August 2010 Archives

Not Telling Them Straight

By webmaster on August 26, 2010 1:02 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Chilean officials dropping wait-time news gently to 33 trapped miners - CNN.com

As Chile labors carefully to rescue 33 trapped miners, the nation is subtly working to buoy their hopes and psychological equilibrium by not telling them straight out just how long it could take to free them from the bottom of a dark and craggy shaft...

Authorities believe it would be too much of a psychological blow to tell the miners that experts estimate it could take three to four months to drill the men out.

Wipeout

By webmaster on August 25, 2010 6:00 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Capitalism Has Made Society Kinder

By webmaster on August 21, 2010 3:11 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Capitalism has made society 'kinder'~ National Post

Social scientists -- and economists in particular -- have long been baffled with the way people in large societies are so trusting and fair in dealings with strangers. Many academics have argued it is a throwback to a time when humans were hunter-gatherers.

Mr. Henrich and his colleagues say their findings indicate playing fair with strangers is a behaviour that was favoured as the size of societies and populations grew.

The emergence and growth of markets allowed for the exchange of goods, skills and knowledge and enabled large complex societies to emerge and function, Mr. Henrich says, noting that humans in large societies are not nearly as selfish as some would suggest.

Ewwwwwwwww!

By webmaster on August 16, 2010 3:40 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Ewwwwwwwww! - The Boston Globe

Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn't return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

Today, psychologists and philosophers are piecing these findings together into a theory of disgust's moral role and the evolutionary forces that determined it: Just as our teeth and tongue first evolved to process food, then were enlisted for complex communication, disgust first arose as an emotional response to ensure that our ancestors steered clear of rancid meat and contagion. But over time, that response was co-opted by the social brain to help police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Today, some psychologists argue, we recoil at the wrong just as we do at the rancid, and when someone says that a politician's chronic dishonesty makes her sick, she is feeling the same revulsion she might get from a brimming plate of cockroaches.

Digital Cheating

By Kerri on August 9, 2010 11:20 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age ~ Trip Gabriel

The New York Times - Aug. 1st 2010

In this article, Trip Gabriel explores the problem of plagiarism in the digital age. Not only is plagiarism easier for students to commit online, but Gabriel shows that the idea of authorship is becoming more obscure as today's students view text as information for anyone to take. Are students legitimately out of touch with the concept of authorship and intellectual property, or are they just lazy and unprepared for college?       

Spend Less and Find Happiness

By webmaster on August 9, 2010 8:13 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness - NYTimes.com

Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

Her mother called her crazy.

Philosophy and Faith

By webmaster on August 2, 2010 7:45 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Philosophy and Faith - NYTimes.com

At this point, the class perks up again as I lay out versions of the famous arguments for the existence of God, and my students begin to think that they're about to get what their parents have paid for at a great Catholic university: some rigorous intellectual support for their faith. 

Soon enough, however, things again fall apart, since our best efforts to construct arguments along the traditional lines face successive difficulties.  The students realize that I'm not going to be able to give them a convincing proof, and I let them in on the dirty secret: philosophers have never been able to find arguments that settle the question of God's existence or any  of the other "big questions" we've been discussing for 2500 years.

Courage and Honesty

By webmaster on August 1, 2010 7:49 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

"None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear." 

Bertrand Russell

Technology Holdouts

By webmaster on August 1, 2010 2:05 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Every semester a lot of professors' lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods. 

hat frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.

If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, 'I've been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I'm going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,' you'd be rightly incensed," he told me recently. "Yet there are a lot of faculty who say with a straight face, 'I don't need to change my teaching,' as if nothing has been learned about teaching since they had been prepared to do it--if they've ever been prepared to."
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