Items to Share; 10 February 13

Education Focus

• Paperwork | Sam Shepherd's Blog --a balanced account.

• Proudly Fraudulent: An Interview With MoMA’s First Poet Laureate, Kenneth Goldsmith (The Awl) "The students that take my class know how to write. I can hone their skills further but instead I choose to challenge them to think in new and different ways. Many of them know how to plagiarize but they always do it on the sly, hoping not to get caught. In my class, they must plagiarize or they will be penalized. They are not allowed to be original or creative. So it becomes a very different game, one in which they're forced to defend choices that they are making about what they're plagiarizing and why. And when you start to dig down, you'll find that those choices are as original and as unique as when they express themselves in more traditional types of writing, but they've never been trained to think about it in this way." 

• Dilbert comic strip for 02/07/2013 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. A different take on 10,000 hours of practice!

Other Business

• Walter Cronkite Imagines the Home of the 21st Century … Back in 1967 (Open Culture) (Videos) Fascinating and quite accurate predictions.

• Apollo Robbins, pickpocket -- mindbending live performance (Boing Boing) This is video of the performer mentioned in a link from my post of 31 December. 

• I Predict A Riot | Neurobonkers (Big Think) "Psychology is historically a field in which replications are rare. Sought after journals with a high impact factor typically refuse to publish replications and until recently, there has been little to no incentive for researchers to conduct research which will not further their careers and likely would not even ever get read. Thus negative findings have vanished from existence while positive findings - which may be the exception rather than the rule, receive all the attention..." 

• EU lead on clinical trials comes out in favour of transparency. Hurrah! – Bad Science Ben Goldacre has good news, on an associated issue.

• Lift (The Morning News) Why, when you’re waiting for a lift (having already pressed the “call lift” button), does someone always arrive after you and insist on re-pressing the button? 

• Stephen T Asma – The evolution of emotion (Aeon magazine) Thoughtful piece on animals and emotion: "The more we learn about the emotions shared by all mammals, the more we must rethink our own human intelligence"

• King Egbert and the Naming of England (History Today) 

• Tractatus Logico-Chocolatus (Evolving Thoughts) Yes--perhaps a specialised taste, early Wittgenstein.

• Websites on Binet, Henri, Janet, & Bourdon! (Advances in the History of Psychology) Just to make a note of.