[222001780010] |<title>A rash of scientific plagiarism?</title>
[222001780020] |Nature reports that Harold Garner of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas <a>has been scouring the medical literature</a> using an automated text-matching software package to catch plagiarized articles. 
[222001780030] |A surprising number have been found.
[222001780040] |181 papers have been classified as duplicates, sharing 85% of their text, on average, with a previous paper.
[222001780050] |One quarter of these are nearly 100% identical to a previous publication. 
[222001780060] |While it is troubling that anybody would be so brazen, the fact that they have gotten away with it so far says something: there are a lot of journals.
[222001780070] |And a lot of papers.
[222001780080] |For a plagiarist to be successful, it must be the case that neither the editor nor any of the referees have read the original article -- this despite the fact that referees are typically chosen because they are experts in the field the article addresses. 
[222001780090] |That, I think, is the big news: that it is possible to plagiarize so blatantly. 
[222001780100] |Incidentally, the Nature news brief suggests that the confirmed plagiarism is usually carried out in obscure journals.
[222001780110] |This means that the plagiarists are gaining relatively little for their effort, and the original authors are losing little. 
[222001780120] |That said 
[222001780130] |Garner's project has apparently identified 75,000 abstracts that seem highly similar.
[222001780140] |It's hard to tell what that means, so we'll have to wait for the full report. 
[222001780150] |An abstract is about 200 words long.
[222001780160] |PsychInfo currently lists 10,098 which contain the phrase "working memory."
[222001780170] |One would assume that, even if all of them are examples of independent work, many are highly similar just by random chance.
[222001780180] |So I hope to find out more about how "highly similar" is being operationalized in this project. 
[222001780190] |While I suspect that plagiarism is not a huge problem, I still think it is fantastic that people are attacking it with these modern tools.
[222001780200] |I think we will be seeing a lot more of this type of work.
[222001780210] |(Actually, come to think of it, a professor I had in 2002 actually used an automated plagiarism-catching software program to screen student homework, so this has been around for a while.)
[222001790010] |<title>As ice melts, oceanography freezes</title>
[222001790020] |<a>Nature </a>reports that the US academic oceanographic fleet is <a>scaling back operations</a> due to a combination of budget freezes and rising fuel costs.
[222001790030] |This means that at least one of its 23 ships will sit out 2009, and two others will take extended holidays. 
[222001790040] |Even so, more cuts will probably necessary. 
[222001790050] |This is of course on top of the <a>budgetary crisis</a> at one of the USA's premier physics facitilities, Fermi Lab.
[222001800010] |<title>Iranian politician moonlights as scientific plagiarist</title>
[222001800020] |<a>It appears that </a>one of the plagiarists caught by <a>Harold Garner's Deja Vu web database</a>, "author" of a paper, 85% of which was stitched together from five papers by other researchers, is Massoumeh Ebtekar, former spokeswoman for the militant students that held 52 Americans hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration, former vice-president under Mohammad Khatami, and current member of the Tehran City Council. 
[222001800030] |Nature, my source for this news, reports that she has blamed this on the student who helped her with the manuscript.
[222001800040] |This would seem to indicate that the student wrote most or all of the paper, despite not being listed as an author...which is a different kid of plagiarism, if one more widely accepted in academia.
[222001820010] |<title>Human behavior on display in the subway</title>
[222001820020] |Riding <a>Boston's T</a> through Cambridge yesterday, I was reminded of <a>why I love this town</a>.
[222001820030] |You can learn a lot about a city riding its public transportation (and if the city doesn't have public transportation, then you have learned something, too).
[222001820040] |In Russia, for instance, people stare coldly off into space.
[222001820050] |The blank look can appear hostile to those not accustomed to it, but it's really more representative of how Russians carry themselves in public than representative of what Russians are like more generally (some of the warmest people I know are Russian.
[222001820060] |They just don't display it on the train).
[222001820070] |To the extent that people do anything while on the train, they mostly do crossword puzzles (at least in St. Petersburg, where I've spent most of my time).
[222001820080] |In Taiwan, reading is rampant.
[222001820090] |You can see this outside of the subway as well, since there are bookstores everywhere, and they are very popular.
[222001820100] |This made me feel more at home (I almost always read on the train) than in business-minded Hong Kong, where reading was much less common.
[222001820110] |Hong Kong is one of my favorite cities, but its decidedly short on bookstores.
[222001820120] |This brings me back to my T ride through Cambridge yesterday.
[222001820130] |The person sitting next to me was reading what was clearly a language textbook, but I couldn't recognize the writing system.
[222001820140] |It looked vaguely Asian, but I know enough of Japanese, Chinese and Korean to know it wasn't one of those.
[222001820150] |Eventually, he closed the book and I saw it was a an <a>Akkadian</a> textbook.
[222001820160] |Akkadian, incidentally, hasn't been spoken in about two thousand years.
[222001820170] |That is Cambridge -- and Boston more generally.
[222001820180] |Many of the people on the train are grading papers, reading scientific articles or studying a language.
[222001820190] |It's very much a town of academics.
[222001820200] |(A large percentage of the metro riders also wear Red Sox gear.
[222001820210] |The two populations are not mutually exclusive.)
[222001830010] |<title>Become a Phrase Detective: A new, massive Internet-based language project</title>
[222001830020] |A typical speech or text does not consist of a random set of unrelated sentences.
[222001830030] |Generally, the author (or speaker) starts talking about one thing and continues talking about it for a while.
[222001830040] |While this tends to be true, there is typically nothing in the text that guarantees it: 
[222001830050] |This is my brother John.
[222001830060] |He is very tall.
[222001830070] |He graduated from high school last year.
[222001830080] |We usually assume this is a story about a single person, who is tall, a recent high school graduate, named John, and who is brother of the speaker.
[222001830090] |But it could very well have been about three different people.
[222001830100] |Although humans are very good at telling which part of a story relates to which other part, it turns out to be very difficult to explain how we know.
[222001830110] |We just do. 
[222001830120] |This is a challenge both to psychologists like myself, as well as to people who try to design computer programs that can analyze text (whether for the purposes of machine translation, text summarization, or any other application). 
[222001830130] |The materials for research 
[222001830140] |A group at the University of Essex put together an entertaining new Web game called <a>Phrase Detectives</a> to help develop new materials for cutting-edge research into this basic problem of language.
[222001830150] |Their project is similar to my ongoing <a>Dax Study</a>, except that theirs is not so much an experiment as a method for developing the stimuli. 
[222001830160] |Phrase Detectives is set up as a competition between users, and the results is an entertaining game that you can participate in more or less as you choose.
[222001830170] |Other than its origins, it looks a great deal like many other Web games.
[222001830180] |The game speaks for itself and I recommend that you <a>check it out</a>. 
[222001830190] |What's the point? 
[222001830200] |<a>Their Wiki</a> provides some useful details as to the purpose of this project, but as it is geared more towards researchers than the general public, it could probably use some translation of its own.
[222001830210] |Here's my attempt at translation:
[222001830220] |The ability to make progress in Computational Linguistics depends on the availability of large annotated corpora...
[222001830230] |Basically, the goal of Computational Linguistics (and the related field, Natural Language Processing) is to come up with computer algorithms that can "parse" text -- break it up into its component parts and explain how those parts relate to one another.
[222001830240] |This is like a very sophisticated version of the <a>sentence diagramming</a> you probably did in middle school. 
[222001830250] |Developing and testing new algorithms requires a log of practice materials ("corpora").
[222001830260] |Most importantly, you need to know what the correct parse (sentence diagram) is for each of your practice sentences.
[222001830270] |In other words, you need "annotated corpora." 
[222001830280] |...but creating such corpora by hand annotation is very expensive and time consuming; in practice, it is unfeasible to think of annotating more that one million words.
[222001830290] |One million words may seem like a lot, but it isn't really.
[222001830300] |One of the complaints about one of the most famous word frequency corpora (the venerable Francis &Kucera) is that many important words never even appear in it.
[222001830310] |If you take a random set of 1,000,000 words, very common words like a, and, and the take up a fair chunk of that set. 
[222001830320] |Also, consider that when a child learns a language, that child hears or reads many, many millions of words.
[222001830330] |If it takes so many for a human who is genetically programmed to learn language, how long should it take a computer algorithm?
[222001830340] |(Computers are more advanced than humans in many areas, but in the basic areas of human competency -- vision, language, etc. -- they are still shockingly primitive.) 
[222001830350] |However, the success of Wikipedia and other projects shows that another approach might be possible: take advantage of the willingness of Web users to collaborate in resource creation.
[222001830360] |AnaWiki is a recently started project htat iwll develop tools to allow and encourage large numbers of volunteers over the Web to collaborate in the creation of semantically annotated corpora (in the first instance, of a corpus annotated with information about anaphora).
[222001830370] |This is, of course, what makes the Web so exciting.
[222001830380] |It took a number of years for it to become clear that the Web was not just a method of doing the same things we always did but faster and more cheaply, but actually a platform for doing things that had never even been considered before.
[222001830390] |It has had a deep impact in many areas of life -- <a>cognitive science research being just one</a>.
[222001840010] |<title>A vote for McCain is a vote against science</title>
[222001840020] |Readers of this blog know that <a>I have been skeptical of John McCain's support for science</a>.
[222001840030] |Although he has said he supports increasing science funding, he appears to consider recent science funding budgets that have not kept pace with inflation to be "increases."
[222001840040] |He has also since called for a discretionary spending freeze. 
[222001840050] |In recent years <a>vocally anti-science elements</a> have hijacked the science policies of the Republican party -- a party that actually has a strong history of supporting science -- so the question has been where McCain stands, or at least which votes he cares about most.
[222001840060] |The jury is still out on McCain, but <a>Palin just publicly blasted basic science research as wasteful government spending</a>. 
[222001840070] |The project that she singled out, incidentally, appears to be research that could eventually lead to new treatments of Autism.
[222001840080] |<a>Ironically, Palin brought up this "wasteful" research as a program that could be cut in order to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act</a>.
[222001850010] |<title>The power of because</title>
[222001850020] |To ask for a dime just outside a telephone booth is less than to ask for a dime for no apparent reason in the middle of the street.
[222001850030] |-Penelope Brown &Stephen Levinson, Politeness 
[222001850040] |The opening quote seems to be true.
[222001850050] |It raises the question of why, though.
[222001850060] |An economist might say a gift of 10 cents is a gift of 10 cents.
[222001850070] |You are short 10 cents no matter what the requestee's reason.
[222001850080] |So why should it matter? 
[222001850090] |The power of because?
[222001850100] |Empirically, in a well-known experiment, Ellen Langer and colleagues showed that 95% of people standing in line to use a copy machine were willing to let another cut in line as long as the cutter offered a reason, even if that reason was inane (e.g. "because I have to make copies.") 
[222001850110] |The explanation given by Langer and colleagues was that people are primed to do defer to somebody who provides a reason.
[222001850120] |Thus, the word "because" essentially in and of itself can manipulate others.
[222001850130] |This not only causes us to give money to people who need it to make a phone call, but to simply give money to anybody who gives a reason. 
[222001850140] |I haven't been able to find the original research paper -- it seems to have perhaps been reported in a book, not in a published article -- so I don't know for sure exactly what conditions were used.
[222001850150] |However, none of the media reports I have read (<a>such as this one</a>) mention the perhaps the most important control: a condition in which the cutter gives no excuse and does not use the word "because." 
[222001850160] |What are other possible explanations?
[222001850170] |Other possible explanations are that people are simply reluctant to say 'no,' especially if the request is made in earnest. 
[222001850180] |There are a couple reasons this could be true.
[222001850190] |People might be pushovers.
[222001850200] |They might also simply have been taught to be very polite. 
[222001850210] |Something that strikes me more likely is that most people avoid unnecessary confrontation.
[222001850220] |Confrontation is always risky.
[222001850230] |It can escalate into a situation where somebody gets hurt.
[222001850240] |Certainly, <a>violent confrontations have been started over less</a> than conflicting desires to use the same copier. 
[222001850250] |Speculation 
[222001850260] |None of these speculations, however, explain the opening quote.
[222001850270] |Perhaps there is an answer out there, and if anybody has come across it, please comment away.
[222001860010] |<title>Nature Magazine endorses Obama (but not because of science policy)</title>
[222001860020] |Nature Magazine's latest issue, just published online, <a>endorses Obama</a>.
[222001860030] |Interestingly, this is not because of "any specific pledge to fund some particular agency or initiative at a certain level."
