology University of West Florida Pensacola, FL 32514 – 5751 Phone: (850) 857-6355 or 473-7435 e-mail:csta...@uwf.edu mailto:csta...@uwf.edu CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/cutla/ Personal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm *From:* Maxwell Gwynn [mailto:mgw...@wlu.ca] *Sent:* Wednesday, March 25, 2009 2:38 PM *To:* Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) *Subject:* Re: [tips] Rick Steves: Travel guru
Re: [tips] Article on paper mills in the The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
My writing assignments are like Gary's and I haven't had trouble with plagiarism. My assignments are research reports that are built from multiple drafts or short very-specific assignments such as analysis of a problem or response to a question. I would rather see 2 pages of organized and edited material than 15 pages of glop. On the other hand, I know faculty who do assign 10-page to 15-page papers and they have a continuing problem with plagiarism. There is an instructor/paper-length confound but I am not going to start assigning long papers to see if I get the problem :-) Ken Gerald Peterson wrote: Interesting stuff. I wonder if people on tips have many of these kinds of problems? I have paper requirements that are not easily the kinds of things one can purchase: Research reports that the students conduct in research classes with a number of drafts, specific applications of social psych to specific local situations, and narrow reviews of psych research journals. All of these can pose problems regarding some plagiarism, but not the kind of things that essay mills can easily handle. Maybe we should ask, what kinds of papers are more appropriate? Does anyone really require the old-fashioned global, general term paper these days? Just wonderin' Gary Gerald L. (Gary) Peterson, Ph.D. Professor, Psychology Saginaw Valley State University University Center, MI 48710 989-964-4491 peter...@svsu.edu sbl...@ubishops.ca 3/19/2009 9:39 pm On 19 Mar 2009 at 13:39, roig-rear...@comcast.net wrote: the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article titled: Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply that attempts to provide an in-depth look at how these operations work, who owns them, etc The article provides an interesting view from the outside. For an interesting view from the inside, try: First Person The Term Paper Artist The lucrative industry behind higher ed's failings. By Nick Mamatas The Smart Set October 10, 2008 http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article10100801.aspx Another, much older but still revealing description from the inside is this one, unfortunately not available on the web: This pen for hire: On grinding out papers for college students by Abigail Witherspoon [pseudonym], Harper's Magazine, June, 1995, p. 49--57 Stephen - Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ --- -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Essential Library purchases- information request
Tim: You didn't ask for a book in this area but there is a 2nd edition (20 years after the 1st) of an excellent ABA book. Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., Heward, W. L. (2007). Applied Behavior Analysis (2nd ed). Pearson Education: Upper Saddle River, NJ. This is an excellent reference work for an undergrad institution. Also, the book connects sections in the text directly to competencies required for BCBA certification in case any of your students are headed down that path. Finally, how can you not be interested in a book where all the authors are wearing bike jerseys in the author photo. Ride on! Ken Shearon, Tim wrote: To my favorite list of highly informed colleagues! Our department has somehow not spent our library budget completely (deadline is today!). As I was looking over some of our areas of weakness in the collection, it occurred to me that the collective intelligence and experience of tips is a far better source of suggestions than my tiny/fatigued little gray cells! So do any of you have any highly recommended texts in the following areas for the last say year to two that are just MUST PURCHASES for an undergraduate library. If you wish, I could compile a list and do feel free to respond off list. Here are the areas I was looking at: Social psychology (probably our greatest area of need and one we are least expert in- your help in this one particularly appreciated) History of psychology Learning- specifically animal learning Applied studies on learning/performance (or particularly important basic research in the area of human learning and performance) Neuropsychology- (brain injury and recovery and sports related in particular) Forensic psychology Your thoughts will be much appreciated by me and the department but I suspect even more-so by our students! Tim Shearon ___ Timothy O. Shearon, PhD Professor and Chair Department of Psychology The College of Idaho Caldwell, ID 83605 email: tshea...@collegeofidaho.edu teaching: intro to neuropsychology; psychopharmacology; general; history and systems You can't teach an old dogma new tricks. Dorothy Parker --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Problems with Turnitin - Inside Higher Ed -- my experiences
