Textbooks

I don’t use traditional textbooks in most of my classes. I try really hard to be sensitive to the fact that textbooks are obscenely expensive, and work around it with chapters and journal articles compiled in various ways.

This semester, I’m teaching a really generic psychology course, with a $95 textbook. I really want to supplement it with a software package of experiments, which costs an additional $42. The software cannot be sold back at all (and in fact, you can buy a registration code and get all of the software and the documentation entirely online). This seems annoying expensive for something that I’m still not even sure how I’ll integrate into the course.

If anyone is still reading here, I’m interested in perspectives from both students and professors on how to deal with not only the cost of textbooks, but the software that cannot be resold. Do you use anything like this in your classroom? How do you feel about it? Is the hands-on learning worth the price of admission?

Origin of Species at 150: A Celebratory Conference

150 Years After Origin: Biological, Historical, and Philosophical Perspectives
Victoria College, University of Toronto, November 21-24, 2009

Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “In July [1837] I opened my first notebook for facts in relation to the Origin of Species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for the next twenty years.” In 1842, he wrote a “very brief abstract” of his theory (35 pages), which in the summer of 1844 he expanded to 230 pages. Beginning in September 1858, after receiving an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” which outlined the central mechanism of evolution on which Darwin had been working, he began work on completing the manuscript of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray, the publisher, launched the book on November 24, 1859 by releasing 1,250 copies. The impact of The Origin of Species has equalled the impact of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It is the unifying theoretical framework for all modern biology.

November 24, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin and The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the Department of Philosophy at University of Toronto are mounting a Gala Celebratory Conference. The conference will culminate in a gala dinner on November 24 at which participants will toast the tremendous achievement of Charles Robert Darwin.

Five multi-disciplinary symposia have been organized. For each symposium, the panel consists of a biologist, a historian of biology and a philosopher of biology.

The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology is located on the elegant, historic Victoria University campus (one of the University of Toronto’s federated universities) and the conference will be held in that location.

Say hello if you’re in the area!

John Scalzi continues to be brilliant

This one is worthy of a post in the Big Important Column of Things You Really Ought to Take Notice Of.

Scalzi succinctly and beautifully suggests a course of action for the SF Boys Club folk:

At this late date, when one of these quailing wonders appears, stuttering petulantly that women are unfit to touch the genre he’s already claimed with his smudgy, sticky fingerprints, the thing to do is not to solemnly intone about how far science fiction has yet to go. Science fiction does have a distance to go, but these fellows aren’t interested in taking the journey, and I don’t want to have to rideshare with them anyway. So the thing to do is to point and laugh.

There are few things I love more than a wonderful writer who, when exposed on a day-to-day basis, continues to be brilliant. When I read columns or blogs by authors whose books I otherwise adored only to learn they’re backwards, close-minded fools, their books become tainted and unreadable. Scalzi’s books take on an aura of betterness when I read his blog.

Link to Whatever.

Absurdist Literature is good for the brain

In news that is sure to annoy those “who needs the humanities or liberal arts” types, it unsurprisingly turns out that absurd literature does wonderful things to the brain.

Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What’s more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.
[...]
This suggests “the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities” are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.
[...]
To Prolux and Heine, these finds suggest we have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what they call “meaning frameworks.” Any threat to this process will “activate a meaning-maintenance motivation that may call upon any other available associations to restore a sense of meaning,” they write.

Of course, this “meaning frameworks” talk calls to mind Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s work on conceptual schemas and metaphor theory for me, but this particular understanding of frames can be found in most disciplines within cognitive science. Claims about the existence of conceptual schemas seem relatively uncontroversial at this point, but the fact that non-sequiturs activate pattern-seeking schemas is, while completely reasonable as a hypothesis, new and exciting to see come through in the data.

Link to article. (H/T to Nuclear Dwight on twitter.)

Mixed Messages in the NY Times

This article in the NY times was sent to me by a colleague in the Computer Science department yesterday. It makes me want to pull my hair out and shove it down the throats of either the reporter, or maybe Ray Kurzweil.

