February 2010 Archives

The Ethical Dog~ Scientific American

Every dog owner knows a pooch can learn the house rules--and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness. But our work has suggested that wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups--and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality.

Dark rooms and sunglasses promote deceit and selfishness ~ Not Exactly Rocket Science

The English language is full of metaphors linking moral purity to both physical cleanliness and brightness. We speak of "clean consciences", "pure thoughts" and "dirty thieves". We're suspicious of "shady behaviour" and we use light and darkness to symbolise good and evil. But there is more to these metaphors than we might imagine. The mere scent of a clean-smelling room can take people down a virtuous road, compelling them to choose generosity over greed and charity over apathy. Meanwhile, the darkness of a dimmed room or a pair of sunglasses can compel people towards selfishness and cheating.

Some say learning styles are myth, others say they're magic ~ Washington Post

Here is my summary of the 15-page paper: Learning styles are hogwash. It's not quite that bad. The four authors agree that "people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information." Some of us consider ourselves visual learners. Some of us think we learn best if we use our hands: draw, make models, stack coins. The authors conclude, however, that "at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice."

We might err, but science is self-correcting  -John Krebs - Times Online

My non-scientist friends are beginning to ask me "What's gone wrong with science?" Revelations about melting glaciers and potentially dodgy emails about global warming, the resurfacing of Andrew Wakefield and the MMR scare, and the sacking of the Government's drugs adviser, have created the impression for some people that science is in a mess.

Of course science isn't in a mess, nor has anything changed. But the stories underline two important features of scientists and science...

Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention - The Chronicle of Higher Education

That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently--so the worry goes--students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.

"Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "But there's evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people."