Christopher D. Green wrote: Turnitin plagiarism detection software seems to have high false positive rate, and is supporting some favorable researchers. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/13/detect Chris -- ASU had a trial semester with Turnitin and my experiences were similar to that reported in the article. The software had both a high false positive and a high miss rate. In addition to the false positives and misattributions noted in the article, here are some misses: I submitted the manuscripts of articles of mine that had been published and repeatedly referenced and Turnitin counted them as legitimate first submissions. I cut and pasted from classic psychology articles and they were classified as legitimate. I cut and pasted several paragraphs from psychology textbooks (in their n-th edition) and Turnitin catagorized them as legitimate. Next, I challenged my classes that semester to see what they could sneak by Turnitin. The assignment was simple: The student got an extra point of credit if they could report the rule they used and whether it worked. More than half of the students could sneak material by Turnitin for a wide variety of reasons -- text in foreign language, text in technical language (chemistry, math), poetry, textbooks. (The students loved this extra-credit opportunity.) Finally, I played around with the sequence in which text was submitted to Turnitin to determine how the program decided which text was the original. The results were not satisfactory. I would urge faculty to test this software carefully before investing money in their services. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Another review to consider
Allen: I am sorry to have mislead you. I meant the prose was as carefully crafted as Stephen's (and other writers on tips). Allen Esterson wrote: Correction: It was Patrick Dolan, not Stephen Black, who posted the link to Ari Brouillette's satirical review of *The Secret*. I misinterpreted Ken Steele's writing As good as Stephen Black when introducing another review by Brouillette. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org --- -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Antecedents of Eurocentric science - Avicenna
sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: For some reason or other, from time to time we've been preoccupied with the question of Eurocentric science, and the extent to which other civilizations, in particular African-based ones, have contributed to and advanced European science. We are not alone. _Nature_ has just reviewed two books which attempt to illuminate on this question. The books are: Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World by John Freely Science and Islam: A History by Ehsan Masood I have recently been introduced to the work of a Persian polymath and medical researcher, whose westernized name is Avicenna. He seems to be the Persian equivalent of Isaac Newton. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] Another review to consider
As good as Stephen Black ... http://www.amazon.com/review/RAZ94ELE5Z1N7/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] back to tips
Hey Annette: Welcome back. Ken tay...@sandiego.edu wrote: Hi Bill: I had a backchannel message today telling me it was safe to go back on tips, so if you could put me back on, I think I'll at least lurk for a while. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 tay...@sandiego.edu - --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] shaun of the dead
DeVolder Carol L wrote: Have any of you seen this movie (Shaun of the Dead)? I was recently told about it, and wondered if it or clips of it would be appropriate for a discussion on motivation. Shaun is one of my favorite movies. What did you have in mind for motivation? You could use an early scene to illustrate change blindness. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] shaun of the dead
Shaun of the Dead is a very funny parody of zombie movies. It is about a self-absorbed slacker, without any ambition other than hanging out at the pub. Zombies appear (in classic ___ of the Dead fashion) and Shaun doesn't notice what is happening because he is so obsessed over his life. (This is a partial explanation of my comments about change blindness.) Shaun will need to figure out what is important in life before the zombies overrun everything. (I don't want to give away too much.) Shaun contains homages to George Romero's (1978) Dawn of the Dead, which also is concerned with the issue of what constitutes the good life. In DotD, the people escape from the zombies and barricade themselves into a shopping mall. In the mall, the people think they have entered into consumer heaven, the good life of having anything they want (that can be found in a mall). I like it because the humor is similar to that of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The violence is cartoon-type violence and there is lots of very funny dialogue among the characters. Ken DeVolder Carol L wrote: I didn't really have anything in mind--I saw a clip on YouTube and it made me laugh. It seemed like a sarcastic look at the way many of my students behave. I only saw a few minutes, so I didn't know if it is gory, weird, or completely inappropriate (which may or may not stop me). I plan on ordering it from Amazon so I can watch the whole thing, but I just wondered if anyone else knew something about it. What makes it one of your favorites? Carol Carol DeVolder, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology Chair, Department of Psychology St. Ambrose University Davenport, Iowa 52803 phone: 563-333-6482 e-mail: devoldercar...@sau.edu -Original Message- From: Ken Steele [mailto:steel...@appstate.edu] Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 12:26 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] shaun of the dead DeVolder Carol L wrote: Have any of you seen this movie (Shaun of the Dead)? I was recently told about it, and wondered if it or clips of it would be appropriate for a discussion on motivation. Shaun is one of my favorite movies. What did you have in mind for motivation? You could use an early scene to illustrate change blindness. Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Can you plagiarize your own work?