It has a sensationalized headline “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man” (I suppose us women are totally safe, although the article is silent on that matter…)

While trying to scare us into believing the Robot Apocalypse is RIGHT! AROUND! THE CORNER! the author also writes:

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

Oh, gee, you think? Look, people have been saying this for centuries. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with automation. Samuel Butler, in 1863, wrote “Darwin Among the Machines” to basically argue that if you can’t imagine life without your automation right now, we’ve already lost, and are already on an inevitable slide into machine domination over humankind. This argument goes back further, but Butler gives a great “inevitable doomsday” reading of the situation.

Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

So, the current president of AAAI, a professional organization I’ve belonged to for the last 11 years (although it’s possible my membership has lapsed since I haven’t gotten an AI Magazine to laugh at in the mail lately) is happily jumping on the singularity nonsense bandwagon. Depressing enough, but then we get:

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

So he isn’t ignorant of the fact that this is the age-old doomsday-cult business, but somehow he still thinks we need to take it seriously?

Members of my field (leading members, in title at least) need to take their collective heads out of their collective asses and get back to work. I’m way too young to be this disillusioned over my work and my passions already.

Link to the NY Times article, if you’ve got a stronger stomach or less stake in this academic community than I do.

Ok, Listen Up

Ok, listen up, because I don’t say things like this lightly. Sometimes, people wonder what drives my love of Warren Ellis. I can’t always point to a single work of his that really illustrates why I love him. Sure, Transmetropolitan changed comics (for me, and almost certainly for others) at the time. Sure, he’s continued to write brilliant comics, including the on-going, weekly, free, online comic Freakangels. He’s also written quite a nice little book called Crooked Little Vein, that is more enjoyable if you already know the way Ellis’ head works (which isn’t something I recommend to those with weak constitutions).

But anyway, listen up.

Ellis has been writing a column (“Do Anything”) for a new comics site called Bleeding Cool recently. It’s been taking me awhile to read them all, because I can’t really read more than one a day (in theory. In reality, I’m getting through 1 every 3 or 4 days). I need to let the language roll around in my brain and choose which synapses to rest in. I decided at the end of the first one that these columns were activating the Hunter S. Thompson neural pathways in my brain, which have been atrophying since last I read HST’s ESPN columns (my only and ever ESPN experiences) and I still think that’s a fair description.

In other words? Warren Ellis is writing a column for Bleedingcool.com, and you should be reading it.

Meet Phineas Gage

The wonderful Neurophilosophy Blog has a piece on Phineas Gage today. The interesting part? A newly discovered photo of Gage holding the spike that went through his head and made him history’s most famous jerk.

As mentioned over there, I think this is the only known photograph of Gage. There are many images floating around of his skull with the spike going through it, but as far as I know, they’re all recreations (although some were done during his life, I believe).

Slow Site

I apologize for the strange slowness here lately (the site itself, not my usual snail-paced posting.) I’ve been planning an overhaul for a year, but I’m barely finding time to breathe, so let’s none of us hold our breath. Hopefully things won’t get any slower before I get around to fixing them.

Merleau-Ponty feels SO vindicated

I wish this study had been done 2 years earlier so I could’ve used it in my dissertation (shut up, Joshua):

Tools are ‘temporary body parts’

The brain represents tools as extensions to the body, according to researchers writing in Current Biology.
The research seems to confirm a century-old hypothesis that the brain models tools as parts of the body.

“There is a great debate in neuroscience about the representation of the body and representation of space,” said Lucilla Cardinali of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) in France.

“There are a lot of papers about the effects of tool use, but they all focus on space – none investigated the effect on our own body,” she told BBC News.

H/T to a recently-graduated student. Link to BBC article.

Oh, Philosophers of Mind…

Who teaches from Rosenthal’s “The Nature of Mind” and who uses Chalmers’ “Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings” instead? Why do they have to be so similar without either one being complete? Textbook decisions are a royal pain.

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