[222001860040] |Instead, the editorial emphasizes the contrast in the ways the two candidates reach decisions: 
[222001860050] |On a range of topics, science included, Obama has surrounded himself with a wider and more able cadre of advisers than McCain.
[222001860060] |This is not a panacea.
[222001860070] |Some of the policies Obama supports -- continued subsidies for corn ethanol, for example -- seem misguided.
[222001860080] |The advice of experts is all the more valuable when it is diverse: 'groupthink' is a problem in any job.
[222001860090] |Obama seems to understands [sic] this.
[222001860100] |He tends to seek a range of opinions and analyses to ensure that his opinion, when reached, has been well considered and exposed to alternatives.
[222001860110] |He also exhibits pragmatism -- for example in his proposals for health-care reform -- that suggests a keen sense for the tests reality can bring to bear on policy. 
[222001860120] |Some will find strengths in McCain that they value more highly than the commitment to reasoned assessments that appeals in Obama.
[222001860130] |But all the signs are that the former seeks a narrower range of advice.
[222001860140] |Equally worrying is that he fails to educate himself on crucial matters; hte attitude he has taken to economic policy over many years is at issue here.
[222001860150] |Either as a result of poor advice, or of advice inadequately considered, he frequently makes decisions that seem capricious or erratic.
[222001870010] |<title>Physics is for wimps</title>
[222001870020] |<a>Matt Springer </a>may not have been throwing down the gauntlet <a>in his Oct. 21 post</a>, but I'm picking it up.
[222001870030] |In a well-written and well-reasoned short essay, he lays out just what is so difficult about the study of consciousness: 
[222001870040] |PZ Myers, as is his wont, recently wrote here that after his death he will have ceased to be.
[222001870050] |In other words, his experience of consciousness will have ended forever.
[222001870060] |Can we test this?
[222001870070] |He goes on to describe some possible ways you might test the hypothesis.
[222001870080] |It turns out it is very difficult. 
[222001870090] |[PZ Myers] could die and then make the observation as to whether or not he still existed.
[222001870100] |If he still did he'd be surprised, but at least he'd be able to observe that he was still somehow existing.
[222001870110] |If he didn't still exist, he's not around to make the observation of his nonexistence.
[222001870120] |So personal experimentation can't verify his prediction.
[222001870130] |Springer goes through some possible ways one might use neuroscience to test the hypothesis.
[222001870140] |None of them are very good either.
[222001870150] |In the end, he concludes: 
[222001870160] |Where am I going with this?
[222001870170] |Nowhere, that's the point.
[222001870180] |Clean experimental testability is why I like physics.
[222001870190] |Now, I like physics, too.
[222001870200] |I almost majored in it.
[222001870210] |But I like cognitive science more for precisely this reason: developing the right experiment doesn't just take knowing the literature or being able to build precision machinery, though both help.
[222001870220] |What distinguishes the geniuses in our field is their ability to design an experiment to test something nobody ever thought was testable.
[222001870230] |(After that, the engineering skill comes in.) 
[222001870240] |Hands thrown up. 
[222001870250] |Many people threw up their hands at answering basic questions like how many types of light receptors do we have in our eyes or how fast does a signal travel down a nerve cell ("instantanously" was one popular hypothesis) until <a>Hermann von Helmholtz</a> designed ingenious behavioral experiments long before the technology was available to answer those questions (and likely before anyone knew such technology would be available). 
[222001870260] |However, while Helmholtz pioneered brilliants methods for understanding the way the adult mind works, he declared it impossible to ever know what a baby was thinking.
[222001870270] |His methods wouldn't work with babies, and he couldn't think of any others.
[222001870280] |A hundred years later, however, researchers like Susan Carey, <a>Liz Spelke</a> and others pioneered new techniques to probe the minds of babes.
[222001870290] |Spelke managed to prove babies only a few months old have basic aspects of object perception in place.
[222001870300] |But Spelke herself despaired of ever testing certain aspects of object perception in newborns, until a different set of researchers (<a>Valenza, Leo, Gava &Simion, 2006</a>) devised an ingenious experiment that ultimately proved we are born with the ability to perceive objects (not just a <a>blooming, buzzing confusion</a>). 
[222001870310] |"I study dead people, everywhere." 
[222001870320] |I'm not saying I know how to test whether dead people are conscious.
[222001870330] |I'm still stumped by much easier puzzles.
[222001870340] |But a difficult question is a challenge, not a reason to avoid the subject.
[222001880010] |<title>On more psychologists in Congress</title>
[222001880020] |<a>Dennis Shulman</a> is an ordained rabbi with a clinical psychology Ph.D. from Harvard.
[222001880030] |He is the <a>New York Times choice</a> for the New Jersey's 5th district.
[222001880040] |In the interest of <a>greater representation of psychologists in Congress</a>, he's mine, too. 
[222001880050] |Still, I wouldn't mind if a psycholinguist ran for Congress.
[222001890010] |<title>Don't blink, you'll lose the election!</title>
[222001890020] |Sarah Palin has been clear on one subject: <a>You can't blink</a>.
[222001890030] |While people argue about whether this is a good administrative philosophy, there is no actually scientific evidence that it is good campaign strategy. 
[222001890040] |The International Journal of Psychophysiology recently published an abstract that claims that from 1960-2004, <a>the US presidential candidate who blinked most during the debates got fewer votes than his opponent in every election</a>.
[222001890050] |For those counting, that is every election which has featured televised debates. 
[222001890060] |The point of the abstract, interestingly, is not to predict campaign outcomes.
[222001890070] |The point was to study eyeblinks.
[222001890080] |Specifically, there are hypotheses about what elevated rates of blinking might suggest, such as a lack of focus or a negative mental state.
[222001890090] |The question the researchers were asking was whether observers pick up on eyeblink rates and make judgments or predictions based on them.
[222001890100] |This *might* suggest that they do. 
[222001890110] |It's important to note that this is a published abstract, not a full paper, so it is difficult to evaluate the methods used, though presumably they involved counting eyeblinks.
[222001900010] |<title>How the Presidential Campaign Changed the English Language</title>
[222001900020] |Languages change over time, which is why <a>you shouldn't take seriously any claims about this language being older than the other</a>, or vice versa.
[222001900030] |A language is only old in the same sense that a farmer can say, "I've had this axe for years.
[222001900040] |I've only changed the handle twice and the head three times." 
[222001900050] |Language change is probably slowed these days by stasis-inducing factors like books.
[222001900060] |However, rapid communication means that new phrases or ways of speaking can be disseminated with lightning speed.
[222001900070] |<a>Here is an interesting article</a> about the effect McCain &Palin's drill, baby, drill has had on the English language. 
[222001900080] |A Bush-administration flunkee's unfortunate statement that reporters -- but not members of the Bush administration -- are members of "<a>what we call the reality-based community</a>" led to an interesting shift in the way Progressives speak.
[222001900090] |The compound adjective "reality-based" has become part inside joke, and part simply a new word.
[222001900100] |I suspect "<a>real America</a>" will similarly <a>entrench itself</a> in the English language.
[222001910010] |<title>Do Bullies like Bullying?</title>
[222001910020] |Although <a>Slate</a> is my favorite magazine, and usually the first website I check each day, I've been known to complain about its science coverage, which typically lacks the insight of its other features.
[222001910030] |A much-too-rare exception to this are the occasional articles by Daniel Engber (full disclosure: I have attempted to convince Engber, a Slate editor, to run articles by me in the past, unsuccessfully). 
[222001910040] |Yesterday, he <a>wrote an excellent piece</a> about a recent bit of cognitive neuroscience looking at bullies and how they relate to bullying.
[222001910050] |Researchers scanned the brains of "bullies" while they viewed videos of bullying and reported that pleasure centers in the brain activated. 
[222001910060] |In a cheeky fashion typical of Slate, Engber questions the novelty of these findings: 
[222001910070] |Bullies like bullying?
[222001910080] |I just felt a shiver run up my spine.
[222001910090] |Next we'll find out that alcoholics like alcohol.
[222001910100] |Or that overeaters like to overeat.
[222001910110] |Hey, I've got an idea for a brain-imaging study of child-molesters that'll just make your skin crawl!
[222001910120] |Obviously, <a>I was a sympathetic reader</a>.
[222001910130] |But Engber does not stop there: 
[222001910140] |OK, OK: Why am I wasting time on a study so lame that it got a write-up in the Onion?
[222001910150] |Hasn't this whole fMRI backlash routine gotten a bit passé?
[222001910160] |Engber goes on to detail a number of limitations to the study, including how the kids were defined as "bullies" (some appear to be rapists, for instance) and also how "pleasure center" was defined (the area in question is also related to anxiety, so one could reasonably argue bullies find bullying worrisome, not pleasurable). 
[222001910170] |The second half of the article is a plea for better science reporting, one that I hope is widely-read.
[222001910180] |<a>Read it yourself here</a>.
[222001920010] |<title>Another language blog</title>
[222001920020] |My <a>favorite language blog</a> remains <a>Language Log</a>.
[222001920030] |However, I was informed of a <a>very interesting blog on language</a>.
[222001920040] |Like Language Log, it's focus is not empirical research (as is the focus here).
[222001920050] |But the group of authors do regularly hit on interesting phenomena in language and have insightful things to say about them.
[222001920060] |I recommend that you <a>check it out</a>.
[222001930010] |<title>Galileo -- Smarter than you thought</title>
[222001930020] |It is often said of cognitive scientists that we have, as a group, a memory that only stretches back about 10 years.
[222001930030] |This is for good reasons and bad.
[222001930040] |Methods change and improve constantly, constantly making much of the literature irrelevant.
[222001930050] |Then there is the fact that <a>there is so much new work, it's hard to find time to read the old</a>. 
[222001930060] |This is a shame, because some of the really old work is impressive for its prescience.
[222001930070] |A recent issue of Trends in Neurosciences carried an article on Galileo's work on perception.
[222001930080] |Most people then -- and probably most people now -- conceived of the senses as passing along an accurate representation of the world to your brain.
[222001930090] |We now know <a>the senses are plagued by illusions</a> (many of them actually adaptive). 
[222001930100] |Galileo was on to this fact.
[222001930110] |His study of the moon proved that perceptions of brightness are constantly subject to illusion.
[222001930120] |More generally, he noted -- contrary to the popular view -- that much of what we sense about the world is in a real sense an illusion.
[222001930130] |Objects exist, but colors and tastes in an important sense do not.
[222001930140] |It's worth presenting a few of the quotes from the article: 
[222001930150] |I say that, as soon as I conceive of a piece of matter, or a corporeal substance,...I do not feel my mind forced to conceive it as necessarily accompanied by such states as being white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or quiet, or having a nice or nasty smell.
[222001930160] |On the contrary, if we were not guided by our senses, thinking or imagining would probably never arrive at them by themselves.
[222001930170] |This is why I think that, as far as concerns the object in which these tastes, smells, colours, etc., appear to reside, they are nothing other than mere names, and they have their location only in the sentient body.
[222001930180] |Consequently, if the living being were removed, all these qualities would disappear and be annihilated.
[222001930190] |see also: 
[222001930200] |A wine's good taste does not belong to the objective determinations of the wine and hence of an object, even of an object considered as appearance, but belongs to the special character of the sense in the subject who is enjoying this taste.
[222001930210] |Colours are not properties of bodies to the inuition of which they attach, but are also only modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected in a certain manner by light. 
[222001930220] |Marco Piccolino, Nicholas J. Wade (2008).
[222001930230] |Galileo Galilei's vision of the senses Trends in Neurosciences, 31 (11)
[222001940010] |<title>Talking in New Tongues -- How Easy is It?</title>
[222001940020] |Today's post is written by a guest, Kelly Kilpatrick.
[222001940030] |It’s a diverse world we live in, where thousands of languages vie with each other to exist and flourish.
[222001940040] |Some are more widely spoken than others, and some are dying out even as I write this.
[222001940050] |We are born knowing only one language –that of tears and noises.
[222001940060] |And as we grow, we’re introduced to the language spoken by those who surround us, picking up bits and pieces as we pass year after year.
[222001940070] |Languages come easily to some of us, while others have to work harder than the rest to master a different tongue.
[222001940080] |But there are a few circumstances when picking up a new tongue is easy, and that’s:
[222001940090] |•When you’re young: Children tend to learn new languages faster than adults, probably because their brains are still in the developing stage.
[222001940100] |The best time to learn a new language is when you’re a child, so if you want your kinds to excel in a language besides their mother tongue, it’s best to get them started as early as possible.
[222001940110] |•When two languages are spoken at home: When both parents speak different languages, children tend to pick up both tongues pretty fast, especially when both are spoken with the same degree of frequency.