What is the instructor's purpose? R C Intrieri wrote: I have found this discussion very enlightening. I have a question of another nature. We have a faculty member who has given students an assignment to write a paper. In his instructions to the students he tells them that they may plagiarize or use any means necessary to complete the paper. We have a very strict academic integrity policy which explicitly states plagiarism is prohibited. The faculty in question revealed his instructions about the paper and his views toward plagiarism in front of a group of nontenured faculty. I learned of this revelation second-hand. I am wondering how members of the list might handle this situation. Thanks. RC Intrieri, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Psychology 1 University Circle Western Illinois University Macomb, IL 61455-1390 Office: 309-298-1336 Fax: 309-298-2179 --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] globeandmail.com: Professor makes his mark, but it costs him his job
My experience is closer to Chris'. I have a set of assignments that are voluntary. I don't take them up or grade them. The assignments are to help students identify whether they understand some topic. I have been pleasantly encouraged by the number of students (both strong and weak) who bring the completed assignments to my office to verify accuracy. Of course, the fact that there is an obvious connection between information asked about on the self-study assignments and the questions that appear on the test encourages voluntary participation :-) Ken Christopher D. Green wrote: Jim Clark wrote: One year I decided to make the assignments voluntary (I can't remember why although I am now being taken to task for using too many TA hours for the course, and this might have been the case earlier as well ... much of TA time is spent marking assignments). Guess what? Completion of assignments dropped off precipitously! My conclusion, even strong, well-motivated students have difficulty working hard when there is NO direct consequence with respect to grades. I can only imagine what the situation would be for weaker, less motivated students. It is interesting that you say that. My experience has been somewhat different. I have never marked the weekly assignments in my stats course, mainly because there isn't sufficient teaching assistance to do so given my class size, but also because I think it gives students an opportunity to do some guided work without every mistake they make ending up in their final grade. Instead, I have the teaching assistant simply go over the assignment at the start of the next class. I cannot tell you what proportion of them do the assignments (though nearly all of them turn up to hear the TA each week). Their motivation is mainly that I tell them that the four tests throughout the year will prove rather difficult unless they have had the practice of the assignments (at a minimum). Those who don't believe me often get a shock when their first midterm test arrives and usually change their behavior. (And what of those few who are able to navigate my tests without taking the assignments seriously? More power to them.) Regards, Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ == --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Hey guys: A nudge to improve your aim
At some point in my grad education, I was taught that providing a target was very helpful when toliet training people with DD-diagnosis. Ken Beth Benoit wrote: An article appeared in today's New York Times about the psychology of nudges that begins with how the image of a fly was etched into urinals in the men's room in the Amsterdam airport and proved to lower spillage. Apparently men did a better job when they had something at which to aim. Other nudgings are discussed as well. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/business/08nudge.html Beth Benoit Granite State College Plymouth State University New Hampshire -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Piaget and Poetry
One example could be Jabberwocky... 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. The words are nonsense but it sounds meaningful because it fits our schema of what a poem should sound like. Ken Michael Britt wrote: Ok. I'll buy that. So, can you give an example of how assimilation would occur in this context? Michael Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.com mailto:mich...@thepsychfiles.com www.thepsychfiles.com http://www.thepsychfiles.com On Jan 28, 2009, at 8:02 PM, rikikoe...@aol.com mailto:rikikoe...@aol.com wrote: Any time you modify a schema to take in new information, that is accomodation. In a message dated 1/28/2009 1:08:57 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, michael.br...@thepsychfiles.com mailto:michael.br...@thepsychfiles.com writes: So the first question is: Is adding into your schema of poetry that poetry is words that evoke images an example of assimilation or accommodation? I'm thinking assimilation. --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Piaget and Poetry
Michael Palij wrote: Indeed. If you were to ask a poetry naive person to judge which of the following is part of a poem, I think that the answer is pretty obvious: (1) Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker (2) I should have been a pair of of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Speaking of flashbulb memories (which Mike was not) I can remember the emotional experience of reading (and re-reading and re-reading) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot in junior high and being devastated by the bleakness of his picture of one potential life as one grows old. Luckily, forgetting did its job and I decided to age anyway. Ken -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
[tips] October 22, 1850
Hi all: I have a student who would like to read the original description of Fechner's famous dream [translated into English]. Does anyone know of a source? Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Some Thoughts on the Outgoing Administration
