Items to Share: 27 January

Education Focus

• Separated and Connected | Clyde Street the nature of "group-ness" online

• Education, privilege, gratitude, responsibility Quite.  

• Why Don't They Apply What They've Learned, Part I (Chronicle of Higher Education) the problem of transfer of learning.

• The Methods Chapter as a party  Pat Thomson's guidance on getting your dissertation right. 

• Reading Plato on Death Row - New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science the difference the setting makes. 

Other Business

• The King's Apostrophe - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan both for content and method. 

• Join Cartoonist Lynda Barry for a University-Level Course on Doodling and Neuroscience | Open Culture

• Think you can multitask? Congratulations, you're probably living a lie.

• Social evolution: The ritual animal : Nature

• Wittgenstein’s master Frank Ramsey--supervised Wittgenstein's doctorate (sort of), but died at 26 (Brother became Archbishop of Canterbury.) 

• Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School studies placebos they do work, but how? 

• Why You Never Truly Leave High School -- New York Magazine Developmentally, the neglected years 

• Tell me now how do I feel – Bad Science The myth of "Blue Monday" and where it came from. 

• Short Sharp Science: Eskimo argument is a snowstorm in a teacup words for snow. Again. But... 

• Why Living Cells Are The Future Of Data Processing | Popular Science DNA-based digital memory is the future?

Items to Share: 21 January

Education Focus

• Keep your eye off the ball: the secrets of elite tennis coaching 

• Shakespeare and Wordsworth boost the brain, new research reveals - Telegraph Odd story--all seems to come down to using difficult words

• Donald Clark Plan B: Mayer and Clark – 10 brilliant design rules for e-learning Good sound advice 

• Education Week: Probing the Science of Value-Added Evaluation  A little arcane, but useful background

Other Business

• A Don's Life: Internet fury: or having your anatomy dissected online

• Metaphors Interesting piece on the obligatory nature of metaphor, and how metaphors frame our understanding of issues. See also this linked piece from Farnam Street, which is on a roll at the moment.

• And  Reality is shaped by the words we use  a simple and accessible exposition of early Wittgenstein.

• Climate Change | New Scientist  Fascinating interactive map plotting temperature changes over 20-year periods

• Randomised trials, blinding, systematic reviews and publication bias, using the 1000 commonest words #upgoerfive Ben Goldacre tries to explain complex ideas with only the thousand commenest (English) words; could become addictive (following xkcd).

• It's Internet Freedom Day: time to share MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech - Boing Boing a few days late

• The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks - Businessweek

• Marek Kohn – Us and them Introduction to inter-group processes

On the subtext of sheer legibility

I recently bought Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: how good people turn evil (London; Rider, 2009 978-1-84-604103-7) If the author's name is not familiar, no matter; it is a 35-years-on account of and reflection on the iconic (for once the adjective is I think appropriate) Stanford Prison Experiment.

In total, it is 551 pages. I'm not going to read it all. I may at most raid it, for quotations or anecdotes or apercus. I bought it because I ought to have a copy.

The experiment, for all its faults (see inter al. Jones and Fowles, 1984 --their critique is not listed in the references) was one of the most important events/contributions/somethings in social psychology in the 20th century, and it has been covered in scores of articles and books (and attempted TV replications) ever since.

I'm not sure that anyone will actually read the book--although it has made it to paperback (the hardback was published in 2007), and Zimbardo has popped up on serious chat shows since it came out. Most people who buy it will already know what it is about, and students who need to know what it is about will encounter it second-hand through textbooks or wikipedia. But like me, they may well buy it. And that is what matters if you are a publisher.

There is the now-common note on a spare page at the end about the typeface (Photina). What it does not say is that it is set in (at a guess) 8 point text on 10 point line spacing (leading). 10pt on 12pt is probably the standard for such a text. This type-setting amounts to an admission by the publisher that they want to print as cheaply as possible (as few pages as possible), because they know that purchasers will not (on the whole, of course) be bothered about the legibility of the text.

My respect and sympathy to Zimbardo; this has been a major effort involving--as I can see from dipping into the first half of the book which deals in detail with the experiment, and the links with other literature in the second half--years of effort. And it has been put out on a gift model*. That's insulting. It may provide another dynamic to explain "how good people turn evil"...

---

Jones K and Fowles A J (1984) Ideas on Institutions: analysing the literature of long-term care and custody London; Routledge and Kegan Paul **

* I'm sure that the marketers have a more sophisticated analysis, but as I see it, selling something as a "gift" means that you would not buy it for yourself, and you don't expect it to be any use to the recipient, but its  (monetary) value is probably exquisitely calibrated to match the social (or business) value you attach to the relationship.

** This reference is genuine (but then I would say that, wouldn't I?) But, within the academic game, it is not likely actually to be followed up, so it matters more as a proxy for academic respectability than for its substance.

On empathising with the NRA...

Like most people (I hope) on this side of the pond, I've been appalled by the Newtown massacre, and the (US) National Rifle Association response. (I'm not linking to sources on the main story.)