[222001940120] |•When you live in a foreign country: Your mother tongue at home and a foreign language when you’re outside, either at school, college or work, helps you speak both fluently.
[222001940130] |You pick up a new language quickly when everyone around you understands and speaks only that particular tongue since sign language works only up to a certain limit.
[222001940140] |•When you work with people of other cultures: Working in a multicultural environment means you get to interact with people of different races from various countries.
[222001940150] |If you hang around them long enough, you tend to pick up certain terms and slang expressions of their mother tongue.
[222001940160] |You may even be able to understand what they say even if you’re not able to talk as fluently as they do.
[222001940170] |•When you’re forced to: Imagine having to go to another country to work or live amongst a different people; you must learn the language as fast as you can or you’re going to find things extremely difficult.
[222001940180] |Conditions like these are ideal in encouraging your brain to learn fast since your survival depends on your new ability.
[222001940190] |While it’s easy to learn how to speak a new language, it’s much harder to master the written form of many scripts, especially the ones that are calligraphic, like Chinese, Arabic and many other Asian languages.
[222001940200] |Western tongues more or less follow the English script, so if you know the pronunciations and spellings, you’re good to go.
[222001940210] |But it takes years and years of practice to get the hang of calligraphic scripts.
[222001940220] |Learning a new language can be an exercise that’s both fun and useful; go ahead, try taking on a new tongue today.
[222001940230] |----This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of <a>online colleges</a>.
[222001940240] |She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.
[222001940250] |For previous posts on the subject of language-learning, click <a>here</a>, <a>here</a>, <a>here</a>, <a>here</a> or <a>here</a>.
[222001950010] |<title>Goodbye, H.M.</title>
[222001950020] |<a>This says it all</a>.
[222001970010] |<title>Language Wars</title>
[222001970020] |I was struck by a comment to a post a while back on <a>Cognitive Daily</a>: 
[222001970030] |<a>It's "DOES the use of hand gestures."
[222001970040] |Please, pay attention; grammar matters.
[222001970050] |"The use of hand gestures" is the subject, and it is singular. </a>
[222001970060] |Grammar matters? 
[222001970070] |A certain segment of the population gets very worked up about "correct usage" of language.
[222001970080] |As a scientist, I understand the difference between "standard" and "non-standard" language, and why one might care, as an educator, about the standard.
[222001970090] |Language is most useful when everybody understands one another (cf <a>The Tower of Babel</a>).
[222001970100] |This is why the <a>standardization of spelling</a> was such an important -- and relatively recent -- achievement. 
[222001970110] |However, the people who say, "pay attention; grammar matters" seem to be concerned with something else entirely.
[222001970120] |I can't say for sure what this poster cared about, but most that I know believe that without proper language, one cannot have proper thoughts.
[222001970130] |Thus, if we could make everybody produce <a>perfectly-diagrammable sentences</a>, everyone would finally think right, too. 
[222001970140] |Really?
[222001970150] |To actually prove this contention, you would have to do a controlled experiment.
[222001970160] |Find two people who speak with "poor" grammar and have similarly sloppy thinking, teach one the correct grammar, and see if that person now thinks more clearly than the uneducated speaker. 
[222001970170] |To the best of my knowledge, no such experiment has been done -- no doubt partly because scientists seem to as a group reject such thinking altogether.
[222001970180] |For one thing, you would have to define "correct grammar," which is a priori impossible to do.
[222001970190] |The only known way to determine if a sentence is grammatical is to querry a native speaker of a language.
[222001970200] |That's it.
[222001970210] |There are no other methods. 
[222001970220] |So, now suppose we have two people (for instance, <a>Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle</a>) who disagree as to whether a sentence is grammatical.
[222001970230] |How do we decide between the two of them?
[222001970240] |Typically, most people for whatever reason side with the wealthier and more politically powerful of the two (in this case, Henry Higgins). 
[222001970250] |That doesn't sound very democratic.
[222001970260] |So we could take a poll.
[222001970270] |Typically, you'll find that one judgment is more common than another.
[222001970280] |But now we have only defined a standard: not necessarily a "correct" judgment.
[222001970290] |Moreover, these differences in judgments often vary as a function of where you live.
[222001970300] |As I understand it, there are parts of the South where most people will agree that you simply can't refer to a group of people as "you" -- "y'all" is the correct term. 
[222001970310] |A war of words If it is the case that there is no evidence that "correct grammar" helps people think more correctly, and that this is because there is no such thing as correct grammar -- and I assure you, there isn't -- then why do people get so hung up on it? 
[222001970320] |First, you might answer that most people live their lives just fine without ever thinking about correct and incorrect grammar.
[222001970330] |I suspect that is false.
[222001970340] |Much hay has been made about Palin's "mangling" of the English language, some of which <a>is valid</a>, but much of which is due to the fact that <a>she speaks with a nonstandard dialect</a>.
[222001970350] |It has been remarked by more than one Southerner that Yankees think they are dumb just because of their accent.
[222001970360] |If you've never done this, then I ask you, have you really never assumed someone with a West Virginian accent was dumb?
[222001970370] |If you haven't, then at least accept that <a>even babies prefer people who speak with the local standard accent</a> (note that somewhat older children may actually prefer a person with a locally high-status accent rather than their own accent). 
[222001970380] |I've heard it claimed that wars have been fought over linguistic differences, but I couldn't think of any obvious examples (please comment away if you have one).
[222001970390] |Still, I think the evidence is compelling that people really, really care about accent and language use, and this goes beyond a belief in the empirical claim that right language leads to right thoughts.
[222001970400] |This runs deeper.
[222001970410] |Hopefully we will some day understand why.
[222001980010] |<title>Are elders better scientists?</title>
[222001980020] |A recent paper, <a>discussed in a recent issue of Nature</a>, found that across disciplines, professors in their 50s and 60s published about twice the number of papers each year as professors in their 30s.
[222001980030] |This is taken in the article as evidence that older professors can be very productive. 
[222001980040] |Nature allows readers to common on news briefs, and the comments raised the same issues I had.
[222001980050] |Here are the first two, for instance: 
[222001980060] |They don't seem to consider that older professors have larger research groups, i.e. more underlings to actually write the papers.
[222001980070] |Perhaps a better photo to illustrate the story would be the aged professor in their office wielding a red pen over their students' manuscripts. 
[222001980080] |Well, the older professors are also more established and have more connections, and therefore can participate in both small and large collaborative projects.
[222001980090] |No offense, but this survey only seems to prove an already obvious point.
[222001980100] |Basically, older faculty tend to not only have more graduate students and post-docs, they also tend to have broad collaboration networks.
[222001980110] |This is not to say that older researchers are not productive, or that even less-productive older researchers aren't valuable members of the community, just that these data seem hard to interpret.
[222001990010] |<title>More amazing birds</title>
[222001990020] |I've been hearing for some time that starlings are remarkable vocal learners.
[222001990030] |For a brief time, there was a starling lab in our building. 
[222001990040] |I came across this video on <a>grrlscientist</a>'s blog.
[222001990050] |I'm not sure if "amazing" or "creepy" is the right response. 
[222002010010] |<title>Mind and Brain</title>
[222002010020] |In periodic posts, I've been trying to lay out the modern scientific consensus on the mind/brain problem, <a>with mixed success</a>.
[222002010030] |If I had come across the following passage, from <a>Ray Jackendoff</a>'s Language, Consciousness, Culture, a bit earlier, I might have saved some trouble, since I feel it is one of the clearest, most concise statements on the topic I have seen:
[222002010040] |The predominant view is a strict materialism, in which consciousness is taken to be an emergent property of brains that are undergoing certain sorts of activity. 
[222002010050] |Although the distinction is not usually made explicit, one could assert the materialist position in either of two ways.
[222002010060] |The first would be 'methodological materialism': let's see how far we can get toward explaining consciousness under materialist assumptions, while potentially leaving open the possibility of an inexplicable residue.
[222002010070] |The second would be 'dogmatic materialism,' which would leave no room for anything but materialist explanation.
[222002010080] |Since we have no scientific tools for any sort of nonmaterialist explanation, the two positions are in practice indistinguishable, and they lead to the same research... 
[222002010090] |Of course, materialism goes strongly against folk intuition about the mind, which concurs with Descartes in thinking of the conscious mind as associated with a nonmaterial 'soul' or the like...
[222002010100] |The soul is taken to be capable of existence independently of the body.
[222002010110] |It potentially survives the death of the body and makes its way in the world as a ghost or a spirit or ensconced in another body through reincarnation...
[222002010120] |Needless to say, most people cherish the idea of being able to survive the death of their bodies, so materialism is more than an 'astonishing hypothesis,' to use Crick's (1994) term: it is a truly distressing and alienating one.
[222002010130] |Nevertheless, by now it does seem the only reasonable way to approach consciousness scientifically.
[222002020010] |<title>Children giving orders to Mom and Dad</title>
[222002020020] |During the last month, I have been <a>studying requests</a>.
[222002020030] |Requests are interesting because there are many ways of making them, including commands ("Give me that"), requests ("Please give me that"), indirect requests ("Could you give me that?"), and hints ("Wouldn't it be nice if I had one of those?"). 
[222002020040] |I just ran across a description of a fairly old line of research that is worth quoting directly: 
[222002020050] |Studies of role playing (Andersen (1978, 1989), Corsaro (1985), Mitchell-Kernan and Kernan (1977) have made it very clear that children make use of the symbolic value of characters' control acts types and forms.
[222002020060] |In Andersen's study, children of four and five were assigned specific roles through puppets, and she played a complementary role.
[222002020070] |This allowed her to see, within each child, the representation of contrasting roles, such as Father and Mother and Child, Doctor and Nurse and Patient.
[222002020080] |Fathers received fewer orders but gave them more, and received few imperatives, but gave them.
[222002020090] |Doctors were the same.
[222002020100] |The Child addressed six times as many imperatives to Mothers as to Fathers, and eight times as many 'let's' forms to Fathers as to the Mothers.
[222002020110] |It would appear that children not only think fathers outrank mothers on the dominance hierarchy but that they seem to think they themselves outrank their mothers.
[222002020120] |Why this is I leave to others to speculate on. 
[222002020130] |Ervin-Tripp, S, Guo, J., Lampert, M. (1990).
[222002020140] |Politeness and persuasion in children’s control acts.
[222002020150] |Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 307-331 
[222002020160] |(Photo borrowed from http://www.radconsultancy.com/).
[222002030010] |<title>Science in the New Administration</title>
[222002030020] |During the Fall, I wrote a number of posts (<a>starting with this one</a>) arguing that science policy in the US was in poor shape, and that Obama looked like the more likely of the candidates to turn that around. 
[222002030030] |While I focused more on support for basic science, I was certainly concerned about how policy-makers use science to support their policy decisions.
[222002030040] |So far, all signs from the not-yet-nascent Obama administration <a>continue to be promising</a>.
[222002040010] |<title>Building a Better Spell-Checker</title>
[222002040020] |<img/>Today Slate carried an interesting piece about spell-checker technology by Chris Wilson.
[222002040030] |A spell-checker typically works in the obvious way: a word you type in is compared to a dictionary.
[222002040040] |The question is where the dictionary comes from.
[222002040050] |If you use a lot of proper nouns -- or, in my case, a lot of technical jargon -- you risk the red-squiggly wrath of Microsoft Word. 
[222002040060] |It's been clear to me for a while that search engines work from much larger lexicons than do word processors.
[222002040070] |The article fills in some detail as to how they do this (not surprisingly, it involves some of the sophisticated statistics that has become so important in computer approaches to language).
[222002040080] |<a>Read the article here</a>. 
[222002040090] |(image borrowed from eduscapes.com)
[222002050010] |<title>Cutting Down Trees to Save the Forest</title>
[222002050020] |It took me a while to understand the concept of ecotourism.
[222002050030] |When I signed up to spend a year with the just-emergent <a>Great Baikal Trail</a> organization from 2003-2004, I honestly picked it for reasons unrelated to its mission: building nature trails. 
[222002050040] |<a>Baikal</a> is the world's largest (by volume) and deepest lake, with 20% of the world's fresh water and a dizzying array of species found nowhere else (<a>some of them v</a><a>ery tasty</a>, I have to admit).
[222002050050] |It's an incredible place to visit, and I feel lucky to have spent so long there (for reasons, read <a>this</a> and <a>this</a>).
[222002050060] |It is also one of the world's more pristine habitats, by virtue largely of being in the middle of Siberia.
[222002050070] |However, the region will eventually develop, and the question is how. 
