I advise caution investing much time/effort to the individual learning styles approach. There is actually extremely little (if any) scientific evidence that learning is enhanced by matching the method of presentation or study to an individual learner's style or preference. See the following scholarly review on the subject:
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2009). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 3, 105-119. [PDF]
I am a cognitive scientist (Ph.D.) who studies the workings of human memory. The number one thing you can do improve your learning is to QUIZ YOURSELF.
Every time you retrieve some information from memory, you STRENGTHEN that information in your memory, making it easier to retrieve again in the future.
So when you study new information, DON'T just re-read it multiple times. Read it, then quiz yourself (try to remember the info on your own), wait a while, quiz yourself some more, quiz yourself again later, etc.
Key terms: "testing effect" or "retrieval practice". For example, here's just one peer-reviewed psychology publication that summarizes relevant scientific research, and some implications for education:
Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J.D. (2006). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 181-210. [PDF]
I am a scientist (i.e., experimental psychologist) who studies human memory. What is described here is simply the difference between a recall task and a recognition task. Roughly: in a recall task, you have to produce information from memory given some cue; in a recognition task, you are given the information and you have to judge whether it was previously encountered. It is extremely well-know and well-documented in the scientific literature that recognition performance is almost always better than recall performance. In everyday terms, you may not be able to recall the name of a childhood friend, but you may be able to recognize that name among a list of alternatives. The difference between recall and recognition performance is just one kind of demonstration that the entirety of information stored in human memory is indeed much greater than what can be accessed at any given time.
This would only work if there was no day/night cycle, or if the day/night cycle was completely meaningless to the entities keeping time. We're on a rotating planet near an active star, so we're stuck with a day/night cycle for now. Plus, we're still biological organisms that must sleep, which, for us, is best done at night (thanks to the way we evolved). Perhaps the elimination of time zones would work and make sense if we became digital entities (i.e., downloaded our minds into non-organic substrates), and/or if we inhabited a chunk of matter (planet or construct) that was tidally locked to a star, completely surrounded by nearby stars, or in deep space.
Interesting idea. But keyboard shortcuts are easily discoverable in Mac OS X. Open any menu, in any application, and keyboard shortcuts are listed right there alongside the commands. Seems like a good solution, but users still need to be trained to understand what the cloverleaf symbol means.
Okay, but there is one obscurity: try holding a menu open and pressing the option key. You may have to try a few different menus before you see the secret.
See this March 10th, 2010 New York Times piece by UCLA Prof. Richard A. Schmidt, who's one of the world's experts on the phenomenon of sudden unintended acceleration: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/opinion/11schmidt.html
Converging lines of evidence indicated that, for a rash of cases in the 1980s, the cause was most likely driver error: your foot gets accidentally placed on the gas instead of the brakes ("noisy neuromuscular processes"). The good news is that if there are regularities to the human error, then designs can be updated to block or reduce that error (e.g., shift lock).
I'm a cognitive scientist and am a member of one of the teams who have been working with the MS SenseCam device (now to be called Vicon Revue), doing memory research. Most of us are academics and clinicians collaborating with Microsoft Research.
This kind of technology (i.e., wearable automated sensors, cameras, etc. that capture massive troves of data about one's experiences) is becoming cheaper, better, and more ubiquitous. But we're still just beginning to explore the many possibilities for research and for clinical or everyday applications. And of course with these possibilities come a host of technical, ethical, and social issues for us to confront.
We just concluded the SenseCam 2009 symposium in Chicago, which featured a lot of really interesting research and discussion, amongst collaborators from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science, clinical psychology, public health, etc.
I actually have an Evoluent VerticalMouse3. I got it because I suffer from tendonitis.
I switch back and forth between the VM3 and a Contour Perfit (optical) mouse because I find that both tend to relieve tension in one area (e.g., the radial nerve) but cause tension in another (e.g., the palm, or the back of the hand).
For the Contour Perfit, there are different sizes and different models for right vs. left-handed use (I use a large right-handed one). They're designed so that your whole hand rests on the mouse, in a "neutral" position (halfway between full flexion and full extension).
I think I like the Contour mouse a little better. I find with the VM3, despite the (very slight) lip at the bottom, my hand still tends to drag on the mousepad.
The scroll wheel, on pretty much any mouse I've tried, is a major culprit for repetitive stress injury. But the function is just too useful to give up!