My very mainstream RSS feeds have been full of the gun control spat (I won't dignify it as a "debate"); the virulence and viciousness of some of the comment streams has been appalling.

Many of the gun lobby arguments have been cloaked in appeals to the second amendment to the US Constitution, the exegesis of which has been argued about endlessly.

OK. But. I get suspicious about (to me) disproportionate passion. In practical terms, the "right to bear arms" (leaving aside the rest of the amendment) for purposes other than hunting and vermin control is an appeal to a situation in extremis. Yes, I can understand how it fits with a culture of self-sufficiency in the expansionist era of the nascent USA, when transportation was slow and there was no faster medium of communication, and the rule of law, and law enforcement, was tenuous at best. And in many respects in the "fly-over" states of the mid-west, sheer geography still matters even now.

I'm not going to get into big empirical arguments--I haven't got the firepower, as it were. But I hypothesise that much of NRA support comes from relatively low-population-density area, where gun-owners really do feel safer for having a firearm to use in --however unlikely-- extremis.

And if that is the case, I can understand how frightened they may be at being compelled to give them up, and how they may well see every step in the direction of control as a step too far. Because they are right, that in the initial stages of such reforms, it will be the law-abiding minority whose gun privileges (not "rights") will be curtailed, whereas criminals just will not care or comply.

President Kennedy got it right in another context, "those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside". The USA is in the position of having to carry on riding the tiger, because there is no way to dismount. Glad I don't live there.

Items to Share: 13 January

Education Focus

• Change Magazine - Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?  Distillation of Carl Wieman's thinking, with Particular reference to science teaching and the limitations of lectures

• Making the Most of PowerPoint  A selection of ideas and tutorials from the TES: thanks to Jim Crawley for finding this.

• Twitter / Search - #overlyhonestmethods  the reality of research methodologies!

• Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet - NYTimes.com  how can MOOCs make money?

• First Day of Class Activities that Create a Climate for Learning | Faculty Focus

•  Noted - The Chronicle Review  all about taking notes and trying to organise them...

Other Business

• Never Mind E-Books: Why Print Books Are Here to Stay - WSJ.com

• “The Value of Culture” Revealed in a New BBC Radio Series by Melvyn Bragg | Open Culture Very broad brush, of course, but still worth listening to (downloads) 

• How Tide Detergent Became a Drug Currency -- New York Magazine

• The Self in Self-Help -- New York Magazine

• The #Word of the Year: #Hashtag  chosen by the American Dialect Society--with other contenders.

• Winners of the National Geographic Photo Contest 2012 - In Focus - The Atlantic

Items to Share: 6 January

Education Focus

• The Science of How Old People Learn New Things : The New Yorker"the scientific evidence for a widespread view called the “critical-period effect” [is] far weaker than widely supposed."

• Isaac Asimov on Bill Moyers World of Ideas pt 2 - YouTube From 1988; Asimov foresees how access to computers could personalise learning. Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link

Other Business

• The Beatles of Comedy - David Free - The Atlantic Interesting discussion of Monty Python and whether they could happen now 

• America's Real Criminal Element: Lead (Mother Jones)  "New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. (Kevin Drum)"  [Up-date 8 January: But see also this detailed critical response from Scott Firestone. Thanks to Boing-Boing for the link.] [Further up-date 9 January; Drum responds, constructively.]

• Freakonomics -- An Economist’s Guide to Year-End Charitable Giving  (The "year-end" bit matters more in the US than here, but still sensible advice.)

• Will Gutenberg laugh last? (Rough Type: Nicholas Carr)  "...sales of dedicated e-readers are falling sharply, and suddenly it seems possible that reports of the death of the codex may have been exaggerated. So why might e-books fall short of expectations? Here are some possibilities..."

• Just in case you failed to notice: The world did not end on December 21, 2012 Excellent piece by Peter Berger, including good summary of the original research on cognitive dissonance (more on that here).What really is in your takeaway pizza « Doctor Stu's Blog

Seasonal Stuff

• BBC News - Prof Mary Beard's 'Roman view' of new year

• 25 things you need to know about 2013 (including the date of the invasion of Norway.) (Actually--it's Denmark, not Norway.) Which reminds me--Borgen is back!

On having a regressive 2013...

It sounds more than merely routinely curmudgeonly not to extend bland "best wishes" for the New Year, but let's get real. It's not going to work, for absolutely everyone.

However, the probabilities are clearly in favour of next year not being as bad as last year if 2012 was miserable. But nor will it be as good--if 2012 was brilliant.

The overall trend of the system is regression to the mean. The bad gets better, but the good gets worse (see Kahneman, 2011 ch. 17).

That of course does not preclude spikes. They are the spice which inhibit our inevitable descent into bland entropic goo.

So it goes (Vonnegut, passim) at the level of the system of the universe.

But subsystems can buck the trend (temporarily).

So have a happy new year! bearing in mind that may be at the expense of someone else's miserable one...

Sorry!