Actually, the elephant in that story did NOT die from exposure to LSD but simply passed out. It died as a result of the drugs they gave to the animal to wake it up. I can't find the reference but I'm pretty sure the experiment was repeated several years later and, without administering any other drugs, the animal woke up fine after the LSD had been metabolized.
I conduct research on humans and animals and it would be nice if, just once in a while, people would stop fear mongering. The ironic part of all this is that, if you're not doing something for the purposes of gaining an understanding (i.e., research) then, it's considered perfectly fine/legal to lie to people, use coercion, and use restrictive procedures. That sounds completely counter-intuitive to me. Why should we let people/governments do things under conditions that the results of those things either cannot or are unlikely to be well understood and much less described when scientists, working under ideal conditions, are not allowed to do so?
For example, "punishment", the process whereby some behavior is followed by a consequence that produces a decrease in that behavior, is something we experience in nearly every facet in our lives (speeding tickets, getting tazed, fines, reprimands, falling down and getting hurt, touching hot stoves, being prosecuted for committing crimes, children teasing each other, stubbing your toe) yet research on even the most benign forms of punishment is restricted to the point that we know almost nothing about it (especially in comparison to the companion process of reinforcement). Does that make any sense? Why does our culture prevent itself from understanding processes it uses regularly?
Off topic but.. You couldn't be more wrong. Lab animals could not be conditioned in the way behaviorism predicted? Really?
First of all, behaviorism and conditioning are not theories in the sense that nobody sat in a chair, came up with stuff off the top of their head, and then tried to prove it. Rather, they were descriptions of the results of experiments THAT HAD ALREADY BEEN CONDUCTED. Hence, reinforcement? Yea, it works. Punishment? You bet. Stimulus discrimination, extinction, schedule effects.. Yea. The descriptions were also somewhat special because they were related to principles that were general enough to span species (humans, rats, mice, pigeons, dogs, birds, sea lions, dolphins, fish, insects) and responses (language, thinking, level pushing, drug abuse/self-administration, 2 and 3-point shots attempted by players on NCAA basketball team, imprinting by birds, self-injury). Basically, it's much harder to list things that animals and people do that can't be described using behavioral principles than things that can.
Second, behavioral approaches have become the de-facto standard in many areas. Functional analysis, a behavioral technique to determine why people engage in behavior, was written into law (IDEA, the individuals with disabilities and education act). Know anyone with a child who has developmental disabilities? Chances are, their child works or has worked with a behavior analyst. And, as you alluded to, behavioral preparations are widely used by neuropsychologists to study the BRAINS of intact organisms (ironic?)!
If anything, it seems like Chomsky's theories have died. I know people who have graduated from linguistics departments only to then become Board Certified Behavior Analysts and practice behavior analysis because its presents very practical way to assess and teach language to children. The only thing I'm confused about is why you (and many, many others) still think the opposite.
Need citations? Google the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis or the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. There are several other good journals, but these are the best and they're available free online.
It's probably more common that criticism comes from people who have NOT read the source material than from people who have. And, for reasons I do not completely understand, such criticism tends to be believed.
Case in point? In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky admitted to writing his famous criticism of B. F. Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior" BEFORE it had been published and, in fact, based his review on much older material including notes taken by students of lectures presented YEARS before the final version was published. This is evident to anyone who has read both Chomsky's review and Skinner's verbal behavior (further reading: McCorquodale, 1970).
And the impact of Chomsky's admission? Zero... Although, at the time, Chomsky's unfounded review effectively reduced the credibility of an entire field of psychology.
Uhh... Really? So, the American Indians who marched along the trail of tears shouldn't have had any right to complain about it because, at any moment, they could have simply CHOOSEN to stop walking? Just because someone has made a choice, that doesn't necessarily mean they LIKE the thing they've chosen. AT&T may simply be the lesser of two evils.
Most studies on this sort of phenomena have yet to find any good evidence that birds can sense magnetic fields. On the contrary, one good study actually showed that instead of using their "sense" of direction, migratory birds actually followed landmarks like major highways!
The notions of operant versus respondent conditioning have been around for 60 or 70 years now and people still can't tell the difference? Learning is a vacuous concept that you can talk to your grandmother about but science has moved away from it because it doesn't address precisely what is learned or precisely when the learning takes place.
The concepts used and referred to by scientists take years to learn. If it were any other way, it would be possible get Ph.D.'s overnight. Therefore, the percentage of the population that truly understands what you're writing about is likely to be just slightly larger than number of people in your particular field. Of course, that begs the question, "What does it mean to truly understand something?" IANAE (I am not an epistemologist) but I would bet that understanding something is akin to being able to talk about the subject matter in a way that leads to effective action.
This fact is even more pronounced in fields that use terminology found in the popular vocabulary. It's relatively easy for a customer to know that they don't know the difference between MySQL and an Oracle Database (database engineering) and subsequently seek more understanding or query the opinion of an expert, but try convincing a mother that it would be worthwhile for her to learn a little bit more about reinforcement and punishment (behavior analysis).