[222002050080] |GBT operates on a If-You-Build-It-They-Will-Come principle: namely, if the right infrastructure is put in <a><img/></a>place, an industry built on tourism will develop, displacing the most likely alternative possibility, which is logging and paper mills (both of which are necessary activities, but would be a shame to see in the Baikal area). 
[222002050090] |More importantly, if the tourism economy is based on the local natural wonders, there is strong economic pressure to maintain Baikal in its pristine state.
[222002050100] |It might stay more pristine if all the humans moved elsewhere, but that's not likely to happen.
[222002050110] |For one thing, if nobody lived there and nobody visited, who has the motivation to maintain the Lake? 
[222002050120] |The Great Baikal Trail runs summer trail-building programs.
[222002050130] |An eco-trail is not just any rut in the ground, but requires sophisticated engineering (to prevent, among things, erosion).
[222002050140] |GBT has been running for over half a decade now and has built up considerable expertise.
[222002050150] |If anybody is interested in volunteering on a two-week trail project, <a>look them up</a>.
[222002050160] |Since the tourism economy is still nascent, this also represents one of the few opportunities for non-Russian speakers to travel extensively in the region. 
[222002050170] |P.S.
[222002050180] |If there are any Russian speakers reading this, please check out my new <a>5-minute experiment in Russian</a>. 
[222002050190] |(for once, photographs are my own)
[222002060010] |<title>The Purpose of Language</title>
[222002060020] |A book I'm currently reading quotes the well-known linguist Charles Fillmore as writing
[222002060030] |the language of face-to-face conversation is the basic and primary use of language, all others being best described in terms of their manner of deviation from that base...
[222002060040] |I assume that this position is neither particularly controversial nor in need of explanation.
[222002060050] |If only it were so.
[222002060060] |Uber-linguist <a>Noam Chomsky</a> said in a talk I attended that language is not "for communication."
[222002060070] |I've never been quite sure what he meant by this, so I decided this was a good time to find out. 
[222002060080] |Googling turned up <a>this interview</a>, in which his statement is much more mild.
[222002060090] |He seems to simply state that to the extent language is used socially, it isn't always for the purpose of communication.
[222002060100] |I can get on board with that. 
[222002060110] |<a>This other interview</a>, however, makes a stronger claim.
[222002060120] |Here is a representative quote: 
[222002060130] |If human language has a function at all it's for expression of thought.
[222002060140] |So if you just think about your own use of language, a rather small part is used for communication.
[222002060150] |Much of human language is just used to establish social relations.
[222002060160] |Suppose you go to a bar in Kyoto and you spend an evening talking to your friends.
[222002060170] |You're not 'communicating'.
[222002060180] |You're rarely communicating.
[222002060190] |You're not presenting them with any information that changes their belief systems.
[222002060200] |You're simply engaged in a kind of social play.
[222002060210] |Perhaps.
[222002060220] |I'm still with Fillmore that this seems to be derivative on communication, but I'm not even sure what kind of evidence could be found that would favor one position or the other.
[222002070010] |<title>Is language just statistics?</title>
[222002070020] |Many years ago, I attended a talk in which a researcher (in restrospect, probably a graduate student) was talking about some work she was doing on modeling learning.
[222002070030] |She mentioned that a colleague was very proud of a model he had put together in which he had a model world populated by model creatures which learned to avoid predators and find food. 
[222002070040] |She reported that he said, "Look, they are able to learn this without *any* input from the programmer.
[222002070050] |It's all nurture, not nature."
[222002070060] |She argued with him at length to point out that he had programmed into his model creatures the structures that allowed to them to learn.
[222002070070] |Change any of those parameters, and they ceased to learn. 
[222002070080] |There are a number of researchers in the field of language who, impressed by the success of statistical-learning models, argue that much or all of language learning can be accomplished by simply noticing statistical patterns in language.
[222002070090] |For instance, there is a class of words in English that tend to follow the word "the."
[222002070100] |A traditional grammarian might call these "nouns," but this becomes unnecessary when using statistics. 
[222002070110] |There are many variants of this approach, some more successful than others.
[222002070120] |Some are more careful in their claims (one paper, I recall, stated strongly that the described model did away with not only grammatical rules, but words themselves). 
[222002070130] |While I am impressed by much of the work that has come out of this approach, I don't think it can ever do away with complex (possibly innate) structure.
[222002070140] |The anecdote above is an argument by analogy.
[222002070150] |Here is a great extended quote from Language Learnability and Language Development, Steven Pinker's original, 1984 foray into book writing:
[222002070160] |As I argued in Pinker (1979), in most distributional learning procedures there are vast numbers of properties that a learner could record, and since the child is looking for correlations among these properties, he or she faces a combinatorial explosion of possibilities.
[222002070170] |For example, he or she could record of a given word that it occurs int eh first (or second, or third, or nth) position in a sentence, that it is to the left (or right) of word X or word Y or ..., or that it is to the left of the word sequence WXYZ, or that it occurs n the same sentence with word X (or words X, Y, Z, or some subset of them), and so on.
[222002070180] |Adding semantic and inflectional information to the space of possibilities only makes the explosion more explosive.
[222002070190] |To be sure, the inappropriate properties will correlate with no others and hence will eventually be ignored, leaving only the appropriate grammatical properties, but only after astronomical amounts of memory space, computation, or both. 
[222002070200] |In any case, most of these properties should be eliminated by an astute learner as being inappropriate to learning a human language in the first place.
[222002070210] |For example, there is no linguistic phenomenon in any language that is contingent upon a word's occupying the third serial position in a sentence, so why bother testing for one?
[222002070220] |Testing for correlations among irrelevant properties is not only wasteful but potentially dangerous, since many spurious correlations will arise in local samples of the input.
[222002070230] |For example, the child could hear the sentences John eats meat, John eats slowly, and the meat is good and then conclude that the slowly is good is a possible English sentence.
[222002070240] |Ultimately, a pure-statistics model still has to decide what regularities to keep track of and what to ignore, and that requires at least some innate structure.
[222002070250] |It probably also requires fairly complex grammatical structures, whether learned or innate.
[222002100010] |<title>How good is your memory?</title>
[222002100020] |The average 20-29 year old scores a 2.5 on my <a>Memory Test</a>.
[222002100030] |How well can you do? 
[222002100040] |There are, of course, different types of memory.
[222002100050] |Most people think of 'memory' as an ability to recall facts and events from days or even years ago.
[222002100060] |This is what was destroyed in the famous amnesic <a>H.
[222002100070] |M.</a> However, H. M. was still able to remember new information for at least a few seconds; that is, his short-term ("working") memory was spared.
[222002100080] |There are also other types of memory, such as iconic memory, also knows as "sensory" memory.
[222002100090] |Moreover, memory for facts seems to dissociate from memory for skills ("know-how"). 
[222002100100] |<a>The Memory Test</a> tests visual working memory. 
[222002100110] |Before you take the test, please do me one favor.
[222002100120] |If you want to test yourself multiple times, feel free to do so.
[222002100130] |But please check off the "have you done this experiment before" box.
[222002100140] |Failing to do this can screw up the data, so it's important. 
[222002100150] |What Does the Test Involve? 
[222002100160] |You try to remember four simple shapes for one second.
[222002100170] |Afterwards, you are shown a single shape.
[222002100180] |You have to decide if it is one of the four you were to remember.
[222002100190] |There are 40 trials, plus some practice trials. 
[222002100200] |A note about the practice: The practice trials are really, really hard.
[222002100210] |That is to get you warmed up, just like a runner tying weights to her ankles during her warm-up.
[222002100220] |The actual test is easier. 
[222002100230] |How is the Score Calculated? 
[222002100240] |On any given trial, you get the answer either right or wrong.
[222002100250] |We could just calculate what percentage you get right, but that would mean getting a score like "80%," which isn't very satisfying.
[222002100260] |80% of what? 
[222002100270] |A formula developed by <a>Nelson Cowan</a> can be used to estimate how many of the shapes, on average, actually make it into your short-term memory store.
[222002100280] |The formula is this: 
[222002100290] |(% hits + % correct rejections - 1) / (Total number of objects) 
[222002100300] |A 'hit' means answering 'yes, this is one of the four objects,' when in fact that is the correct answer.
[222002100310] |A 'correct rejection' is saying 'no, this is not one of the four object,' when in fact it is not. 
[222002100320] |From the math, the score can run from -1/4, if you get every question wrong, to 4, if you get every question right (which has happened, but rarely).
[222002100330] |If you guessed at random, you should get half the questions right, in which case your score should be 0. 
[222002100340] |Keep in mind that this depends completely on the shapes.
[222002100350] |If the shapes are really hard to remember (as the practice shapes are), scores will be lower.
[222002100360] |If they are very easy, scores will be higher.
[222002100370] |What makes a shape easy is not just how complex it is, but how similar it is to the other shapes (how easy the shapes are to confuse with one another).
[222002100380] |What Does the Score Mean? 
[222002100390] |You could have a higher or lower score for a number of reasons.
[222002100400] |For one thing, you might have guessed abnormally well or abnormally poorly.
[222002100410] |All tests are subject to a guessing effect.
[222002100420] |On average, guessing cancels itself out, but if the test is short enough and enough people take is, somebody is likely to get everything right (or wrong) just by chance. 
[222002100430] |Luck aside, a good score could mean that you have more "room" in your short-term memory.
[222002100440] |It might also mean you are better at avoiding interference.
[222002100450] |There are <a>several types of interference in memory</a>, and so you could be better at avoiding any one of them.
[222002100460] |You might also be better at paying attention, or you might have developed a useful strategy for success on this task.
[222002100470] |(That said, visual short-term memory does appear to be anywhere near as susceptible to strategies as verbal short-term memory.)
[222002100480] |Remember one thing.
[222002100490] |This is not a clinical test.
[222002100500] |Though clinical tests for verbal short-term memory exist, I'm not sure there even are clinical tests for visual short-term memory.
[222002100510] |This is just for fun.
[222002100520] |Enjoy it. 
[222002100530] |Wait.
[222002100540] |How Do you Know What the Average Score Is? 
[222002100550] |The Memory Test is nearly identical to an experiment I ran previously.
[222002100560] |I used the data from that version to estimate what the scores will be on this version. 
[222002100570] |(Photo served from the National Geographic website)
[222002110010] |<title>Fractured Consciousness</title>
[222002110020] |The modern scientific consensus is that the 'mind' is just a word we use to describe our experience of our own brains in action.
[222002110030] |That is, mind and brain are more or less the same thing, just described at different levels (this gets stuck in the semantics because the brain monitors some nonconscious things such as heart rate, activities not normally thought of as in the domain of the mind). 
[222002110040] |That said, some in the scientific community and many in the general community have difficulty buying this '<a>astonishing hypothesis</a>' (check out <a>the comments to my last post on the subject</a>). 
[222002110050] |Different people arrive at the hypothesis by their own paths.
[222002110060] |To me, the most compelling evidence is the range of bizarre consequences of brain damage.
[222002110070] |For instance, check out this late-December <a>New York Times profile of a recent case of blind-sight</a>, a phenomenon in which a person, due to brain damage, believes herself to be blind, but is clearly able to see.
[222002110080] |<a>Oliver Sacks</a> books are full of such cases, such as hemispheric neglect, in which people lose their awareness of half the world, to the extent that they eat from only one side of their plate, shave only one side of their face, and may even only be able to turn in one direction.
[222002110090] |<a>A recent obituary of a famous amnesic</a> noted how work with amnesics has shown that losing one's ability to form memories is in essence losing part of oneself. 
[222002110100] |Data like these make it hard to save dualism.
[222002110110] |If there is a non-material soul, it is not responsible for memory, for having a sense of left or right, or probably even for consciousness itself.
[222002110120] |That doesn't seem to leave much for the non-material soul to do.
[222002110130] |This conclusion may be disheartening, but it seems inescapable. 
[222002130010] |<title>Modern Environmentalism, or Which Would You Rather Save: Your Planet or Your Soul?</title>
[222002130020] |According to <a>Johann Hari, writing for Slate</a>, there are at least two kinds of environmentalists: the romantics and the realists. 
[222002130030] |The romantics—a tradition you can peel back to Wordsworth's daffodils—see environmental crises as primarily spiritual.
[222002130040] |They believe concrete and cities and factories are fundamentally inhuman, alienated habitats that can only make us sick.
[222002130050] |They cut us off from the natural rhythms of the land, and encourage us to break up the world into parts and study them mechanistically—when, in fact, everything is connected... 
