Skepticism
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Journal’s Article on ESP Is Expected to Prompt Outrage
The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper , to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn. The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem , an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.
Father Barron weighs in on renown scientist Stephen Hawking's upcoming book release in which he offers his "scientific" view on the existence of a creator. So another prominent British academic has weighed in on the God question. Stephen Hawking, probably the best-known scientist in the world, has said, in a book to be published a week before the Pope’s visit to Britain, that the universe required no Creator. (I’m sure, of course, that there was no “intelligent design” behind that choice of publication date!).
Fr. Robert Barron's Word On Fire - Theology:Steven Hawking & More Tiresome Atheism
Convince Me
What is Convince Me? Many researchers have illustrated the difficulties and challenges that children and adults face with formal and informal reasoning. Convince Me is a "reasoner's workbench" computer program to help students structure, restructure, and assess their knowledge about often controversial situations. Convince Me guides people to cyclically (1) categorize their own propositions as either evidence or hypotheses, (2) indicate the reliability of their various evidence, (3) connect their propositions with both explanatory and contradictory/competitive links, and (4) rate each proposition's believability. After each (1-4) cycle, users can elicit feedback from a connectionist model, called ECHO, to help improve the coherence of their arguments.