Items to share: 31 March

• Received wisdom | Prospect Magazine
  Is the Flynn effect (rising IQs) going into reverse?
   
• Cheese made with "gecko technology" Swiss humour!
  
  
• Friday Weird Science: The Urinal Problem , and  The Social Psychology of Flatulence Two pieces worthy of nomination for an IgNobel prize from Neurotic Physiology. Incidentally, didn't Goffman write about the first issue in Relations in Public; microstudies of the public order (1971)? If not, he should have done.
   
• Want superconductivity? Add red wine. Yet another use for a wonderful substance! From Boing Boing.
   
• Ballet dancers in super slow motion; self-explanatory
  
  
• How to Write Like a Scientist. Badly
   
• Daniel Kahneman: "A Short Course in Thinking about Thinking" An Edge Master Class by the author of the recent Thinking; Fast and Slow. A good taster for the book.
   
• Rhetological Fallacies Probably appropriate for 1 April--but there's much more to this than that: an "infographic" of rhetorical and logical fallacies.
  
  
• Science on the Rampage by Freeman Dyson from The New York Review of Books
  
  
• Robert Frost recites "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" from Open Culture.
  
  
• Quality Teaching: We're Looking in the Wrong Places This is US-centric and school-based, but exposes the delusional obsession with blaming teachers as individuals for poor student performance, and of course the fallacies behind Ofsted teaching grades, and here, disputing whether their view of "outstanding" teaching makes contact with reality...
  
  
• Risky biscuits from Prospect Magazine: it's a hoary old topic but still interesting.
  
  

Items to share: 24 March

• Is Homeopathy A Sham? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR  Interesting to find this. In a lecture earlier this week (link to come) on the "Limits of Reflective Practice" I speculated that this generally inoccuous but over-rated approach to professional practice survives--like homeopathy--as a "meme", not because it does what it sets out to do, but because of side-effects valued by its proponents.  Perhaps it is a matter of selective attention (a la Invisible Gorilla) that I seem to have picked up three alternative medicine pieces this week:.

• Diluting the scientific method: Ars looks at homeopathy : An earlier link on the "memory of water" (18 March) has mysteriously disappeared... Thanks to David S for noticing and suggesting this sounder counterbalance.
  

• Evidence-based medicine v alternative therapies: moving beyond virulence:  And in the same area, a counter-blast which deserves to be entertained, at least.

• It's 'not' history - Research - University of Cambridge The history of negation

• Body Language - Lapham’s Quarterly More precisely, cultural variations in gesturing.

• Barack Obama and sign language: ASL, that is.

• Online PhD Resources:Thanks to a correspondent for pointing me in this direction--looks interesting.
  

• Robbers' Cave Experiment: A Week with the Boys Not quite as famous (or notorious) as Milgram's obedience experiments, or Zimbardo's prison, or Asch on conformity, the Robber's Cave study of creating conflict and co-operation is nonetheless a classic which could not be replicated today (Sherif et al., 1961). Well, not in an academic setting, but of course "reality" TV operates on different rules...

• Tour the Amazon with Google Street View; No Passport Needed

• 'Keep Calm and Carry On: The Story of the Iconic World War II Poster
  

• Astronaut Films Auroras from Above | Open Culture Stunning

• Removed by request (1 Feb 3013)
  

• NCBI ROFL: Which brand of ball point pen is best for an emergency airway
  puncture? | Discoblog | Discover Magazine Just in case you need to know... (The site isn't serious, but the studies are.)
  

• Nick Kwiatek — Web & interaction designer + developer Just stir up the screen and see what happens...
  

• Presentation Zen: Videos to help you rethink education, learning, and school Nothing particularly new, but a useful compilation to have access to nonetheless (US-centric, of course)
  

• The End of Pax Papyra and the Fall of Big Paper - Forbes I always like takes on the less obvious impact of technologies, promoting sideways looks.
  

• Bryan Appleyard ‘The Opposite of Faith is not Doubt, it is Certainty’
  

Items to share: 18 March

• I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter - NYTimes.com

• Philip Tetlock on Expert Prediction Just a pointer.

• BBC Two - Horizon, 2011-2012, Out of Control? On the role of the unconscious, but not as Freud would have it.

• Is neuroscience the new ‘Freakonomics’? - The Washington Post

• Water has Memory Almost lends credibility to homeopathy (a claim the piece does not make). [This link has now been taken down--the source was here. Thanks to David S for the correction.]

• Art Direction: (musical) instruments from the inside on the Behance Network 

• Rome Reborn – An Amazing Digital Model of Ancient Rome | Open Culture

• dy/dan » Blog Archive » “It’s Killing Me. I Gotta Know.” The suspense and excitement of doing maths.

Items to share: 11 March

Apologies for this (late) ramshackle listing. I'm experimenting with delicious as a means of gleaning interesting links. It is indeed easy, but getting the results from there to here appears to be convoluted, until I get the knack...

• Times Higher Education - This edition - Satisfaction and its discontents Frank Furedi on the National Student Satisfaction Survey--distorting the culture of higher education.

• Neurons v. Free Will : the backlash against reductionist neuroscience--but do read the comments.

• Big Dog, Little Dog: The Mosaic of Learning Styles A defence! Still not convinced.
   
• PHD Comics: The Methodology Translator Ought to be in the handbook for every research methods course.

• Thoughts on Art and Teaching: Doubtful Pedantry: Interesting thoughts about the impact of confidence and certainty, and credibility

• ...and this sort of follows on, on the virtues of not being defensive about one's teaching. Creating an Authentic Learning Environment by Embracing What’s Real | Faculty Focus

• Clear Your Google Web History - Wired How-To Wiki In case you are concerned about the new privacy policy. And here is some useful background: I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

• A fitting tribute to Alan Turing « Mind Hacks He would have been 100 last week.

On Pinker's latest

“One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it.” — E.M. Forster (Attributable  of course to cognitive dissonance.)

In that spirit Steven Pinker's On the Better Angels of our Nature is brilliant. It's the book of the century!

It's on "the decline of violence in history and its causes". The Preface sets out the argument very succinctly, so you don't really have to read the rest. The main body smacks of protesting too much, but I'm not a historian and really capable of evaluating the evidence Pinker cites; but then, nor is he. Other critics have complained about his use of relative rates of violence (instances per 100,000 population raather than absolute figures) as if it were a sleight of hand. I can't, for example, comment knowledgeably on that. I am largely convinced by what Pinker discusses, but then I don't know enough to know what he doesn't discuss, and the counter-arguments and counter-evidence.

The final chapter on game theory and violence is more convincing. But overall, I'm not convinced that Pinker has added very much to Robert Wright's argument in Nonzero: History, Evolution & Human Cooperation: The Logic of Human Destiny (2001)--certainly not 700 pages worth.

I expended all that effort, and all I got was this lousy blog post!

Items to share (3 March)

• Social history comes alive in these images of the East End of London of less than fifty years ago.

• Will we ever decode dreams?

• Michael Ruse  on Thomas Kuhns' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 50 years on.

• Interesting piece arguing that in the Middle Ages it was usual to go to bed at sunset or shortly after, and then to get up again for an hour or two around midnight.

• Ben Goldacre argues for more randomised trials on social policy and initiatives across the piece as well as medical interventions

• Jean McNiff (of action-research fame) has a new website. (Thanks to Jim Crawley's delicious feed.)

• How Technology Shaped Our Metaphors for Remembering

• Based on marketing toothpaste, a different take on the traditional behavioural account of learning.

• A technological fix on how to make people shut up!