[222002130060] |The rational environmentalists ... believe our crisis is not spiritual at all, but physical.
[222002130070] |Human beings didn't unleash warming gases into the atmosphere out of malice or stupidity or spiritual defect: They did it because they wanted their children to be less cold and less hungry and less prone to disease.
[222002130080] |The moral failing comes only very late in the story—when we chose to ignore the scientific evidence of where wanton fossil-fuel burning would take us.
[222002130090] |This failing must be put right by changing our fuel sources, not altering our souls.
[222002130100] |We might recast these as those who want to return to nature, and those who want to preserve nature: 
[222002130110] |Diagnose the problem differently, and you end up with fundamentally different solutions.
[222002130120] |You can see this most clearly if you look at the environmentalist clash over cities, over how we should live: Is the way forward to build more cities or to try to get people to flee to the countryside?
[222002130130] |Personally, I'm a realist (as is Hari).
[222002130140] |Hari, though, tries to make the case for realism by pointing to the thought processes involved (e.g., "the cities of human beings are as natural .. as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters.").
[222002130150] |However, I think realism is the only option for those of us who live in the real world -- and I'm not using that phrase metaphorically: really mean anyone who lives on Planet Earth. 
[222002130160] |The Reality on the Ground.
[222002130170] |Here's the problem: There are over 6,000,000,000 people on Earth.
[222002130180] |There are only 58,179,688 square miles of land.
[222002130190] |That is over 103 people per square mile.
[222002130200] |If we fan out into the countryside, there will be no countryside.
[222002130210] |And keep in mind that those 58,179,688 square miles of land include the Earth's deserts (14% of land) and high mountains (27% of land). 
[222002130220] |I love Nature.
[222002130230] |I love spending time in Nature.
[222002130240] |(I'd love to publish in Nature, too, but that's a different topic.)
[222002130250] |The only way it will be possible for any sizeable chunk of people to spend time in Nature is for most of us to live in cities -- frankly, in cities more dense than the ones that exist today in America. 
[222002130260] |It may be true that there are too many people, but before anyone suggests we start reducing the world population, keep in mind that if we want to ge to the point where there is only 1 person per square mile, over 99% of humanity must disappear.
[222002130270] |Personally, that's not my environmentalism fantasy.
[222002150010] |<title>Can Your Brain Force You to Do Something You Don't Want to Do?</title>
[222002150020] |I have been reading Jerome Kagan's compelling recent book on emotion.
[222002150030] |I stumbled on one particular line: 
[222002150040] |An article in the June 20, 1988, issue of Time magazine, reporting on a woman who murdered her infant, told readers that the hormonal changes that accompany the birth process create emotional states, especially in women unprepared for the care of children, that can provoke serious aggression that women are unable to control.
[222002150050] |It is thus not fair, the journalist argued, to hold such mothers responsible for their horrendous actions.
[222002150060] |This conclusion is a serious distortion of the truth.
[222002150070] |There is no known hormonal change that can force a woman to kill her infant if she does not want to do so!
[222002150080] |This raises one of most difficult problems facing 21st Century ethics.
[222002150090] |We want to treat criminals differently if they are in control of their actions.
[222002150100] |For instance, a soldier who is ordered to commit an atrocity is, if still guilty, a bit less guilty than one who does the same thing, but just for kicks. 
[222002150110] |When the outside influence constraining your free will actually arises within your own body, it's a bit more difficult.
[222002150120] |Suppose Alfred goes on a drug-induced killing spree.
[222002150130] |Again, it's different from the just-for-kicks murderer, but then one might wonder if Alfred should have thought of the consequences before injecting himself with psychotics.
[222002150140] |Or what about somebody who had a psychotic break?
[222002150150] |Where do we draw the line between that and a bad mood? 
[222002150160] |Many people used to be comfortable drawing the line between psychosis and a bad mood using medical information.
[222002150170] |Anyone who acts under the influence of a medical condition is less culpable (or, at least, differently culpable) than somebody who is not.
[222002150180] |However, neuroscientists find the brain correlates of conditions like a bad mood and geneticists find that <a>nearly every personality trait is heritable</a> (including being just plain mean), this line is breaking down. 
[222002150190] |To be fair, this is in essence not a new problem.
[222002150200] |Certain strains of Christian religious thinkers have spent centuries tying themselves into knots trying to explain how, given that everything is according to God's plan, including sin, it was not sacrilege to punish sinners, who, by definition, were just carrying out God's plan. 
[222002150210] |Nonethess, Christian civilizations did not collapse under the weight of this paradox, and I suspect we'll get along for some time without a coherent answer to the Great Question of Free Will.
[222002150220] |But it would still be nice to have... 
[222002150230] |---- Kagan (2007) What Is Emotion, p. 80
[222002160010] |<title>Presidential Words</title>
[222002160020] |The New York Times has <a>an interesting feature analyzing inaugural addresses</a>.
[222002160030] |An interactive tool displays and visually ranks the most common words in each presidential inaugural address in US history.
[222002160040] |This is a common method for determining what the common themes are in a piece of work, and as such it captures both a moment in time and the style of a particular president.
[222002180010] |<title>Have you ever shruck?</title>
[222002180020] |"Remember the time in 2003 when Bartlett came to work all hung over?"
[222002180030] |Laughs.
[222002180040] |"Nothing ever changes."
[222002180050] |[Bush] continued: "We never shruck—""Shirked!" someone yelled.
[222002180060] |"Shirked," Bush corrected, smiling.
[222002180070] |"You might have shirked; I shrucked.
[222002180080] |I mean we took the deals head on."
[222002180090] |This is an excerpt from <a>an account of George W. Bush's farewell party</a> at the Spanish Ballroom in Glen Echo (which I know better as a middling swing dance venue; apparently the better places were all booked).
[222002180100] |A number of people have been <a>making hay about Bush's creative past tense inflection of the verb shirk</a>.
[222002180110] |This is probably because it fits with the general perception of Bush as <a>barely literate</a>.
[222002180120] |Not to defend one of the nation's most disastrous presidents, but shirk is actually a hard verb to decline.
[222002180130] |The Psychology of the Past Tense
[222002180140] |Most of us were taught in school that to make the past tense of a verb (walk) you add an -ed (walked).
[222002180150] |Of course it turns out there are some irregular verbs (ran, slept) which have to be memorized as such.
[222002180160] |A simple theory would just state that these exceptions are on a metaphoric list: when an English speaker wants to put a verb into the past tense, she checks the list of exceptions first.
[222002180170] |If the verb is on the list, she uses that irregular form; if not, she adds -ed.
[222002180180] |This seems like a decent theory, but it doesn't quite work.
[222002180190] |This is because people are perfectly capable of coming up with new irregular past tense forms.
[222002180200] |Suppose you heard a verb splink, which means to fall into a pool of water.
[222002180210] |What do you think the past tense would be?
[222002180220] |Many people would guess splunk.
[222002180230] |Our list model can't explain this, since that irregular isn't on the list.
[222002180240] |However, it seems clear where splunk comes from: it's an anology to sink-sunk.
[222002180250] |In fact, historically some verbs have become irregular.
[222002180260] |Once upon a time, the past tense of creep was creeped.
[222002180270] |So clearly people are capable of inventing new irregular forms that aren't on the metaphoric list.
[222002180280] |The Past Tense Wars
[222002180290] |How to fix this model was the focus of the far-reaching <a>Past Tense Debate</a>, in which I was once a <a>minor participant</a>.
[222002180300] |Although everybody's theory came to predict new irregular forms, none of the theories were very good at predicting a particular form (why splunk instead of splought, on analogy to think-thought?
[222002180310] |For some very interesting recent work on this problem, check out a series of recent papers by <a>Adam Albright</a>).
[222002180320] |When I was doing this work, I would present participants with made up verbs and ask them to give me a past tense.
[222002180330] |I got a lot of responses like splunk, but I also got very odd responses.
[222002180340] |It was not infrequent for a person to add or subtract a consonant (sadly, I don't remember any of the best examples).
[222002180350] |Many looked a good deal like turning shirk to shruck.
[222002180360] |Granted, few people made such big mistakes on the real words (other than the infamous brung), but it seems clear <a>Bush has a deficiency in (linguistic) planning and monitoring</a>, so one would expect his irregularizations to be more prominent.
[222002180370] |(I'm actually sympathetic to the linguistic malady, at least, since I'm similarly inarticulate when speaking off the cuff.)
[222002180380] |Parting Thoughts
[222002180390] |As usual, <a>Language Log got to this topic first</a> and used much more impressive vocabulary (e.g., "metathetic").
[222002190010] |<title>Steven Pinker on Roberts-speak</title>
[222002190020] |If you haven't yet seen it, check out this <a>New York Times editorial by Harvard Professor of Psychology, Steven Pinker</a>.
[222002190030] |It is an analysis of (perhaps) why Chief Justice Roberts bungled the inaugural swearing-in.
[222002190040] |The Assistant Village Idiot has <a>a rather strange rebuttal</a>.
[222002190050] |The author seems to believe Pinker's editorial was a political commentary.
[222002190060] |Well, it is, but Pinker is concerned about the politics of language (something he's worried about for a long time, as anyone who has read his books knows), not Supreme Court politics.
[222002190070] |The writer continues:
[222002190080] |Pinker seems <a>unable to restrain himself</a> from injecting his political opinions into his discussions of language and thought.
[222002190090] |I wonder what that means?
[222002190100] |One might ask the same question right back.
[222002200010] |<title>Why Don't Babies Talk Like Adults: Coglanglab at Scientific American</title>
[222002200020] |The Scientific American Mind Matters blog is running <a>an article by me on language learning</a>.
[222002200030] |The moderator of this blog, Jonah Lehrer, asks scientists to pick what they think is one of the most exciting recent papers and blog about it.
[222002200040] |Here's how I set up the problem:
[222002200050] |Many people assume children learn to talk by copying what they hear.
[222002200060] |In other words, babies listen to the words adults use and the situations in which they use them and imitate accordingly.
[222002200070] |Behaviorism, the scientific approach that dominated American cognitive science for the first half of the 20th century, made exactly this argument.
[222002200080] |This “copycat” theory can’t explain why toddlers aren’t as loquacious adults, however.
[222002200090] |After all, when was the last time you heard literate adults express themselves in <a>one-word sentences</a> (“bottle,” “doggie”) or in short phrases such as, “Mommy open box.”
[222002200100] |The rest of the post describes what I think is one of the most important recent language experiments and how it addresses this paradox.
[222002220010] |<title>Emotions Caused by Your Brain</title>
[222002220020] |Yesterday, the New York Times ran a science article under the following heading: <a>In Pain and Joy of Envy, the Brain May Play a Role</a>.
[222002220030] |It is a very well-written and engaging article of the subject of envy, which is a fascinating emotion.
[222002220040] |The title, however, leaves something to be desired.
[222002220050] |It seems to imply that there was some doubt over whether the brain plays a role in envy.
[222002220060] |The modern scientific consensus is that the brain plays a role in all emotions.
[222002220070] |So why write this article?
[222002220080] |To tell the truth, the article doesn't fit the title very well: the article isn't really about proving a role for the brain in envy.
[222002220090] |A better title might have been "The Science of Envy."
[222002220100] |I suspect the editors chose the title because <a>it is well-known that people believe cognitive research more if you stick the word "brain" in a few places</a>.
[222002220110] |In journalistic parlance, neuroscience is a good hook.
