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David McGavock

Species diversity refutes the theory of evolution | PostIndependent.com - 1 views

www.postindependent.com/...1022&parentprofile=1077

opinion critical_thinking information_literacy evaluate evolution theory

shared by David McGavock on 12 May 12 - No Cached
  • Species diversity refutes the theory of evolution
  • Somehow, I always understood that the concept of evolution was the proof that there are no miracles.
  • Evolution presupposes that somehow some accidentally formed primordial soup
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the universe had a point origin extremely hot and of incredible speed.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      Changing topics - now we're on to saying that there is an infinite supply of fuel burn. Talk about spending (consuming) above our means...
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      To say that a miracle is outside of science or that science cannot see the miracle is uninformed.
  • oil is not a “fossil fuel” and there is some process deep within our planet that is producing it.
  • volution was a foundational belief of Hitler
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      The belief in evolution is the "cause" of nazi germany? I think not.
  • That understanding destroys the leverage politicians use to scare us into the idea that we are running out of oil.
  • incredible complexity deeply challenges any idea that it is the result of spontaneous generation.
  • When you compare that time against the $14 trillion-plus of the U.S. debt, it is comparatively a short time.
  • The rest of us are also somehow sub-human and must be conquered and/or killed
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      And the arabs are fervent believers in evolution???
  • The concept of evolution is an effort to demonstrate that there is no God. That being the case, there are no eternal consequences. Evil is just what the government says it is.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      Evolution = no god = no eternal consequences = evil government. I'm not sure how all this ties together.
  • one thing that did not come into existence without a purpose and a creator.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      Christianity doesn't have the patent on creation. All faiths have a creation story describing causes.
  • David McGavock on 12 May 12
     
    "Species diversity refutes the theory of evolution"
David McGavock

Child Development Research - 1 views

www.childdevelopmentmedia.com/hild-development-research.html

thinking critical_thinking lowest common denominator resources child development research

shared by David McGavock on 04 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 04 Jan 12
     
    "Child Development Research Child Development Videos » History, Theory & Research » Child Development Research Child development research encompasses a broad range of topics, and included here are titles illustrating some of the many branches of developmental psychology and child development theory. Methods of research and observation have changed dramatically in the past century, allowing for vast amounts of new information to be compiled and assessed. Our collective knowledge of how children grow has grown exponentially, thanks to researchers from around the world. Titles in this section offer an in-depth look at this new and compelling research, and the lives of the individuals who founded them. "
David McGavock

Elke Weber - The Earth Institute - Columbia University - 2 views

www.earth.columbia.edu/...2329

information_literacy evaluate critical_thinking crap detection resources choice environment

shared by David McGavock on 18 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Currently, Weber is focusing the majority of her time on two very different, but crucial issues: “… environmental decisions, in particular responses to climate change and climate variability, and financial decisions, for example pension savings.” 
  • Weber is past president of both the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and Society for Mathematical Psychology, and she is the current president of the Society for Neuroeconomics.
  • Her areas of expertise include cognitive and affective processes in judgment and choice, cross-cultural issues in management, environmental decision making and policy, medical decision making, and risk management.
  • David McGavock on 18 Dec 11
     
    "Working at the intersection of psychology and economics, Weber is an expert on behavioral models of judgment and decision making under risk and uncertainty. Recently, she has been investigating psychologically appropriate ways to measure and model individual and cultural differences in risk taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental issues. She describes her research as follows: "I try to gain an understanding and appreciation of decision making at a broad range of levels of analysis, which is not easy, given that each level requires different theories, methods and tools. So at the micro end of the continuum, I study how basic psychological processes like attention, emotion and memory (and their representation in the brain) influence preference and choice. At the macro end of the continuum, I think about how policy makers may want to present policy initiatives to the public to make them maximally effective. This range of topics and methods is challenging, but at least in my mind the different levels of analysis inform and complement each other." "
David McGavock

John Seely Brown & Cognitive Apprenticeship - 1 views

www.lifecircles-inc.com/...Brown.html

cognition psychology thinking apprenticeship coach

shared by David McGavock on 03 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Brown's work on cognitive apprenticeship evolved from the work of Lave on situated learning.
  • Learners enter a culture of practice. Acquisition, development and application of cognitive tools in a learning domain is based on activity in learning and knowledge. Enculturation (social interaction) and context (learning environment) are powerful components of learning in this model.
  • In traditional classroom approaches, the teacher's thinking processes are usually invisible and operate outside of conscious awareness, even for the teacher. The goal of cognitive apprenticeship is to make the thinking processes of a learning activity visible to both the students and the teacher.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The legitimacy of prior learning and knowledge of new students is respected, and is drawn upon as scaffolding in tasks which initially seem unfamiliar or difficult to learners.
  • Cognitive apprenticeship can be especially effective when teaching complex, cognitive skills such as reading comprehension, essay writing, and mathematical problem solving.
  • David McGavock on 03 Apr 11
     
    Theories of Learning in Educational Psychology John Seely Brown: Cognitive Apprenticeship
  • David McGavock on 03 Apr 11
     
