“Superlativity, in a word, is not science. It is a discourse, opportunistically taking up a highly selective set of scientific results and ideas and diverting them to the service of a host of wish-fulfillment fantasies that are very old and very familiar, dreams of invulnerability, certainty, immortality, and abundance that rail against the finitude of the human condition.” More at Amor Mundi.
This NY Times story on the current crop of college students and the prevailing sense of entitlement makes me think the phrase “A for Effort” should be forever stricken from the collective consciousness.
A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
[...]
In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.
“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”
I’ve encountered a decent amount of this, but I have to admit that I see decidedly less of it at liberal arts colleges than I do at large universities. My anecdotal analysis would be that at a liberal arts college, the students know they’re there to explore ideas first and foremost, and it seems that the process of college itself is recognized as the goal rather than the obstacle to getting the grade. This isn’t to say it doesn’t happen at liberal arts colleges, or that I don’t see the thoughtful, process-centric students at universities, but it’s been my experience more often than not that the university students seem to believe the default grade is an A unless they mess up, rather than the default being a C unless they excel.
An Amazonian ant has dispensed with sex and developed into an all-female species, researchers have found. The ants reproduce via cloning – the queen ants copy themselves to produce genetically identical daughters… And when they dissected the female insects, they found them to be physically incapable of mating, as an essential part of their reproductive system known as the “mussel organ” had degenerated. Link to article at BBC News. H/T to Supermegamonkey.
I’m teaching 2 new courses in the Fall (and 1 new one in the Spring) and I’m currently examining textbooks for them.
Since my readers (if there are any of you left after my lingering slack) are likely familiar with these topics and texts, I welcome suggestions and feedback in regards to the texts I’m considering. (Most of my classes are non-standard, so I often make custom course-packets, but I’m contemplating using more standard texts this time for a change.)
Philosophy of Mind- Currently considering Rosenthal’s anthology “The Nature of Mind,” and trying to decide on a supplemental text. There aren’t really any other contemporary analytic courses taught here, so I’m trying to navigate between good primary sources and the availability of simple descriptive texts on the theories to make them more accessible to the students.
Topics in Cognitive Science: Our Cyborg Brains – Definitely planning on using Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs, but currently examining Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild, and waiting for 2 other texts to arrive (neither of which I can currently even recall, but both of which looked really promising.) This class is really an examination of neural plasticity and embodiment, as well as the Extended Mind argument from Clark and Chalmers. Totally open to further suggestions for texts.
Lastly, I’m teaching a straightforward Memory and Cognition course in the Spring, but I haven’t taught a standard version of such a class before (currently teaching Experiments in Cognition and Consciousness, but the text is a custom course packet filled with my own reading choices.) This is one of those standard undergraduate psychology courses with too many possible Cognition texts to choose from. I’m really liking Reed’s Cognition and Eysenck’s Fundamentals of Cognition, but the texts for this course have changed so much in recent years that I don’t know what the new standard will be. If you’ve had experience with any of the standard mem and cog texts in the last 5 years, your input is very welcome.
The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.” [...] “Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.” [...] “Anything old coming back, I’m in favor of it,” she said. “More fervor is a good thing.” Link to article in the NY Times.
What an utterly bizarre report. Not for the phantom limb (supernumerary though it is), but for the incredibly strange way the story is reported, as though seeing the neurological correlate on an fMRI is the only reason we can confirm this phenomenon.
After examining the case, the woman’s neurologist, Asaid Khateb of the hospital’s experimental neurophysiology laboratory, called the rare phenomenon credible.
The arm appeared to the woman a few days after suffering a stroke, doctors said.
But this case of what is known as a supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a genuine head-scratcher.
[...]
But when doctors asked her to move her phantom arm, her brain reacted as though the arm really existed and could be moved. In addition, the patient’s visual cortex was also activated, indicating the she actually saw the imaginary limb.
And when she was instructed to scratch her cheek, regions of the brain relating to touch were activated.
In one of John Brockman’s great collections (perhaps “The Next 50 Years? It escapes me), Geoffrey Miller talks about what he calls “Stingy Materialism” – this notion that no phenomenon (particularly experiential) is considered real by us (researchers) until we develop some way to measure it. This is incredibly common in neuroscience: synaesthetes were *psychologically* disturbed but not *physiologically* disturbed, at least until a test was finally devised to examine the experience on a neurological level. The same is true of things like Blindsight and Anosognosia. One of my current classes, “Experiments in Cognition and Consciousness,” has basically found itself returning to this theme again and again ad nauseum. The most exciting things we know about cognition, and its relationship to consciousness, are young, vivid examples of such stingy materialism. It is responsible science not to accept anecdote into the canon, but it’s absurd that we hold the explanatory gap between observation and experience to still be some sort of scientific-line-in-the-sand. I hope that naming and recognizing this stingy materialism will help us see how far we are from anything like a full understanding even our own brains and minds, and how exciting it is to not avoid and explain away, but to work precisely in and among the explanatory gap itself.
“Man did not feel inches or meters, pounds or gallons. He felt heat, He felt cold; He felt heaviness and lightness. He knew hatred and love, pride and despair. You cannot measure these things. You cannot know them. You can only know the things that He did not need to know: dimensions, weights temperatures, gravities. There is no formula for a feeling. There is no conversion factor for an emotion.”
“There must be,” said Frost. “If a thing exists, it is knowable.”
“You are speaking again of measurement. I am talking about a quality of experience. A machine is a Man turned inside-out, because it can describe all the details of a process which a Man cannot, but it cannot experience that process itself as a Man can.”
-Roger Zelazny at Amazon.com
“CHICAGO, ILLINOIS–Paleoanthropologists working in Africa have discovered stone blades more than a half-million years old. That pushes the date of the earliest known blades back a remarkable 150,000 years and raises a question: What human ancestor made them?” Link to article at Science Now.