On the other hand, it would still be worthwhile to try and disseminate the "big picture" findings from your research. Stephen Hawking is someone who is great at this. The people that read books like "A Brief History of Time" probably still can't do quantum mechanics but I would say most of them have indeed learned _something_.
Although this animal could do some fairly impressive things, I often felt she (Dr. Pepperberg) and her colleagues made too much of it. The constellation of things referred to by English speakers as "Language" is far too broad to be especially meaningful when applied to the behavior of a parrot. The behaviors of "speaking" and "listening" are better described as falling along a continuum as opposed to a skill that one either has or not.
And this is fairly important news because, from what I understand, most Alex's success has not been replicated with other birds. Hopefully this will prompt her and/or others to better describe the conditions under which animals (and humans) come to do things we refer to as language as opposed to simply cataloging differences between species which are all too easy to find.
Doesn't that seem like a poor allocation of resources on behalf of the bot net controllers? I mean, how long could a DDOS attack possibly be carried on? A few hours? Maybe a day at most? I can see that, for a retailer, that sort of thing would seriously impact business but if these sites go down for a day, does that really matter?
In addition, implementing a DDOS probably entails some sort of risk. This could be either in terms of having individual machines identified and temporarily disabled or in terms of the risk of getting caught increasing with every illegal act that is committed (although, the risk is probably very small, it's still there).
I bet the Bush Administration's use of executive privilege is really starting to irk Al Qaeda. I mean, it's got to take what, 600 hours of martyrdom training just to get a single mission pulled off these days? Jeeze..
The notion that "the number of subjects" has any bearing on the quality of an experiment or the degree to which the results can be trusted is somewhat off the mark. The better metric is the number of times the effect has been demonstrated. Effects can be demonstrated both across and within subjects. However, the number of times an effect has been demonstrated becomes less important the more we (the scientific community) are familiar with the relevant baseline. You don't have to throw a brick through a window 1000 times (or even 10 times) to convince someone bricks can break windows (in this case, each window is analogous to each participant in an experiment).
However, the general notion that learning and behavioral processes span several species is well established. For example, The Matching Law is an equation that describes the choices organisms can make between two options and has been empirically demonstrated with several species and contexts including rats, pigeons, flocks of pigeons (it's called Ideal Free Distribution in this case), monkeys, children, and basketball player's choices between 2 and 3 points shots.
Slashdot Mirror
The potential implications for Linux (or, open-source operating systems) in the desktop market, as a result of OLPC, have just been made clear to me.
Increased user base
Increased demand for applications and games
Increased demand for supported hardware
It's brilliant!
Actually, the elephant in that story did NOT die from exposure to LSD but simply passed out. It died as a result of the drugs they gave to the animal to wake it up. I can't find the reference but I'm pretty sure the experiment was repeated several years later and, without administering any other drugs, the animal woke up fine after the LSD had been metabolized.
I conduct research on humans and animals and it would be nice if, just once in a while, people would stop fear mongering. The ironic part of all this is that, if you're not doing something for the purposes of gaining an understanding (i.e., research) then, it's considered perfectly fine/legal to lie to people, use coercion, and use restrictive procedures. That sounds completely counter-intuitive to me. Why should we let people/governments do things under conditions that the results of those things either cannot or are unlikely to be well understood and much less described when scientists, working under ideal conditions, are not allowed to do so?
For example, "punishment", the process whereby some behavior is followed by a consequence that produces a decrease in that behavior, is something we experience in nearly every facet in our lives (speeding tickets, getting tazed, fines, reprimands, falling down and getting hurt, touching hot stoves, being prosecuted for committing crimes, children teasing each other, stubbing your toe) yet research on even the most benign forms of punishment is restricted to the point that we know almost nothing about it (especially in comparison to the companion process of reinforcement). Does that make any sense? Why does our culture prevent itself from understanding processes it uses regularly?
Mr. Wizard wasn't interested in "educating" youth, he was trying to build an army for his own jihad!
Off topic but.. You couldn't be more wrong. Lab animals could not be conditioned in the way behaviorism predicted? Really?
First of all, behaviorism and conditioning are not theories in the sense that nobody sat in a chair, came up with stuff off the top of their head, and then tried to prove it. Rather, they were descriptions of the results of experiments THAT HAD ALREADY BEEN CONDUCTED. Hence, reinforcement? Yea, it works. Punishment? You bet. Stimulus discrimination, extinction, schedule effects.. Yea. The descriptions were also somewhat special because they were related to principles that were general enough to span species (humans, rats, mice, pigeons, dogs, birds, sea lions, dolphins, fish, insects) and responses (language, thinking, level pushing, drug abuse/self-administration, 2 and 3-point shots attempted by players on NCAA basketball team, imprinting by birds, self-injury). Basically, it's much harder to list things that animals and people do that can't be described using behavioral principles than things that can.
