Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention - The Chronicle Review Imagine that driving across town, you've fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You're so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn't there. By contrast, imagine that you drive across town in a state of mild exhilaration, multitasking on your way to a sales meeting. That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. "Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. Experiments like that one have added fuel to the perpetual debate about whether laptops should be allowed in classrooms. Wait a minute.
The Tragic Triumph Of The MBAs “We’ve seen Mubarak fall,” said Salesforce’s Marc Benioff of the corporate need to focus on social networks at the recent Dreamforce conference. “We’ve seen Khadafy fall. When will the first CEO fall for the same reason?” What a fantastic comparison! Benioff isn’t a bad guy, it was just a dumb thing to say — but it’s stuck in my mind, because Salesforce, cloud-computing’s poster child, is the future, and his seems to be the voice of the zeitgeist. And it seems that whatever survives the ongoing Mountain View bloodbath will be thoroughly monetized. Is this the right thing for Google to do? Nope. I suspect this is pretty common among CEOs and MBAs — but most techies don’t agree at all. Image credit: Paul G, Flickr.
SCHOPENHAUER'S 38 STRATAGEMS, OR 38 WAYS TO WIN AN ARGUMENT Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896. Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent's statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. (abstracted from the book:Numerical Lists You Never Knew or Once Knew and Probably Forget, by: John Boswell and Dan Starer) Groundbreaking Research Methods and Skills for the Human Sciences and Humanities Palo Alto, CA (PRWEB) August 26, 2011 A new book by professors of Transpersonal Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology offers research methods and skills from the field of transpersonal psychology. "Transforming Self and Others Through Research", released this month by SUNY Press, offers transformative approaches to those conducting research across the human sciences and the humanities. As co-author Dr. Rosemarie Anderson explains, “These research approaches can be transformative for researchers, participants, as well as the audience of a project.” In hundreds of empirical studies conducted since the release of their first book, Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences, in 1998, these methods have been tested and integrated with qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method research designs. Anderson and Braud invite scholars to bring multiple ways of knowing and personal resources to their scholarship. About the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Human rights: Homophobia feels like a disease Dear Editor, Why is it that when a man with courage of his convictions like John Cummins speaks his mind, he is really lambasted in the press and on the radio? If a person dares speak up and says that homosexuality is unnatural and an abuse of the natural use of sex, he is subject to all kinds of abuse. Is the truth not allowed any more, or are we all supposed to be politically correct and bow to public pressure? The term homophobic makes us to feel that we are suffering from a disease. I am not proposing that gays be abused, either physically or verbally, but dont try to tell us that its just an alternate lifestyle. Even electricity needs a male and a female plug to connect the circuit. David J. © Langley Advance
Invasion of giant snails has Florida on alert - US news - Environment Florida is used to strange creatures, but the discovery of a non-native animal — a giant snail from East Africa — has got local officials really worried. A search-and-destroy advisory that went out included this bit of history: the last time the giant snails were found in Florida (back in 1966) they had multiplied from three to 18,000 in seven years and cost $1 million to eradicate. The new population of giant African land snails was found in Miami-Dade County, and several dozen technicians were quickly dispatched to search them out. About 1,000 were found Thursday within a one-square-mile radius, the Miami Herald reported. Several hundred were found in one backyard in Coral Gables. The snails were sent to freezers to be frozen to death. Why worry? They also breed like crazy. The 1966 incident was tied to a boy who brought three into Miami as pets. In the new outbreak, officials are looking into a possible connection to a criminal investigation, the Miami Herald reported.
handwriting tips You’ve decided you want to improve your handwriting and you’re probably hoping a fountain pen will do the trick -- maybe a friend told you it would. Maybe you’re just adventurous and you want to try your hand at calligraphy (or you might, once your handwriting improves). Good for you! A fountain pen may make your writing look a bit better, but if your writing looks as if frenzied chickens got loose on the page, chances are this won’t be enough. Most likely, you’ll need to retrain your arm and hand. After coaching handwriting and teaching calligraphy over the years, I’ve learned to see the characteristics of those who’ll be able to pick up the necessary motions quickly from those who’ll have to work a bit harder. Crampy, uneven letters are often the result of drawing the letters with the fingers rather than using the whole arm to write. People who inevitably have trouble with handwriting and calligraphy write with their fingers. It will take time to re-train muscles and learn new habits.