[222002220120] |However, as a public service, and in probably a vain attempt to forestall future articles with titles such as "In Pain and Joy of love/hate/surprise/etc., the Brain May Play a Role," here are a list of emotions and psychological states (courtesy of <a>WordNet</a>) in which the brain certainly plays a role, to the extent we can be certain about anything:
[222002220130] |abashmentabhorrenceabsolutethresholdacidityacridityactivityaddictionaffectionagapeaggravationaggressionaimalarmanaphrodisiaangstanimusantagonismanxietyanxiousnessaphrodisiaappetiteardoraromaarousalassumptionastringenceattentionattitudeattributingauditoryperceptionawarenessawebadtemperbeholdingbeliefbelligerencebeneficencebenevolencebitterblessednessbloodlustbodingboldboredombravebreakdownbrightnessconstancycapricecaringcautiouschafechagrinchillchromesthesiaclass feelingcogitationcoldcold feetcolorconstancycoloredhearingcomfortzonecompetenceconcentrationconceptconditioned responseconfidenceconscienceconsiderationconstancyconstrictionconstructionconstruingcontemplationcontrastcopulationcowardlycravingcreepscuriositycuriouscutaneoussensationdeficitdeliberationdesiredespisaldetectiondevotiondifferencethresholddiffidencediscombobulationdiscomfiturediscontentmentdisgruntlementdispleasuredissatisfactiondreaddreamdrivendudgeondysphoriaecstasyedginesseducationelationembarrasembarrassmentsmentembittermentemotionalstateempathyemulationenamorednessengrossmentenmityestimateeuphoriaexhilarationexpectationexuberancefacerecognitionfacultyfaintnessfearfedfeelingfinish[winetasting]fitfondnessfondregardfragilityfrissonfrustrationfundamentalfurygaietygenerositygloomgloomygratefulnessgratificationgratitudehackleshankeringhappinessharassmentharmonichatredhealthheartheartstringshomesicknesshorrorhuffinesshumilityhunchhysteriaideaimageimmersionimpatientimpressionincautiousincenseincentiveindignationinfirmityinfuriationinsecurityintentioninterestinterpretationinterpretingintimidationintoxicationintrospectionintuitionsirascibilityireitchingjealousyjitterinessjndjoyjubilancejudgementjudgmentlazylecherousnesslemonletdownlevitylibidolimenlividitylonginglovelovesicknessloyaltymaleficencemalevolencemalicemalodormaskingmeeknessmelodymisanthropymisocaineamisogamymisogynymisologymisoneismmisopediamittelschmerzmotivationmotivemurderousnessmusicmusic[music]musicalperceptionmusicofthespheresmusingsmusknationalismnaughtyneednervousniffnostalgianymphomaniaobjectiveobjectiveorgoalobjectrecognitionopenopinionopticalfusionoutlookovertonepain>twingepainthresholdpanicpassionpatientperspectivepessimismphantom limb painpiecepiningpins and needlespiqueplanpointofviewponderingpositionpressureprojectionprotectivenessproudprurienceprurituspruritusanipruritusvulvaepuppylovepurposequalityofliferacketradiancerationalizedreactionreasoningreflectionregardrelishrepresentationresentmentreserveresponsiblesadnesssaltsatyriasisscarescentscruplesecurityseetheself-depreciationself-disgustselfishsensation>odorsensesensualityserenityserioussexinesssexualdesireshameshamefacednessshapeconstancyshynesssidesinkingsizeconstancysmellsoftspotsomesthesiasound>tonesourspeculationspeechperceptionstage frightstancestatestomachsupposingsurmisingsuspensesuspicioussweetsweettoothsympathysynesthesiataste>tangtemperature>warmthtemptationtendernessterrorthinkingthoughttickletimidtimidnesstingletitillationto stop lovingtoleranttonetopognosiatouchtrepidationtriumphtrusttwingeumbrageuneasinessunhappinessupurgeurticationvanillavelleityviewviewpointvigilvindictivenessvisionvisualspacewakefulnesswarmthweaknesswhistfulwhitenoisewillieswishfulnesswishingwistfulnesswithdrawnworworshipwrath
[222002230010] |<title>New Experiment: Learning Verbs</title>
[222002230020] |I run a graduate student research workshop for students in the linguistics and psychology departments here at Harvard.
[222002230030] |We did a segment on word-learning.
[222002230040] |<a>One of our guest-speakers</a> started her presentation by pointing out that the field often things of word learning as learning nouns, despite the fact that there are <a>many other types of words</a> that probably have to be learned differently.
[222002230050] |The experiments at the Cognition &Language Laboratory have been guilty of this oversight (<a>this one for example</a>).
[222002230060] |I'm happy to say that this flaw has been rectified.
[222002230070] |Late last week I posted <a>the GorpTest</a>, in which you can try to learn new verbs.
[222002230080] |I'll be writing more on this topic in the near future.
[222002230090] |In the meantime, <a>please participate</a>.
[222002240010] |<title>What the Stimulus Package Means for Science</title>
[222002240020] |When the <a>American Recovery and Reinvestment Act</a> went through Congress, I assumed my favorite provisions would be stripped out.
[222002240030] |Instead, <a>the Senate increased the funding for NIH</a> to over $6 billion.
[222002240040] |By the time President Obama signed the law, the total influx into NIH had reached $10.4 billion over two years (out of an annual budget of $29 billion, which has been flat for 6 years).
[222002240050] |I'm not sure when the extra $2 billion for NSF entered the bill, but that money is on its way as well.
[222002240060] |Readers of this blog know that this is <a>a major change in US policy</a>.
[222002240070] |I had hopes for this administration, but that this is actually a lot more than I hoped for.
[222002240080] |Once the celebration is done, though, it's important to note that even if these funding increases become permanent, it will at best help us keep pace with the rest of the world, <a>rather than continuing to fall behind the leaders</a>.
[222002240090] |It's certainly not enough to guarantee America's future as the leading producer of science.
[222002240100] |<a>This New York Times article has more information</a> on how the science stimulus moneys will bespent.
[222002250010] |<title>Obama's Science Budget</title>
[222002250020] |The administration has released a previous of its proposed budget.
[222002250030] |After <a>years of stagnant funding for research</a>, there are obviously many people interested to know whether <a>Obama will live up to promises of investing in science</a>.
[222002250040] |There is no centralized science directive, so it is hard to evaluate the budget as a whole.
[222002250050] |However, what I can find looks promising.
[222002250060] |<a>The NSF 2010 budget</a> includes a $950 million (16%) increase over 2008.
[222002250070] |<a>NASA is similarly getting a $1.5 billion dollar (9%) raise</a> over 2008 levels.
[222002250080] |This is of course on top of large supplements to both programs through the <a>Stimulus Package</a>.
[222002250090] |The National Institutes of Health (NIH) <a>is unfortunately buried within a larger department</a>, and there isn't enough information to evaluate it.
[222002250100] |The Department of Energy appears to be getting <a>increased research funding</a>, but I wasn't able to track down exact numbers.
[222002250110] |Concerns about the deficit aside, after so many years of depressing, damaging budgets, it is hard not to be excited.
[222002250120] |Someone at the top seems to actually care.
[222002260010] |<title>All Scientists Have Conflicts of Interest (Duh)</title>
[222002260020] |In a thoughtful and provocative piece in the The Wild Side blog at NYTimes.com, Stephen Quake <a>takes up the issue of conflicts of interest in research</a>.
[222002260030] |By "conflicts of interest," Quake means researchers who have a financial interest in the outcome of their research.
[222002260040] |It is becoming increasingly common for academic researchers to partner with businesses in developing new technology. 
[222002260050] |He raises many important and interesting questions, some of which I'll write about in the future.
[222002260060] |One point that deserves much more space was the fact that many researchers have conflicts of interest even when they aren't selling a product:
[222002260070] |Interestingly, it is not unusual for basic scientists with no commercial relationships to be dependent on grants for their salaries and therefore have a significant personal financial interest in preserving their grants.
[222002260080] |Although COI experts have assured me that that this is not a conflict that needs to be managed, I must confess that I have some difficulty with the distinction they are trying to draw.
[222002260090] |Who is under greater temptation to bias the results of their research: the financially comfortable academic entrepreneur, or the ivory tower scientist who may not be able to pay his mortgage if his grant is not renewed?
[222002260100] |What may not be clear to the casual reader is that research agencies like the NIH prefer to give grants to researchers with a history of success.
[222002260110] |Last time they gave you a grant, did you publish a series of important papers, or did all your projects end in failure?
[222002260120] |In the latter case, you may be out of a job. 
[222002260130] |Nobody Sees Your Data But You 
[222002260140] |A baseball player is paid largely on his ability to perform on the field.
[222002260150] |If you are known as a power-hitter, you better produce home-runs. 
[222002260160] |The major difference between a baseball star and a research star, is that a baseball player's performance is public.
[222002260170] |Everybody at the game knows whether he hit a home run or struck out. 
[222002260180] |In contrast, the only person with access to a researcher's data is the researcher.
[222002260190] |It is as if a baseball player went to an automatic batting cage where nobody was looking, took a few swings, came out and told the team management how many home runs he hit and was paid accordingly. 
[222002260200] |A number of non-scientists I've talked to seem to be under the impression that during peer review, the reviewers check the data.
[222002260210] |They don't.
[222002260220] |They can't, really.
[222002260230] |In my experiments, I ask people questions and mark down whether they got it right or wrong.
[222002260240] |The reviewers weren't in the testing room with me, so they simply have to take my word for it. 
[222002260250] |Now let's say you are a researcher and it's time to renew your grant.
[222002260260] |You've been swinging and missing -- your data are uninterpretable or simply uninteresting.
[222002260270] |The easiest way to make the data more interesting is to "fix" them. 
[222002260280] |All Scientists Have Conflicts of Interest 
[222002260290] |Ultimately, all scientists have a conflict of interest, because our promotions and salaries are ultimately based on the research we have produced, whether directly or indirectly.
[222002260300] |And there are many non-financial incentives.
[222002260310] |Nobody wants to be seen as a failure. 
[222002260320] |I don't believe many people are simply making up their data (though it happens).
[222002260330] |A larger concern is selectively reporting results.
[222002260340] |Suppose you are in the situation in which you have run four different experiments.
[222002260350] |Three of them support one conclusion, but the fourth supports the opposite conclusion. 
[222002260360] |You simply can't publish that.
[222002260370] |No journal will take a paper showing conflicting results.
[222002260380] |You can either give up on the project and admit to having wasted perhaps 2-3 years of your life.
[222002260390] |You can continue doing research to try to figure out why you are getting conflicting results, perhaps succeeding, perhaps not, but in any case spending time and money you might not have.
[222002260400] |Or you can write a paper about the first three experiments and forget about the "bad" experiment.
[222002260410] |Some people take the latter route.
[222002260420] |This is <a>best-known in pharmaceutical research</a>, but it happens everywhere. 
[222002260430] |Even worse, perhaps you run an experiment, the results of which challenge the theory for you which you are known, an experiment which challenges the validity of your life's work.
[222002260440] |Who really wants to publish that? 
[222002260450] |What to Do 
[222002260460] |Quake's point is that you can't eliminate conflicts of interest from science.
[222002260470] |A baseball player needs to win games.
[222002260480] |A researcher needs to publish.
[222002260490] |As long as this is true, baseball players will have an incentive to take steroids and researchers will have incentives to "improve" their work.
[222002260500] |Any proposed solution that ignores these basic facts is doomed to fail 
[222002260510] |Are Scientists Really Cheating? 
[222002260520] |This article might have looked really gloomy.
[222002260530] |My point is simply that everybody has the incentive to cheat, not that everybody does.
[222002260540] |In the course of your life, there will be a number of instances in which it would be in your financial interests to murder somebody.
[222002260550] |Still, most people don't murder. 
[222002260560] |It is popular in some circles to assume most people are fundamentally bad and will do anything they can get away with, but my experience -- professionally and personally -- is otherwise. 
[222002260570] |Moreover, academic fraud is generally not in one's long-term interests.
[222002260580] |Even if it isn't exposed, others will fail to replicate your results and your theories will be disproved.
[222002260590] |Again, for a researcher, ultimately the best thing for your career is to be right.
[222002260600] |And fraud won't help you with that. 
[222002260610] |(Image sourced from blog.springsource.com)
[222002270010] |<title>Experimental Pragmatics & Visa Problems</title>
[222002270020] |Experimental pragmatics is the science of language use.
[222002270030] |It's also a great conference held in Europe every year and a half or so.
[222002270040] |I'll be attending this spring to present a poster.
[222002270050] |Well, the poster is an excuse; mainly it is simply the conference for my field, and just about everybody who works on problems similar to the ones I work on will be there.
[222002270060] |I am excited about going to Europe for the conference (the other two I'm going to this spring are in Denver and in Davis, California), which is a good thing, since we may all be doing more of that in the future.
[222002270070] |This morning, the New York Times reports that <a>conference organizers are increasingly reluctant to hold their conferences in the United States</a>.
[222002270080] |The reason is a resurgence of visa problems for foreign researchers trying to enter America.
[222002270090] |Many will remember that this was a major problem post-9/11 and contributed to the precipitous fall of America's standing as a place for higher education.
[222002270100] |These issues improved somewhat in recent years but have mysteriously cropped up again in the last six months.
[222002270110] |The article uses no hard numbers to support its claims about an increase in visa processing times or the decrease in American-based conferences.
[222002270120] |Still, the decrease in US-based conferences makes sense; American visas are hard to get, and their availability has been unpredictable in recent years.
[222002280010] |<title>Can Peer Review Solve Conflicts of Interest?</title>
[222002280020] |As I wrote recently, <a>Stephen Quake has been writing about conflicts of interest in research</a> over at The Wild Side blog.