Probably a bigger problem is the one discovered by rehtonAesoohC (parent poster): fine mouse movements are very difficult to achieve when using your whole arm rather than your fingers. Those larger muscles just lack the precision of our fingers, which is why I often find myself using the Contour mouse inappropriately, with my fingertips touching the mouse and rest of the hand arched up above it rather than laying flat. I've developed a few little tricks to get back some precision, like incorporating a kind of wrist wiggle to move the mouse left and right in a fan-like motion and get the mouse pointer to home in on a specific little point. But that can lead to wrist pain if overdone, and I think especially gives me pain along the radial nerve when using VM3
At any rate, I'm glad to see other recommendations from Slashdotters, and may try a few more mice. Don't overlook the possibility of using several mice and switching between them at times.
I shouldn't fail to say that I'm dismayed and angered to read of fellow humans living under such oppression. In Iran or anywhere.
Beside doing my part to elect US government officials most likely to advance my values, and doing my part to protect and restore the global environment that we all share, I don't know what else I can do to help. But I will continue to try and think of something.
[i'm an American]
One thing that makes America great is our constitutionally protected right to question and criticize our leaders, publicly and vocally. In fact, doing so could even be seen as fulfilling one's civic duty, or being patriotic even!
Of course, there is a lot of variation in quality of discourse. Saying "Bush is a chimp-faced jerkwad" every chance you get is not necessarily equivalent on an intellectual level (or on politeness, if that's something you want to consider) to saying, "the current president's policies and actions are grossly immoral and hypocritical, and they're causing widespread and lasting damage across the world, and they are encroaching on our freedoms, etc."
But both statements are equally protected.
I HATE THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION OF MY COUNTRY. But I love my country.
From the description: "MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort."
Too bad it doesn't seem to be publicly available at all, let alone for Mac OS X or Linux.
Way more complicated than that.
Yes, we have instincts that compel us to value physical beauty (setting aside for the moment other kinds of beauty), and there are certain universals to what is considered beautiful in human women (obvious stuff like absence of open sores, and less obvious like symmetry and waist-to-hip ratio [see the book Mean Genes]). But much of human beauty is subjective and heavily influenced (if not determined) by societal norms. So the issue is not whether both men and women value physical beauty (they do), but what kind of physical beauty is being put forth as valuable, and whetehr a focus on that kind of beauty alone has a detrimental effect on the attitudes of both men and women toward women.
Plus, your argument (that because many popular magazines feature pictures of only certain types of women this means that women value that too) is not logically valid. Economics is driving what's on the magazine, and perhaps there are a subset of women who buy the magazines and like the pictures and spend a lot of money, but a large group of other women don't. Or perhaps women buy the magazines for other reasons (informative content) and simply tolerate the images.
Finally, even if many women do have the attitude that the pictures on the magazines are the ideal of female beauty, does that mean it's all okay? No, not necessarily. Perhaps their attitudes have been influenced by the unrealistic hyper-sexual images that have appealed to men and thus been prevalent in our society because they've made a lot of money. These attitudes could lead many women to suffer lowered self esteem, etc, and many men to devalue many women who don't fit a specific image. None of this would necessarily be concsious, and could interact in any number of ways with considerations of non-physical beauty (the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive). The shifting attitudes would also feed back into a cyclical "confirmation" of the status quo in norms about physical beauty.
Anyway, I'm not saying any of this is necessarily the case, or anything as blunt as "men bad/good, beauty always subjective/objective, women always bad/good, sexualized female images always badd/good." I'm just saying that these are complicated issues that must be considered carefully along with human evolutionary heritage, economics, social psychology, and morality (among other things).
I look forward to reading the article when the server comes back to life.
Back in 2001, when I was Co-President of the UCLA AstroBiology Society, we were planning a very large event and inquired as to whether Douglas Adams might be interested in being the headlining speaker. He was very interested, and even willing to appear at a much discounted rate! Then, alas...
We erected a tribute page on our website in his honor:
Two years later, we finally ran our Big Event, with Bill Nye the Science Guy and Dr. Jill Tarter of SETI fame. We opened with a dedication to Adams. Here are pictures from the event:
Bill Nye, Jill Tarter, & Astrobiology at UCLA
on
The Science Guy Returns
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Back when I was co-president of the UCLA AstroBiology Society, I organized a big event for which Bill Nye was the headliner! He was great: he gave a custom-tailored talk to an audience of about 500, even though he'd gotten food poisoning in Indiana the day before! Here are pics from the event:
http://homepage.mac.com/uniace/PhotoAlbum21.html
I've still got his voice on my answering machine! It'll be great to see him back on TV.
The other speaker at the event was Dr. Jill Tarter, Director of Research at SETI. Jodie Foster's Character in the movie, Contact, was based on Dr. Tarter. She was also a great speaker and cool to work with.
