Join the Club!

Still subscribed to this old course blog? Nice.

So, I'm trying to start up a school club -- the "Owning Our Ignorance" club -- devoted to fun and logic, in that order. I've put up a blog for it over here.

Check it out. Please join if you're interested.

Goodbye to Yesterday...

In case you haven't checked yet, your grades are now posted. Enjoy your summer!

Own Your Ignorance

Here's an excerpt from a podcast I listen to called Jordan, Jesse GO! Two guys in their twenties are jovially discussing a favorite topic of mine: owning your ignorance.

Other sincerely awesome stuff from them is available at Maximum Fun.

News You Can Use

Here are some links on advertising and news. The first is about the underlying intellectual dishonesty in even the most honest of ad campaigns. By the way, if you're into advertising, that entire blog is great. I'm a bit biased, though, since I used to work for Bob Garfield.

The second is a radio interview with the director of FactCheck.org, a website devoted to debunking claims in political ads. I also used to work with the guy who interviewed FactCheck's director. Yup, I'm a pretty big deal.

Now for some news stuff. Lots of people worry about conservative or liberal news media bias. But there are several interesting biases that are much less talked about. Here's a discussion of the bias toward anything that's dangerous.

What's so important about news anyway? Here's an interesting argument against caring so much about current events.

Penguin Digestion Experts? You Bet!

So you didn't believe me when I said that there are experts on the subject of penguin digestion? Oh, you did? Fine, well, I'll prove it to you, anyway. Here are some academic articles on the topic:

• Adjustments of gastric pH, motility and temperature during long-term preservation of stomach contents in free-ranging incubating king penguins from a 2004 issue of Journal of Experimental Biology
  
• Feeding Behavior of Free-Ranging King Penguins (Aptenodytes Patagonicus) from a 1994 issue of Ecology

Of course, no list would be complete without the often-cited, groundbreaking 1985 Ornis Scandinavica article:

• Differential Digestion of Fish and Squid in Jackass Penguins Spheniscus demersus

Perhaps my favorite, though, is the following:

• Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation from a 2003 issue of Polar Biology
  

If any of these articles are above your head (I think they're all above mine!), you might like this, uh, simpler video demonstration of penguin digestion.

Attend or Die

Group presentations begin on Friday. I mentioned this in class, but just in case...

Attendance is mandatory for the group presentations on Friday (5/2/07), Monday (5/5/07), and Wednesday (5/7/07). It's the only time I'll be a stickler for it. Basically, I want you to show respect for the other groups presenting.

If you don't attend on either the days your group isn't presenting (and your absence isn't excused), your own personal presentation grade will drop. Each day you don't attend will lower your grade by a full letter grade.

One last thing: be sure to keep the presentations under 15 minutes. A 10-minute presentation is ideal, so we can have time for a short question-and-answer session afterwards.

Pre-Writing, Post-Writing, Writing-Writing

Today's dinosaur comic is a combo of our last two topics: writing and advertising!

(Click on the comic to enlarge)


Oh, so you want some non-web-comic content? Fine.

Here are some tips on writing philosophy papers. The first one's a great basic guideline, and the second one's a little more advanced.

BS

Here's the video of Jon Stewart interviewing Harry Frankfurt about his book On Bullshit.


What do you think? Is not caring about whether you're telling the truth worse than deliberately lying?

I'm The Special-est

First, here's a link to the article we discussed in class about how The Secret is really wishful thinking run amok.

OK, now that we're discussing psychological impediments, we're going to dive into one of my favorite topics: I'M-SPECIAL-ism. Psychological research has repeatedly shown that most Americans overestimate their own abilities. This is one of the biggest hurdles to proper reasoning: the natural tendency to think that we're smarter--or more powerful, or prettier, or whatever--than we really are.

One of my favorite blogs is Overcoming Bias. Their mission statement is sublimely anti-I'M-SPECIAL-ist:

"How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us that we are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing."

This may sound insulting, but one of the goals of this class is getting us to recognize that we're not as smart as we think we are. All of us. You. Me. That guy. You again.

So in the upcoming weeks, at least, I hope you'll join me in my campaign to end I'M-SPECIAL-ism.

Pimply Stress

This mini-article on acne and anxiety raises a combo platter of questions relevant to what we're going over in class.

1) Reverse causation: Does acne cause stress, or does stress cause acne?
2) Questionable statistics: Do you trust the stat that students were 23 percent more likely to experience breakouts around the time of a test? Is it a good study? A reliable source? An undemanding stat?
3) Questionable use of statistics: If the above statistic is true, is it reasonable to conclude that anxiety causes acne? Or is there another plausible explanation?

What say you?