citing sources

If you choose to paste text into your blog, you must cite the source. I will make an a second announcement in class to this effect and push back grading until this Tuesday.

Any text that comes straight from a source without a citation will be a basis for giving a zero for the blog grade for this first grading section, so I highly recommend going back and editing and including links to your sources.

This may seem like I'm being mean, but trust me, I'm really not. Read the university policy on plagiarism if you think so.

links

Here are a couple of resource links:

The Daily Show

A useful program for capturing online content:
Snagit

If you need to buy videos of ABC news programs you might have seen:
ABC News Store

I'll check and see what sorts of videos are available from the library.

Don't forget to do today's mission: Find a news story/editorial that contains at least one fallacy. If you do more, that's great, because later I'll ask you to do more. Stories that descibe fallacies of others are okay, but I'd prefer stories/editorials that are fallacious.

Reminder

Some quick comments:

Make sure you bring in some of your sources for your talk on Friday's class.

In your blogs, please tell me what you thought of today's videos.

In theory, I'll be doing blog grading tonight and tomorrow, so if you have some last minute things you'd like to blog about to bring your participation up to par, now would be the time.

See you in class on Friday.

Books for you and for me

If you wish to use PowerPoint for your group talk, you must first purchase and read "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" (one copy to a group is fine).

It can be purchased here:

Edward Tufte Books

The books I'm reading/have read to prep for this class are:

A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, Richard Dawkins

The Illusion of Conscious Will, Daniel Wegner

The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker

On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt

Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders, Jamie Whyte

Reading for Monday

On Monday I'm going to go a little off the class's mandate and discuss some reasons behind why people behave in weird ways or come to believe weird things.

Here are some articles I'd like you to read for Monday's class:

Stanford Prison Experiment

Wikipedia Article: Stanford Prison Experiment

Wikipedia Article: Milgram Experiment

Milgram Experiment: Perils of Authority

Wikipedia Article: Asch Conformity Experiments

Wikipedia Aricle: Mind Control

Tetris and the mind

I can remember reading about a study that used a PET scan to measure brain activity and compared the levels of glucose use when people started playing tetris, to when they became an expert. Experts, used less glucose, and so perhaps less of their brain when they were functioning at a higher level.

To me this is another idea that flies in the face of the suspicious 10% of the brain idea.

Here's an article (not the one I orginally read, but just as good) about the study

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/tetris.html

Tell me in your blog if you've had a video game induced hypnagogic hallucination (those crazy half-dreams you have before going to sleep).

Shafer Commission

Here's a (short) Wikipedia article about the "Shafer Commission" , the report I said that Richard Nixon commissioned about marijuana and it's use.

Shafer Commission

Tell me what you think about the idea of whether policy should be based on scientific standards or on ethical/moral ones or some combination of the two?