I used an old busted monitor, keyboard, motherboard, and various cards to create a piece of art for an A.I. class I took at UCLA. The art represented the dynamics between human and machine and between an intelligent system and the outside world, not to mention dynamics within the system. It was featured at an Art of Science exhibit in 2002, and a photo of it even made the front page of the Daily Bruin newspaper (doesn't show up in the online archives, but I've got the print version still). Anyway, there are some pictures of it here.
Also, I use heat sinks as handy desktop business card holders.
What would be really nice is to have the full texts of articles available P2P. That's the advantage of using centralized databases from subscribing locations (like universities): you can sometimes access full text for newer articles with just one click. Swapping full texts would be tremendously useful (and would keep us lazy scientists from having to actually get up and go to the library).
Yeah yeah, I'm sure there are copyright issues... but doesn't fair use apply somehow? I'm a psychology research assistant at a major university, and at weekly lab meetings we often send around articles by email for everyone to read and then discuss, and I've never even really thought about copyright of them until now. Isn't open sharing of knowledge at the heart of the scientific endeavor?
Oh, and also: it would be awesome if user comments could be added to each citation. Like: "this was an influential paper that opened new directions for research on human memory," etc. Of course, you can also get a ROUGH idea of that kind of thing by how many times a paper's been cited by other papers, as someone else already said.
A Cognitive Approach to Computers for Education
on
The Flickering Mind
·
· Score: 1
I'm currently working on a research project in the UCLA Psychology Department (funded by the U.S. Department of Education) to investigate whether important findings on how learning and memory work in humans can be extended from simple cognitive experiments in the lab to actual educational practices with real educational material.
One example: it's been found in the laboratory that when two similar tasks or pieces of info need to be learned (e.g. A and B), that interleaving study/practice of them (e.g. ABBABAABABA) results in better longterm learning than blocking (e.g. AAAABBBB), even though interleaving appears to slow down the learning process. Another example is that it's better for longterm learning to have learners try to generate (come up with on their own) a piece of previously seen info, rather than simply re-reading it, even though generation is harder and, again, may appear to impair learning at first.
This kind of research, with a strong foundation in cognitive psychology, could be extremely important for all kinds of education. But specifically, we're using some web-based educational software as a testbed for this. Computers may make implementing something like interleaving or generation a lot easier to implement in real educational contexts. If we can use computers to harness the power that knowledge of the human mind gives us, then they can be terrific learning tools. Without using that knowledge, computers could easily do as much harm as good.
Dr. Phil Agre, UCLA Professor of Information Studies, has an entire page dedicated to the topic of cheap, high quality pens. Highly recommend checking it out:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/pens.html
Slashdot Mirror
I advise caution investing much time/effort to the individual learning styles approach. There is actually extremely little (if any) scientific evidence that learning is enhanced by matching the method of presentation or study to an individual learner's style or preference. See the following scholarly review on the subject: Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2009). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 3, 105-119. [PDF]
I am a cognitive scientist (Ph.D.) who studies the workings of human memory. The number one thing you can do improve your learning is to QUIZ YOURSELF.
Every time you retrieve some information from memory, you STRENGTHEN that information in your memory, making it easier to retrieve again in the future. So when you study new information, DON'T just re-read it multiple times. Read it, then quiz yourself (try to remember the info on your own), wait a while, quiz yourself some more, quiz yourself again later, etc.
Key terms: "testing effect" or "retrieval practice". For example, here's just one peer-reviewed psychology publication that summarizes relevant scientific research, and some implications for education: Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J.D. (2006). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 181-210. [PDF]
I am a scientist (i.e., experimental psychologist) who studies human memory. What is described here is simply the difference between a recall task and a recognition task. Roughly: in a recall task, you have to produce information from memory given some cue; in a recognition task, you are given the information and you have to judge whether it was previously encountered. It is extremely well-know and well-documented in the scientific literature that recognition performance is almost always better than recall performance. In everyday terms, you may not be able to recall the name of a childhood friend, but you may be able to recognize that name among a list of alternatives. The difference between recall and recognition performance is just one kind of demonstration that the entirety of information stored in human memory is indeed much greater than what can be accessed at any given time.
This would only work if there was no day/night cycle, or if the day/night cycle was completely meaningless to the entities keeping time. We're on a rotating planet near an active star, so we're stuck with a day/night cycle for now. Plus, we're still biological organisms that must sleep, which, for us, is best done at night (thanks to the way we evolved). Perhaps the elimination of time zones would work and make sense if we became digital entities (i.e., downloaded our minds into non-organic substrates), and/or if we inhabited a chunk of matter (planet or construct) that was tidally locked to a star, completely surrounded by nearby stars, or in deep space.