The Danger of Making College Too Career-Focused - Education This fall's crop of college freshmen and their anxious parents are probably already thinking about what major to choose. After all, college is a serious financial investment, and with fears of a double-dip recession looming, picking a major that promises entree to a lucrative and sustainable career—one that allows repaying student loans—seems like a no-brainer. But is the way we're increasingly connecting higher education with careers actually a good idea? Casey Wiley, an English lecturer at Penn State, writes in an op-ed for Inside Higher Education that he recently met with a student who pointedly asked him, “Can I get a job with an English degree?” But that's not why students are heading to school anymore. Even though students have jobs on the brain, Wiley rightly notes that students who major in English don't necessarily end up becoming English teachers, writers, or editors. Can you imagine if Jobs had been pushed into petroleum engineering instead of following his passions?
Eyewitness Testimony Loses Legal Ground in State Supreme Court Is justice now less blind to science? Image courtesy of iStockphoto/spxChrome As science has long demonstrated, eyewitness accounts are frequently riddled with errors. Human memory in general is far from perfect—working less like a video camera than an ever-evolving collage, studies have shown. But in courtrooms across the country eyewitness testimony of alleged crimes have frequently been enough to convince juries to send defendants to jail—even without more reliable forms of evidence. Now, the courts seem to be finally catching up with the science. A recent survey found that some 63 percent of U.S. adults thought that memory passively records events, per the video camera model. Not only can people often miss obvious details in a scene (such as a person in a giant gorilla costume), but they can also be led, with relative ease, to “recall” things that never actually occurred. Also see this 2010 Scientific American MIND arrticle, “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts.”
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide | Guest Blog Today’s lesson from Sherlock Holmes deals with learning to cull and to cultivate knowledge in such a way that your decision process will be optimized for the question at hand, and not get bogged down in irrelevant minutiae – a lesson that is all too relevant in the age of the internet, when we have a constant stream of information at our beck and call. A mind is an attic: keep yours well organized In “A Study in Scarlet,” Dr. Watson expresses surprise that Holmes is ignorant of Copernican theory and the composition of the solar system. Holmes explains that he does his best to forget any information that is not relevant to his existence: “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A cluttered mind prevents organized thought Holmes, of course, is exaggerating. Especially when it comes to decision making, Holmes’s analogy is remarkably apt. Has the internet expanded our attics?
The "End of Work" And The Coming Revolution In Education Are you an ‘educated’ predator? The mad clambering for grades is detrimental to the process of acquiring education. Education – slick, elite, expensive education – for which, I attend classes, take exams and tap a phenomenal fraction of my parent’s hard-earned money. Education – there is no word so grotesquely misunderstood. No idea so ill-expressed. Little does anyone realise that the mad rat-race to score better grades does not ‘educate.’ On the contrary, the cut-throat dynamics of the relative grading system merely give us a taste of the usual rat-racing, throat-cutting, leg-pulling and back-stabbing competition that the corporate culture is characteristic of. Relative grading gives you the grade, but it ingrains in you the idea that your success is tied to another student’s failure. Better grade equals better education? Better grades are universally thought to be reflective of a ‘better educated’ student. Education, however, is not the skill of passing exams or surviving the scars of the corporate world. Faiza Rahman
Logic Puzzles - Difficult Logic Puzzles <p style="font-style:bold; color:red"> Warning: Solutions are currently displayed. To hide and show the solutions as desired, enable javascript on your browser </span></p> 1. A king wants his daughter to marry the smartest of 3 extremely intelligent young princes, and so the king's wise men devised an intelligence test. The princes are gathered into a room and seated, facing one another, and are shown 2 black hats and 3 white hats. The king tells them that the first prince to deduce the color of his hat without removing it or looking at it will marry his daughter. You are one of the princes. Note: You know that your competitors are very intelligent and want nothing more than to marry the princess. Show Hint Show Solution Hint: Based on what you know, why are the other princes unable to solve this puzzle? Solution: White. The king would not select two white hats and one black hat. Therefore the only fair test is for all three princes to be wearing white hats. 2. 100 Gold Coins
Logic Problems - Very Easy Logic Puzzles <p style="font-style:bold; color:red"> Warning: Solutions are currently displayed. To hide and show the solutions as desired, enable javascript on your browser </span></p> 1. The Camels Four tasmanian camels traveling on a very narrow ledge encounter four tasmanian camels coming the other way. As everyone knows, tasmanian camels never go backwards, especially when on a precarious ledge. The camels didn't see each other until there was only exactly one camel's width between the two groups. How can all camels pass, allowing both groups to go on their way, without any camel reversing? Show Hint Show Solution Hint: Use match sticks or coins to simulate the puzzle. Solution: First a camel from one side moves forward, then two camels from the other side move forward, then three camels from the first side move forward etc... etc... 2. Three men in a cafe order a meal the total cost of which is $15. Now, each of the men effectively paid $4, the total paid is therefore $12. Show Solution 3.