    An approach to teaching that leads with active questioning.
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 0 views

jetpress.org/campa.htm

Barber information_literacy critical skills evaluate serendipity

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept.
  • Barbano (1968: 65) notices that one of Merton’s constant preoccupations is with language and the definition of concepts and recognizes that the function of the latter is for him anything but ornamental.
  • Merton proposes an articulated technical language now widely used by sociologists and is perfectly aware of the strategic importance of this work.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • Walpole tried to illustrate the concept of serendipity with other examples, but basically failed to do it in an unequivocal way.
  • It was in the 1930s that Merton first came upon the concept-and-term of serendipity in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, he discovered that the word had been coined by Walpole, and was based on the title of the fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which “were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • As Rob Norton (2002) recognizes: “The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.” In this way, the combined etymological and sociological quest began that resulted in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • it was to serve as a propedeutic to Merton’s seminal work – On the Shoulders of Giants, acronymised to OTSOG and published in 1965.
  • Merton provides interesting statistics to illustrate how quickly the word had spread since 1958. By that time, serendipity had been used in print only 135 times. But between 1958 and 2000, serendipity had appeared in the titles of 57 books. Furthermore, the word was used in newspapers 13,000 times during the 1990s and in 636,000 documents on the World Wide Web in 2001.
  • The Italian version was published in 2002, after Barber’s death. Two years later and a year after Merton’s death, we could welcome the appearance of the original English version.
  •  Now let us focus on an analysis of the content of the book and its theoretical consequences, that is, on the history of this term-and-concept and its significance to the sociology of science.
  • The first few chapters elucidate the origin of the word, beginning with the 1557 publication of The Three Princes of Serendip in Venice.
  •  In a letter to Horace Mann dated January 28, 1754, Walpole described an amazing discovery as being “of that kind which I call Serendipity.”
  • in 1833, Walpole’s correspondence with Horace Mann was published.
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  • Serendipity was used in print for the first time by another writer forty-two years after the publication of Walpole’s letters.
  • Edward Solly had the honor
  • Solly defined serendipity as “a particular kind of natural cleverness”
  • he stressed Walpole’s implication that serendipity was a kind of innate gift or trait.
  • Walpole was also talking of serendipity as a kind of discovery.
  • The ambiguity was never overcome and serendipity still indicates both a personal attribute and an event or phenomenon
  • the word appeared in all the “big” and medium-sized English and American dictionaries between 1909 and 1934.
  • authors reveal disparities in definition
  • To avoid both the ambiguities of the meaning and the disappearance of one of the meanings, Piotr Zielonka and I (2003) decided to translate serendipity into Polish by using two different neologisms: “serendypizm” and “serendypicja” – to refer to the event and the personal attribute respectively.
  •  Even if Merton waited four decades to publish his book on serendipity, he made wide use of the concept in his theorizing.
  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
  • “Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
  • David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
     
    Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.
David McGavock

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) : Howard Rheingold : City... - 2 views

www.sfgate.com/...detail

twitter literacy rheingold socialmedia

shared by David McGavock on 02 Jan 11 - Cached
  • It's about knowing how and knowing who and knowing who knows who knows what.
  • use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.
  • successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively.
  • The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.
  • My reasons: Openness - anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else
  • Immediacy - it is a rolling present. You won't get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.
  • I don't have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
  • Reciprocity - people give and ask freely for information they need
  • A channel to multiple publics - I'm a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds - and each of the people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks.
  • Asymmetry - very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.
  • A way to meet new people - it happens every day. Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I follow people I don't know otherwise but who share enthusiasm
  • A window on what is happening in multiple worlds
  • Community-forming - Twitter is not a community, but it's an ecology in which communities can emerge.
  • A platform for mass collaboration:
  • Searchability - the ability to follow searches for phrases like "swine flu" or "Howard Rheingold" in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.
  • successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and feeding.
  • If it isn't fun, it won't be useful. If you don't put out, you don't get back. But you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you
  • Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy
  • My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter
  • David McGavock on 02 Jan 11
     
    "Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. "
  • David McGavock on 02 Jan 11
     
    Using twitter effectively is a critical thinking skill. Howard describes this in detail.
David McGavock

Wanna Solve Impossible Problems? Find Ways to Fail Quicker | Co.Design - 2 views

www.fastcodesign.com/...lems-find-ways-to-fail-quicker

design solve problems thinking evaluate critical critical_thinking

shared by David McGavock on 11 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • a British industry magnate by the name of Henry Kremer wondered: Could an airplane fly powered only by the pilot's body? Like Da Vinci, Kremer believed it was possible and decided to try to turn his dream into reality. He offered the staggering sum of £50,000 for the first person to build a human-powered plane that could fly a figure eight around two markers set a half-mile apart.
  • A decade went by. Dozens of teams tried and failed to build an airplane that could meet the requirements. It looked impossible.
  • MacCready’s insight was that everyone who was working on solving human-powered flight would spend upwards of a year building an airplane on conjecture and theory without a base of knowledge based on empirical tests. Triumphantly, they would complete their plane and wheel it out for a test flight. Minutes later, a year's worth of work would smash into the ground.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The problem was the problem. MacCready realized that what needed to be solved was not, in fact, human-powered flight. That was a red herring. The problem was the process itself.
  • He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: How can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours, not months? And he did.
  • MacCready’s Gossamer Condor flew 2,172 meters to win the prize. A little more than a year after that, the Gossamer Albatross flew across the English Channel.
  • So what's the lesson? When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.
  • David McGavock on 11 Apr 11
     
    "Wanna Solve Impossible Problems? Find Ways to Fail Quicker A case study in how an intractable problem -- creating a human-powered airplane -- was solved by reframing the problem. " So what's the lesson? When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.
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