Interesting idea. But keyboard shortcuts are easily discoverable in Mac OS X. Open any menu, in any application, and keyboard shortcuts are listed right there alongside the commands. Seems like a good solution, but users still need to be trained to understand what the cloverleaf symbol means.
Okay, but there is one obscurity: try holding a menu open and pressing the option key. You may have to try a few different menus before you see the secret.
One would be well advised to avoid accepting favors from the Fungi from Yuggoth.
Geocaching provides family-friendly real-life outdoor treasure hunts, and only requires a device with GPS, which most smart phones have.
See this March 10th, 2010 New York Times piece by UCLA Prof. Richard A. Schmidt, who's one of the world's experts on the phenomenon of sudden unintended acceleration: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/opinion/11schmidt.html Converging lines of evidence indicated that, for a rash of cases in the 1980s, the cause was most likely driver error: your foot gets accidentally placed on the gas instead of the brakes ("noisy neuromuscular processes"). The good news is that if there are regularities to the human error, then designs can be updated to block or reduce that error (e.g., shift lock).
I'm a cognitive scientist and am a member of one of the teams who have been working with the MS SenseCam device (now to be called Vicon Revue), doing memory research. Most of us are academics and clinicians collaborating with Microsoft Research.
This kind of technology (i.e., wearable automated sensors, cameras, etc. that capture massive troves of data about one's experiences) is becoming cheaper, better, and more ubiquitous. But we're still just beginning to explore the many possibilities for research and for clinical or everyday applications. And of course with these possibilities come a host of technical, ethical, and social issues for us to confront.
We just concluded the SenseCam 2009 symposium in Chicago, which featured a lot of really interesting research and discussion, amongst collaborators from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science, clinical psychology, public health, etc.
I actually have an Evoluent VerticalMouse3. I got it because I suffer from tendonitis.
I switch back and forth between the VM3 and a Contour Perfit (optical) mouse because I find that both tend to relieve tension in one area (e.g., the radial nerve) but cause tension in another (e.g., the palm, or the back of the hand).
For the Contour Perfit, there are different sizes and different models for right vs. left-handed use (I use a large right-handed one). They're designed so that your whole hand rests on the mouse, in a "neutral" position (halfway between full flexion and full extension).
I think I like the Contour mouse a little better. I find with the VM3, despite the (very slight) lip at the bottom, my hand still tends to drag on the mousepad.
The scroll wheel, on pretty much any mouse I've tried, is a major culprit for repetitive stress injury. But the function is just too useful to give up!
Probably a bigger problem is the one discovered by rehtonAesoohC (parent poster): fine mouse movements are very difficult to achieve when using your whole arm rather than your fingers. Those larger muscles just lack the precision of our fingers, which is why I often find myself using the Contour mouse inappropriately, with my fingertips touching the mouse and rest of the hand arched up above it rather than laying flat. I've developed a few little tricks to get back some precision, like incorporating a kind of wrist wiggle to move the mouse left and right in a fan-like motion and get the mouse pointer to home in on a specific little point. But that can lead to wrist pain if overdone, and I think especially gives me pain along the radial nerve when using VM3
At any rate, I'm glad to see other recommendations from Slashdotters, and may try a few more mice. Don't overlook the possibility of using several mice and switching between them at times.
I shouldn't fail to say that I'm dismayed and angered to read of fellow humans living under such oppression. In Iran or anywhere.
Beside doing my part to elect US government officials most likely to advance my values, and doing my part to protect and restore the global environment that we all share, I don't know what else I can do to help. But I will continue to try and think of something.
[i'm an American] One thing that makes America great is our constitutionally protected right to question and criticize our leaders, publicly and vocally. In fact, doing so could even be seen as fulfilling one's civic duty, or being patriotic even! Of course, there is a lot of variation in quality of discourse. Saying "Bush is a chimp-faced jerkwad" every chance you get is not necessarily equivalent on an intellectual level (or on politeness, if that's something you want to consider) to saying, "the current president's policies and actions are grossly immoral and hypocritical, and they're causing widespread and lasting damage across the world, and they are encroaching on our freedoms, etc." But both statements are equally protected. I HATE THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION OF MY COUNTRY. But I love my country.
If this is the kind of thesis that involves doing actual research, wouldn't you want to collect data using RANDOM SAMPLING?
Check out the My Life Bits project.
From the description: "MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort."
Too bad it doesn't seem to be publicly available at all, let alone for Mac OS X or Linux.