Second, behavioral approaches have become the de-facto standard in many areas. Functional analysis, a behavioral technique to determine why people engage in behavior, was written into law (IDEA, the individuals with disabilities and education act). Know anyone with a child who has developmental disabilities? Chances are, their child works or has worked with a behavior analyst. And, as you alluded to, behavioral preparations are widely used by neuropsychologists to study the BRAINS of intact organisms (ironic?)!
If anything, it seems like Chomsky's theories have died. I know people who have graduated from linguistics departments only to then become Board Certified Behavior Analysts and practice behavior analysis because its presents very practical way to assess and teach language to children. The only thing I'm confused about is why you (and many, many others) still think the opposite.
Need citations? Google the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis or the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. There are several other good journals, but these are the best and they're available free online.
It's probably more common that criticism comes from people who have NOT read the source material than from people who have. And, for reasons I do not completely understand, such criticism tends to be believed.
Case in point? In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky admitted to writing his famous criticism of B. F. Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior" BEFORE it had been published and, in fact, based his review on much older material including notes taken by students of lectures presented YEARS before the final version was published. This is evident to anyone who has read both Chomsky's review and Skinner's verbal behavior (further reading: McCorquodale, 1970).
And the impact of Chomsky's admission? Zero... Although, at the time, Chomsky's unfounded review effectively reduced the credibility of an entire field of psychology.
The real danger is that this will only help Monsanto increase the number of plants they sell that are unable to produce viable seeds.
Can copyright really be used to limit the conditions under which people can read/view materials that have already been distributed?
Uhh... Really? So, the American Indians who marched along the trail of tears shouldn't have had any right to complain about it because, at any moment, they could have simply CHOOSEN to stop walking? Just because someone has made a choice, that doesn't necessarily mean they LIKE the thing they've chosen. AT&T may simply be the lesser of two evils.
Most studies on this sort of phenomena have yet to find any good evidence that birds can sense magnetic fields. On the contrary, one good study actually showed that instead of using their "sense" of direction, migratory birds actually followed landmarks like major highways!
The notions of operant versus respondent conditioning have been around for 60 or 70 years now and people still can't tell the difference? Learning is a vacuous concept that you can talk to your grandmother about but science has moved away from it because it doesn't address precisely what is learned or precisely when the learning takes place.
The concepts used and referred to by scientists take years to learn. If it were any other way, it would be possible get Ph.D.'s overnight. Therefore, the percentage of the population that truly understands what you're writing about is likely to be just slightly larger than number of people in your particular field. Of course, that begs the question, "What does it mean to truly understand something?" IANAE (I am not an epistemologist) but I would bet that understanding something is akin to being able to talk about the subject matter in a way that leads to effective action.
This fact is even more pronounced in fields that use terminology found in the popular vocabulary. It's relatively easy for a customer to know that they don't know the difference between MySQL and an Oracle Database (database engineering) and subsequently seek more understanding or query the opinion of an expert, but try convincing a mother that it would be worthwhile for her to learn a little bit more about reinforcement and punishment (behavior analysis).
On the other hand, it would still be worthwhile to try and disseminate the "big picture" findings from your research. Stephen Hawking is someone who is great at this. The people that read books like "A Brief History of Time" probably still can't do quantum mechanics but I would say most of them have indeed learned _something_.
Although this animal could do some fairly impressive things, I often felt she (Dr. Pepperberg) and her colleagues made too much of it. The constellation of things referred to by English speakers as "Language" is far too broad to be especially meaningful when applied to the behavior of a parrot. The behaviors of "speaking" and "listening" are better described as falling along a continuum as opposed to a skill that one either has or not.
And this is fairly important news because, from what I understand, most Alex's success has not been replicated with other birds. Hopefully this will prompt her and/or others to better describe the conditions under which animals (and humans) come to do things we refer to as language as opposed to simply cataloging differences between species which are all too easy to find.
Doesn't that seem like a poor allocation of resources on behalf of the bot net controllers? I mean, how long could a DDOS attack possibly be carried on? A few hours? Maybe a day at most? I can see that, for a retailer, that sort of thing would seriously impact business but if these sites go down for a day, does that really matter?
In addition, implementing a DDOS probably entails some sort of risk. This could be either in terms of having individual machines identified and temporarily disabled or in terms of the risk of getting caught increasing with every illegal act that is committed (although, the risk is probably very small, it's still there).
I bet the Bush Administration's use of executive privilege is really starting to irk Al Qaeda. I mean, it's got to take what, 600 hours of martyrdom training just to get a single mission pulled off these days? Jeeze..
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
However, the general notion that learning and behavioral processes span several species is well established. For example, The Matching Law is an equation that describes the choices organisms can make between two options and has been empirically demonstrated with several species and contexts including rats, pigeons, flocks of pigeons (it's called Ideal Free Distribution in this case), monkeys, children, and basketball player's choices between 2 and 3 points shots.