[222002280030] |He proposes solving these problems with peer review.
[222002280040] |<a>I like the article</a>, and he has many thoughtful things to say on the topic, but I don't really understand this proposal. 
[222002280050] |He doesn't give a lot of details as to how this would work.
[222002280060] |For instance: 
[222002280070] |When this bureaucracy asked me for a plan to manage conflicts in my own research, I wrote one that described all of the steps involved in peer review –and the COI committee sent it back as “too much.”
[222002280080] |In their view the process that scientific publications go through was more rigorous than necessary.
[222002280090] |This reads as if the committee thought it would be too much work for him, but it sounds like too much work for the peer reviewers.
[222002280100] |Peer reviewers are not professional peer reviewers: they are typically volunteers from within the community who review papers partly out of a sense of social responsibility.
[222002280110] |Any proposal for expanding peer review has to keep in mind that the reviewers might not want the extra responsibilities. 
[222002280120] |I have not seen his proposal, but I'm not sure if it would work even in principle.
[222002280130] |As <a>I wrote previously</a>, nobody really knows what the data are but the researcher.
[222002280140] |Analyses can always be run in many different ways, potentially giving different results -- a problem whether your concern is conscious bias or unconscious bias.
[222002280150] |It's just not clear what peer review is supposed to do about that.
[222002290010] |<title>Scientists vs. Engineers</title>
[222002290020] |What is the difference between a scientist and an engineer?
[222002290030] |<a>Cowbirds in Love</a> boils it down to its essence:
[222002300010] |<title>Talking Robots</title>
[222002300020] |Farhad Manjoo has an article in Slate on <a>text-to-voice technology</a>.
[222002300030] |We've come a long way in making talking robots in recent years (does anybody remember the old Mac OS's terrible talking voice?), but the technology has a long way to go yet.
[222002300040] |The article has a good historical overview and some great sound clips.
[222002310010] |<title>Congress Considers Killing Open-Access Journals</title>
[222002310020] |It's often repeated that science thrives on the free exchange of ideas.
[222002310030] |Thus, the fact that it actually costs a lot of money to get access to scientific papers (<a>$146/year for Science alone</a>) has struck <a>more than one person as odd</a>.
[222002310040] |A recent movement has led to the creation of <a>open-access journals</a>, which do not charge access fees.
[222002310050] |This movement has gained traction at universities (<a>e.g., Harvard</a>) and also at government agencies.
[222002310060] |NIH recently required the researchers they fund to publish in journals which are either open-access or make their papers open-access within a year of publication.
[222002310070] |<a>Fortunately for the for-profit journal system</a>, Congress is considering <a>H.R. 801</a>, which would forbid NIH and other government agencies from implementing such policies.
[222002310080] |The conceit of the bill is that NIH is requiring researchers to give up their copyrights, though of course researchers hardly ever -- and, as far as I know, never -- retain the copyrights to their works.
[222002310090] |Publishers require the transfer of the copyright as a condition of publication.
[222002320010] |<title>Yes, HR 801 is about Open-Access Journals</title>
[222002320020] |<a>Stevan Harnad has questioned</a> some of the claims in <a>my last post</a>.
[222002320030] |I hate to say this, as a part-time semanticist, but Harnad's criticisms of the above post are mostly semantics.
[222002320040] |He did more accurately quote the letter of the NIH and Harvard policies (and I apologize for my sloppy wording), but I believe my formulation got much closer to the intent and impact<em></em> of these policies.
[222002320050] |Harnad points out that the NIH and Harvard policies do not mandate publishing in open-access journals; they simply mandate making publications open-access after a certain period of time.
[222002320060] |As far as I can tell, pretty much everybody -- <a>including Conyers</a>, the bill's sponsor, and probably Harnad -- understands that these policies hurt subscription-based journals.
[222002320070] |After all, it is very hard to sell access to something which is free.
[222002320080] |It might not have been clear from his comment, but Harnad supports free access to peer-reviewed research.
[222002320090] |His focus is not on open-access journals, however, so he has some stake in pointing out that there are other open-access models.
[222002320100] |I appreciate this point.
[222002320110] |Still, I think the key issue is that these papers still need to go through peer-review and publication, something <a>Harnad goes to pains to point out elsewhere</a>.
[222002320120] |Currently, we have two models: subscription-based journals, which pass on the costs of review and publication to the reader, and open-access journals, which pass on the costs to the author or a private foundation.
[222002320130] |If these policies make the subscription-based journals less profitable, then the open-access journals presumably become more competitive.
[222002320140] |Currently, open-access journals have several things working against them.
[222002320150] |For one thing, they (typically) cost the authors money.
[222002320160] |I have more than once wanted to submit a paper to the <a>Journal of Vision</a>, but I can't accord the $85/page publication costs.
[222002320170] |Also, the open-access journals are newer and less prestigious, and in academics, prestige of the journal can count for a great deal.
[222002320180] |If the open-access policies force subscription-based publishers to raise their own publication fees or go out of business, this presumably should help open-access journals .
[222002320190] |I used "presumably" a few times, and if there are good reasons to believe that policies like those of NIH and Harvard harm open-access journals and subscription journals alike, then I'd like to know about them.
[222002320200] |--One minor point about the distinction between for-profit and non-profit journals: Subscription-based journals, whether for-profit or non-profit, sell subscriptions and thus are paid for their role in publication.
[222002320210] |Thus, I'm not really sure what Harnad was getting at in pointing out that some non-profit journals also support Conyers' bill, which <a>is intended to support the subscription model</a>.
[222002340010] |<title>The Academic Job Market Tanks</title>
[222002340020] |"This is a year of no jobs."
[222002340030] |Ph.D.s are stacked up "like planes hovering over La Guardia. -- Catherine Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. 
[222002340040] |The above quote is taken from <a>a recent article in the New York Times</a>.
[222002340050] |Although people usually flock to graduate school in a down economy, the down economy means <a>fewer spots in graduate school</a>.
[222002340060] |This is just as well, it seems, if there are fewer jobs for graduating Ph.D.s. 
[222002340070] |The article is based mostly on anecdote, but the anecdotes match what I have seen as well.
[222002340080] |A graduate student from UT-Austin frets that more and more job searches have been pulled as universities announce hiring freezes.
[222002340090] |Two colleagues of mine who were on the market this year also reported jobs they had applied for disappearing.
[222002340100] |One has managed to find a post-doc position; the future of the other is uncertain. 
[222002340110] |For those who want numbers, there are a few in the article.
[222002340120] |It reports 15% drop in history department job searches and a 25% drop in the length of the American Mathematic Association's largest list of job postings. 
[222002340130] |In addition to the problems faced by people on the market, this is problematic for a country that wants to increase its intellectual output.
[222002340140] |Ph.D.s are long and hard and not worth it if there is no job at the end.
[222002340150] |Discouraging employment figures are not going to help <a>the president's goal of increasing our nation's supply of scientists and engineers</a>.
[222002340160] |To the extent that the work of historians and area-studies researchers informs policy, it seems we'd want to make sure there are employment prospects for humanities students as well. 
[222002340170] |Again, the Times has no numbers, but the article quoted a few discouraged undergraduates who are putting off graduate study (though frankly I don't think going straight from undergraduate to graduate programs is a good idea, anyway).
[222002340180] |Moreover, they point to Thomas Benton, a columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Eduction -- academia's trade journal -- who has been actively discouraging students from going into the humanities, arguing that it makes no sense unless you are wealthy or well-connected.
[222002340190] |I'm not sure undergraduates read the Chronicle, but the existence of that sentiment is troubling. 
[222002340200] |Ours is a knowledge-driven economy.
[222002340210] |Everybody seems to recognize that in the push to get more Americans to go to college.
[222002340220] |Hopefully, there will be professors there to teach them.
[222002350010] |<title>The Scientist as Parent</title>
[222002350020] |A few weeks ago, the New York Times carried an <a>alarmist and basically silly article about cognitive scientists studying their own children</a>.
[222002350030] |Alarmist because it suggested this is an ethically grey area.
[222002350040] |For the types of experiments they were talking about, there are no ethical issues.
[222002350050] |Their opening story was about Pawan Sinha spending a few hours videotaping his newborn baby's environment. 
[222002350060] |Silly, because observant parents have always been interested in what their children are thinking about how their babies develop from infants to walking, talking human beings.
[222002350070] |Muscian parents, I imagine, spend extra time singing to their babies.
[222002350080] |Artist parents no doubt are interested in their newborn's sense of creativity.
[222002350090] |The parental fascination of scientist parents often gets channeled into...well, science. 
[222002350100] |Renaisauce has just written a much more insightful and ultimately sweet essay about parental love from the perspective of a neuroscientist who is also a new parent.
[222002350110] |I won't quote from it, because <a>I recommend you read it in its entirety</a>. 
[222002350120] |(Picture of Darius Sinha borrowed from the New York Times)
[222002360010] |<title>Alzheimer's, Autism & the NCAA: Science News for 3/17</title>
[222002360020] |Do vaccines give Somalis autism?
[222002360030] |Can diabetes give you Alzheimer's?
[222002360040] |Does losing make you win?
[222002360050] |Anyone scanning the science news articles this week would know the answers to these questions. 
[222002360060] |First, Freakonomics has a discussion of a recent paper <a>showing that NCAA basketball teams are more likely to win</a> if they are 1 point behind at halftime than if they are 1 point ahead.
[222002360070] |It seems that when people are slightly behind in a game at halftime, they work even harder in the second half relative to people who are way behind, slightly ahead or way ahead. 
[222002360080] |Second, the New York Times (byline: Donald McNeil Jr.) discusses the <a>abnormally high rate of autism among Somali immigrants in Minneapolis</a>.
[222002360090] |The article gives several explanatory hypotheses (including a statistical fluke), but a lot of time is spent on the "possibility" that these cases of autism are caused by vaccinations.
[222002360100] |The fact that the article doesn't mention that <a>this is simply absurd</a> is glaring (though it does mention "some children" had autistic tendancies before being vaccinated).
[222002360110] |More interesting is that many of these kids appear to have had seizures, something which is mentioned only in passing. 
[222002360120] |Finally, Amanda Schaffer at Slate discusses the possible relationship between insulin and Alzheimer's (<a>Diabetes of the Brain: Is Alzheimer's disease actually a form of diabetes?</a>).
[222002370010] |<title>Are Web-Based Experiments Reliable? The Data Say 'Yes.'</title>
[222002370020] |After a few months, I'm back to the task of getting the <a>Video Test experiments</a> published.
[222002370030] |As I mentioned last year, the paper had run aground <a>partly due to reviewers' skepticism about Web-based experiments</a>.
[222002370040] |I sat down to improve the section of the paper that justifies using Web-based experiments.
[222002370050] |That required looking for other published experiments.
[222002370060] |I've done this haphazardly over the years, but this time I was much more systematic.
[222002370070] |I knew there were a fair number of published Web surveys, but I was surprised to discover there are many, many more published Web-based experiments than I thought.
[222002370080] |I also turned up a fairly large number of studies in which researchers directly compared Web-based and lab-based studies, typically finding the former to be as reliable as the latter.
[222002370090] |In fact, I found so much I almost felt silly writing the justification.
[222002370100] |It seems strange to be justifying what has become essentially a well-established method.
[222002370110] |In fact, many researchers who use write up Web-based experiments don't even bother to do so.
[222002370120] |The DataWithout further ado, here is a draft of that justification:
[222002370130] |Internet-based experiments have become increasingly popular in recent years, with at least 21% of APA journals having published at least one paper relying on Internet-based methods (Skitka &Sargis, 2006).
[222002370140] |In the cognitive and perceptual research, domains in which the methodology has been particularly productive include face perception (inter alia, Bestelmeyer, Jones, DeBruine, Little &Welling, in press; Boothroyd, Jones, Burt, Cornwell, Little, Tiddeman &Perrett, 2005; Feinberg, DeBruine, Jones &Little, 2008; Feinberg, Jones, DeBruine, Moore, Smith, Cornwell, Tiddeman, Boothroyd &Perrett, 2005; Fessler &Navarrete, 2003; Little, Burriss, Jones, DeBruine &Caldwell, 2008; Little, Jones &Burriss, 2007; Little, Jones, Burt &Berrett, 2007; Little, Jones &DeBruine, 2008; Little, Jones, DeBruine &Feinberg, 2008; Smith, Jones DeBruine &Little, in press; Welling, Jones &DeBruine, 2008; Wilson &Daly, 2004) and reaction-time based studies of implicit social biases (inter alia, Bar-Anan, Nosek &Vianello, in press; Graham, Haidt &Nosek, in press; Lindner &Nosek, 2009; Nosek &Hansen, 2008; Ranganath &Nosek, 2008; Schwartz, Vartanian, Nosek &Brownell, 2006).