Yes, we have instincts that compel us to value physical beauty (setting aside for the moment other kinds of beauty), and there are certain universals to what is considered beautiful in human women (obvious stuff like absence of open sores, and less obvious like symmetry and waist-to-hip ratio [see the book Mean Genes]). But much of human beauty is subjective and heavily influenced (if not determined) by societal norms. So the issue is not whether both men and women value physical beauty (they do), but what kind of physical beauty is being put forth as valuable, and whetehr a focus on that kind of beauty alone has a detrimental effect on the attitudes of both men and women toward women.
Plus, your argument (that because many popular magazines feature pictures of only certain types of women this means that women value that too) is not logically valid. Economics is driving what's on the magazine, and perhaps there are a subset of women who buy the magazines and like the pictures and spend a lot of money, but a large group of other women don't. Or perhaps women buy the magazines for other reasons (informative content) and simply tolerate the images.
Finally, even if many women do have the attitude that the pictures on the magazines are the ideal of female beauty, does that mean it's all okay? No, not necessarily. Perhaps their attitudes have been influenced by the unrealistic hyper-sexual images that have appealed to men and thus been prevalent in our society because they've made a lot of money. These attitudes could lead many women to suffer lowered self esteem, etc, and many men to devalue many women who don't fit a specific image. None of this would necessarily be concsious, and could interact in any number of ways with considerations of non-physical beauty (the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive). The shifting attitudes would also feed back into a cyclical "confirmation" of the status quo in norms about physical beauty.
Anyway, I'm not saying any of this is necessarily the case, or anything as blunt as "men bad/good, beauty always subjective/objective, women always bad/good, sexualized female images always badd/good." I'm just saying that these are complicated issues that must be considered carefully along with human evolutionary heritage, economics, social psychology, and morality (among other things).
I look forward to reading the article when the server comes back to life.
We erected a tribute page on our website in his honor:
http://www.studentgroups.ucla.edu/abs/douglasadams /
Two years later, we finally ran our Big Event, with Bill Nye the Science Guy and Dr. Jill Tarter of SETI fame. We opened with a dedication to Adams. Here are pictures from the event:
http://homepage.mac.com/uniace/PhotoAlbum21.html
I've still got his voice on my answering machine! It'll be great to see him back on TV.
The other speaker at the event was Dr. Jill Tarter, Director of Research at SETI. Jodie Foster's Character in the movie, Contact, was based on Dr. Tarter. She was also a great speaker and cool to work with.
Local Los Angeles radio station KCRW does podcasting now, and they've got some great in-house shows, like "Left, Right, and Center," and "To the Point with Warren Olney."
Also, I use heat sinks as handy desktop business card holders.
What would be really nice is to have the full texts of articles available P2P. That's the advantage of using centralized databases from subscribing locations (like universities): you can sometimes access full text for newer articles with just one click. Swapping full texts would be tremendously useful (and would keep us lazy scientists from having to actually get up and go to the library). Yeah yeah, I'm sure there are copyright issues... but doesn't fair use apply somehow? I'm a psychology research assistant at a major university, and at weekly lab meetings we often send around articles by email for everyone to read and then discuss, and I've never even really thought about copyright of them until now. Isn't open sharing of knowledge at the heart of the scientific endeavor? Oh, and also: it would be awesome if user comments could be added to each citation. Like: "this was an influential paper that opened new directions for research on human memory," etc. Of course, you can also get a ROUGH idea of that kind of thing by how many times a paper's been cited by other papers, as someone else already said.
One example: it's been found in the laboratory that when two similar tasks or pieces of info need to be learned (e.g. A and B), that interleaving study/practice of them (e.g. ABBABAABABA) results in better longterm learning than blocking (e.g. AAAABBBB), even though interleaving appears to slow down the learning process. Another example is that it's better for longterm learning to have learners try to generate (come up with on their own) a piece of previously seen info, rather than simply re-reading it, even though generation is harder and, again, may appear to impair learning at first.
This kind of research, with a strong foundation in cognitive psychology, could be extremely important for all kinds of education. But specifically, we're using some web-based educational software as a testbed for this. Computers may make implementing something like interleaving or generation a lot easier to implement in real educational contexts. If we can use computers to harness the power that knowledge of the human mind gives us, then they can be terrific learning tools. Without using that knowledge, computers could easily do as much harm as good.
Here's our project website: http://www.psych.ucla.edu/iddeas/
(There has also been a lot of research on 'multimedia' and learning; see studies by Rich Mayer at UC Santa Barbara)
Dr. Phil Agre, UCLA Professor of Information Studies, has an entire page dedicated to the topic of cheap, high quality pens. Highly recommend checking it out: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/pens.html