Dang, I thought I telegraphed that one pretty clearly Ken Peter Kepros wrote: Tim: I've re-read Kenneth's response to my posting and I see that I did not read to the end of the message. I must have been too stunned by Kenneth's question to skip down over the blank area to read his NET HUMOR ALERT. I assumed his message ended with his question. In humor, as in other areas, I must remember to invoke a (very little) bit of Latin I learned at the U. of Utah: /de gustibus non est disputandum/. Happy Wednesday, Peter At 10:26 PM 1/20/2009, you wrote: Peter- Check your leg. I think something might be pulling it. :) Tim -Original Message- From: Peter Kepros [ mailto:pkep...@nbnet.nb.ca] Sent: Tue 1/20/2009 5:48 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Some Thoughts on the Outgoing Administration Kenneth: I thought Olbermann pretty well summarized the last eight years. What I don't understand is the basis of your comment and your comment itself. Are you serious? Peter At 07:49 PM 1/20/2009, you wrote: Peter Kepros wrote: Allow me to contribute to the present thread: *Olbermann on Bush -- Eight Years in Eight Minutes *click here --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtnE4C9Gv5U Peter Kepros University of New Brunswick pkep...@nbnet.nb.ca Why do you hate America? /* NET HUMOR ALERT This is a standard joke response to any criticism of anything relating to the USA. NET HUMOR ALERT OVER */ --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu http://www.psych.appstate.edu/ Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Some Thoughts on the Outgoing Administration
Peter Kepros wrote: Allow me to contribute to the present thread: *Olbermann on Bush -- Eight Years in Eight Minutes *click here --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtnE4C9Gv5U Peter Kepros University of New Brunswick pkep...@nbnet.nb.ca Why do you hate America? /* NET HUMOR ALERT This is a standard joke response to any criticism of anything relating to the USA. NET HUMOR ALERT OVER */ --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard - NYTimes.com
My son, Andy, has just begun one of those new types of introductory physics classes at NC State Univ. NCSU is very proud of the class format. I am looking forward to his evaluation of the class. With regard to Deb's comment on the pressure to have larger classes, Andy said that there were a large number of students in the room but the class was broken up into units of about 10 students per unit and each unit had its own table. Ken Christopher D. Green wrote: Perhaps this is something that large psychology departments should consider as well. Of course, it would take money. The [MIT] physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?_r=2 Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ == --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] The Boy With The Incredible Brain
Allen: Is it possible that he picked up on a pattern of change in the digits and was using a IF x THEN y type of algorithm to predict the next values? The miracle is being able to produce a string of 22,500 words that are comprised of only 10 words. Ken Allen Esterson wrote: On 10 January 2009 Rick Stevens wrote: I recorded this show and show it sometimes in class. His '22,500' places of pi is billed as a memory event but I have wondered if he was not 'just' calculating as he went along. [...] There is no straightforward formula for pi that he could have used to calculate as he went along. (Not at the rate he was going all the way through!) See, e.g., Leibniz's formula pi/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 + 1/13 - 1/15 + 1/17 - 1/19... ad infinitum (For the later decimal digits for pi he would have had to have calculated hundreds of these terms for every digit -- and then add them together.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz_formula_for_pi Hands up all those who think pi = 22/7. :-) Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org Subject: Re: The Boy With The Incredible Brain From: Rick Stevens stevens.r...@gmail.com Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2009 08:29:54 -0600 I recorded this show and show it sometimes in class. His '22,500' places of pi is billed as a memory event but I have wondered if he was not 'just' calculating as he went along. Chao Lu may still hold the record at 67,890 places. I found his meeting with Kim Peek to be interesting, too. RS On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 8:04 AM, Christopher D. Green chri...@yorku.cawrote: See this film about a savant in England who can recite pi to 22,500 places, do extraordinary math problems in his head, and learn new languages in about a week. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4913196365903075662 He has Asperger's, but unlike most savants, he is quite high functioning interpersonally. There is more information about him here: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/01/inside_the_mind_of_a.html Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) -- --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] longevity thoughts -- early adopters
Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) Hey Bill: I have forgotten how you first publicized the list. Do you remember? Ken --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] Body Mnemonics for Skewed Distributions Video
So disappointing - I thought Michael was going to bare his toes for science! :-) Michael Britt wrote: Since I just happened to be playing around with green screen video techniques at the same time as I was thinking about skewed distributions (an odd combination), I decided to put the two together in this video. So, just for fun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzSbAkZE8jw Michael Michael Britt mich...@thepsychfiles.com www.thepsychfiles.com --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor and Assistant Chairperson Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
Re: [tips] longevity thoughts -- early adopters
I remember TIPS-METHODS. Everyone still continued to have methods arguments/discussions on TIPS. One interesting historical issue would be to trace the emergence of [PSYTEACH] --the regulated listserv-- and the controversy over a few prolific posters on TIPS that lead to the 3 posts per day rule. Bill Southerly wrote: Does anyone remembered the failed attempt to start a list for the discussion of teaching research methods/stats - TIPS-METHODS? Or the failed attempt to start one for discussing the teaching of developmental psychology - TIPS-DEVELOP? Bill Bill Southerly Department of Psychology Frostburg State University Frostburg, MD 21532 301-687-4778 bsouthe...@frostburg.edu --- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. steel...@appstate.edu Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