[222002370150] |A number of researchers have directly compared the results of Internet-based and laboratory-based studies, finding that the former are highly reliable and the two methods produce similar results, both within and between subjects (Buchanan, T., &Smith, J. L., 2000; Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava &John, 2004; Linnman, Carlbring, Ahman, Anderesson &Andersson, 2004; McGraw, Tew, &Williams, 2000; Meyerson &Tryon, 2003; Ollesch, Heineken &Schulte, 2006; Srivastava, John, Gosling &Potter, 2003).
[222002370160] |Importantly for the present work, a recent study of VWM found converging results from Internet-based and Laboratory-based methods (Hartshorne, 2008).
[222002370170] |Bar-Anan, Y., Nosek, B. A., &Vianello, M. (in press).
[222002370180] |The sorting paired features task: A measure of association strengths.
[222002370190] |Experimental Psychology.
[222002370200] |Bestelmeyer, P. E. G., Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L. M., Little, A. C., &Welling, L. L. M. (in press).
[222002370210] |Face aftereffects demonstrate interdependent processing of expressions and the invariant characteristics of sex and race.
[222002370220] |Visual Cognition.
[222002370230] |Boothroyd, L. G., Jones, B. C., Burt, D. M., Cornwell, R. E., Little, A. C., Tiddeman, B. P., &Perrett, D. I. (2005).
[222002370240] |Facial masculinity is related to perceived age but not perceived health.
[222002370250] |Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 417-431.
[222002370260] |Buchanan, T., &Smith, J. L. (1999).
[222002370270] |Using the Internet for psychological research: Personality testing on the World Wide Web.
[222002370280] |British Journal of Psychology, 90, 125-144.
[222002370290] |Feinberg, D. R., DeBruine, L. M., Jones, B. C., &Little, A. C. (2008).
[222002370300] |Correlated preferences for men’s facial and vocal masculinity.
[222002370310] |Evolution and Human Behavior, 29, 233-241.
[222002370320] |Feinberg, D. R., Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L. M., Moore, F. R., Smith, M. J. L., Cornwell, R. E., Tiddeman, B. P., Boothroyd, L. G., Perrett.
[222002370330] |(2005).
[222002370340] |The voice and face of woman: One ornament that signals quality?
[222002370350] |Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 398-408.
[222002370360] |Fessler, D. M. T., &Navarrete, C. D. (2003).
[222002370370] |Domain-specific variation in disgust sensitivity across the menstrual cycle.
[222002370380] |Evolution and Human Behavior, 24, 406 –417.
[222002370390] |Gosling, S. D., Vazire, S., Srivastava, S. &John, O. P. (2004).
[222002370400] |Should we trust web-based studies?
[222002370410] |A comparitive analysis of six preconceptions about Internet questionnaires.
[222002370420] |American Psychologist, 49, 93-104.
[222002370430] |Graham, J., Haidt, J., &Nosek, B. A. (in press).
[222002370440] |Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations.
[222002370450] |Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
[222002370460] |Hartshorne, J. K. (2008).
[222002370470] |Visual working memory capacity and proactive interference.
[222002370480] |PloS ONE 3(7): e2716.
[222002370490] |Lindner, N. M., &Nosek, B. A. (2009).
[222002370500] |Alienable speech: Ideological variations in the application of free-speech principles.
[222002370510] |Political Psychology, 30 67-92.
[222002370520] |Linnman, C., Carlbring, P., Ahman, A., Andersson, H., &Andersson, G. (2004).
[222002370530] |The Stroop effect on the Internet.
[222002370540] |Computers in Human Behavior, 22, 448-455.
[222002370550] |Little, A. C., Burriss, R. P., Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L. M., &Caldwell, C. C. (2008).
[222002370560] |Social influence in human face preference: men and women are influenced for long-term but not short-term attractiveness decisions.
[222002370570] |Evolution and Human Behavior, 29, 140-146.
[222002370580] |Little, A. C., Jones, B. C., &Burriss, R. P. (2007).
[222002370590] |Preferences for masculinity in male bodies change across the menstrual cycle.
[222002370600] |Hormones and Behavior, 52, 633-639.
[222002370610] |Little, A. C., Jones, B. C., Burt, D. M., &Perrett, D. I. (2007).
[222002370620] |Preferences for symmetry in faces change across the menstrual cycle.
[222002370630] |Biological Psychology, 76, 209-216.
[222002370640] |Little, A. C., Jones, B. C., &DeBruine, L. M. (2008).
[222002370650] |Preferences for variation in masculinity in real male faces change across the menstrual cycle.
[222002370660] |Personality and Individual Differences, 45: 478-482.
[222002370670] |Little, A. C., Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L. M., &Feinberg, D. R. (2008).
[222002370680] |Symmetry and sexual-dimorphism in human faces: Interrelated preferences suggest both signal quality.
[222002370690] |Behavioral Ecology, 19: 902-908.
[222002370700] |Meyerson, P. &Tryon, W. W. (2003).
[222002370710] |Validating Internet research: a test of the psychometric equivalence of Internet and in-person samples.
[222002370720] |Behavior Research Methods, Instruments &Computers, 35, 614-620.
[222002370730] |Nosek, B. A., &Hansen, J. J. (2008).
[222002370740] |The associations in our heads belong to us: Searching for attitudes and knowledge in implicit evaluation.
[222002370750] |Cognition and Emotion, 22, 553-594.
[222002370760] |Heike Ollesch, Edgar Heineken, Frank P. Schulte (2006).
[222002370770] |Physical or virtual presence of the experimenter: Psychological online-experiments in different settings International Journal of Internet Science, 1 (1), 71-81
[222002370780] |Ranganath, K. A., &Nosek, B. A. (2008).
[222002370790] |Implicit attitude generalization occurs immediately, explicit attitude generalization takes time.
[222002370800] |Psychological Science, 19, 249-254.
[222002370810] |Schwartz, M. B., Vartanian, L. R., Nosek, B. A., &Brownell, K. D. (2006).
[222002370820] |The influence of one's own body weight on implicit and explicit anti-fat bias.
[222002370830] |Obesity, 14(3), 440-447
[222002370840] |Smith, F. G., Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L. M., &Little, A. C. (in press).
[222002370850] |Interactions between masculinity-femininity and apparent health in face preferences.
[222002370860] |Behavioral Ecology.
[222002370870] |Srivistava, S., John, O. P., Gosling, S. D., &Potter, J. (2003).
[222002370880] |Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: Set like plaster or persistent change?
[222002370890] |Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1041-1053.
[222002370900] |Welling, L. L. M., Jones, B. C., &DeBruine, L. M. (2008).
[222002370910] |Sex drive is positively associated with women’s preferences for sexual dimorphism in men’s and women’s faces.
[222002370920] |Personality and Individual Differences, 44(1): 161-170.
[222002370930] |Wilson, M., &Daly, M. (2004).
[222002370940] |Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future?
[222002370950] |Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 271, S177-S179.
[222002380010] |<title>Why Aren't More Kids Studying Behavioral Sciences?</title>
[222002380020] |The New York Times has a profile of <a>a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search</a> (for those of you who missed the change, that's the renamed Westinghouse competition).
[222002380030] |Newspaper articles -- by style less than by design -- are often cryptic, and this one notes in a single-sentence paragraph towards the end that the profiled student's project is "the only behavioral science project among the 40 finalists." 
[222002380040] |The article has no more to say on the subject, so we are left to guess what the author found so remarkable about this.
[222002380050] |It probably does not directly reflect a bias of the judges.
[222002380060] |I haven't been to a science fair recently, but I suspect that now, as always, they are dominated by chemistry and biology.
[222002380070] |When our nations students are steered towards science, the behavioral sciences are an afterthought. 
[222002380080] |This is unfortunate.
[222002380090] |Certainly, we need more talented people entering medical research or developing new energy sources, but recent events also highlight the need for advancements in market forecasting (predict human behavior) and regulatory schema (control human behavior) -- just to name a few vexing behavioral science problems.
[222002390010] |<title>Thinking outside the circle</title>
[222002390020] |I'm currently at the CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference.
[222002390030] |I'll start blogging the most interesting reports soon, but at the moment I'm too busy conferencing to actually write about the conference.
[222002390040] |In the meantime, in honor of the conference, I give you this slide from GraphJam:<a><img/></a>
[222002400010] |<title>Baseball Models</title>
[222002400020] |The Red Sox season opener was delayed yesterday by rain.
[222002400030] |In honor of Opening Day 2.0 (this afternoon), I point you to an interesting piece in the Times about <a>statistical simulations in baseball</a>.
[222002400040] |According to the article, the top simulator available to the public is <a>Diamond Mind</a>.
[222002410010] |<title>Should Universities Have Standards?</title>
[222002410020] |This is the question asked by the <a>Bologna Process</a>, an alliance of some higher education authorities.
[222002410030] |The question itself is a bit of Bologna, since, at least in the United States, there is an accreditation process that ensures some minimal standards for higher education.
[222002410040] |For those who believe that is a low bar, keep in mind that some institutions fail to reach even that standard (cf <a>Michael "Heckuva-Job" Brown's law school</a>).
[222002410050] |The Bologna Process have something more aggressive in mind: <a>"quality assurance" and "easily readable and comparable degrees."</a>
[222002410060] |As described in <a>a recent New York Times article</a>, this involves establishing "what students must learn" rather than simply "defining degrees by the courses taken or the credits earned":
[222002410070] |“Go to a university catalog and look at the degree requirements for a particular discipline,” Mr. Adelman [education policy expert] said.
[222002410080] |“It says something like, ‘You take Anthropology 101, then Anthro 207, then you have a choice of Anthro 310, 311, or 312.
[222002410090] |We require the following courses, and you’ve got to have 42 credits.’
[222002410100] |That means absolutely nothing.” 
[222002410110] |The new approach, he said, would detail specific skills to be learned: “If you’re majoring in chemistry, here is what I expect you to learn in terms of laboratory skills, theoretical knowledge, applications, the intersection of chemistry with other sciences, and broader questions of environment and forensics.” 
[222002410120] |The idea, as I understand it, is to help prospective students choose the best schools and to help prospective employers evaluate applicants.
[222002410130] |Although I recognize this is a problem in need of a solution, I just don't see how this is supposed to work.
[222002410140] |Imagine somebody wanted to set up standards for college football teams, in order to allow prospects to better compare potential schools and also to allow pro football scouts better evaluate college talent.
[222002410150] |You can define football fundamentals and even develop a test for them, but if you want to evaluate both <a>Michael Oher</a> and the left tackle at the local community college by the same standards, they will be either trivially easy or so steep as to "fail" the vast majority of college football players.
[222002410160] |Academics has the same issues.
[222002410170] |Even leaving aside the fact that different colleges attract students of different abilities, the average student at one state school I know puts in about 5-6 hours of studying per week.
[222002410180] |At other schools, that's the number of hours per course.
[222002410190] |The amount you are expected to learn is vastly different.
[222002410200] |It's also not clear how you would deal with emerging disciplines.
[222002410210] |Just looking at my own corner of academia, not long ago, few undergraduate schools had neuroscience courses.
[222002410220] |A handful of schools (Brown &Johns Hopkins being obvious examples) have "cognitive science" degrees.
[222002410230] |My <a>alma mater</a> had psychology, neuroscience, and "biopsychology" -- a blend of the two former.
[222002410240] |MIT has one department cellular, systems and computational neuroscience, along with cognitive psychology (clinical and social psychology are absent).
[222002410250] |In contrast, some years back Harvard had the now-disbanded Department of Social Relations, consisting of social psychology, social anthropology and sociology.
[222002410260] |How can we define one set of standards that would apply to all those different departments?
[222002410270] |Perhaps it is exactly this multitude of department structures that so frustrates the folks at the Bologna Process, but I'm not sure there is an alternative.
[222002410280] |The late 20th century saw incredible growth and turmoil in the social and neurosciences, and nobody is quite sure what is the appropriate way of carving up the subject matter.
[222002410290] |Both the Harvard and MIT strategies have something to recommend them, but they are polar opposites.
[222002410300] |In the end, I'm just not convinced there is a problem.
[222002410310] |Ultimately, what employers care about is not the quality of the employee's education, but the quality of his/her work product.
[222002410320] |So maybe that's what we should be evaluating.