Sunday, February 24, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Aggression: "College football games and crime"
http://econ.cudenver.edu/home/workingpapers/Rees_WP_08-01.pdf
"Our results suggest that the host community registers sharp increases in assaults, vandalism, arrests for disorderly conduct, and arrests for alcohol-related offenses on game days. Upsets are associated with the largest increases in the number of expected offenses. These estimates are discussed in the context of psychological theories of fan aggression."
"Our results suggest that the host community registers sharp increases in assaults, vandalism, arrests for disorderly conduct, and arrests for alcohol-related offenses on game days. Upsets are associated with the largest increases in the number of expected offenses. These estimates are discussed in the context of psychological theories of fan aggression."
Milgram in real life!
Get this, obedience to authority and the end results is people getting electrical shocks!
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2007/12/18/prank_led_school_to_treat_two_with_shock/
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2007/12/18/prank_led_school_to_treat_two_with_shock/
Researchers Gain Understanding of How Poverty Alters the Brain
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, February 18, 2008
Researchers Gain Understanding of How Poverty Alters the Brain
By RICHARD MONASTERSKY
Brain studies of poor children reveal that their neural systems develop differently from those of other children, a finding that potentially points the way toward creating methods for ameliorating the effects of poverty on academic achievement.
"Growing up poor is bad for your brain—we've known that for a long time," said Martha J. Farah, director of the center for cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. "What's new is that neuroscientists have begun to try to understand this problem," she said last week at the annual meeting here of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which ends today.
For generations, psychologists have noted that children raised in poverty perform poorer on cognitive tests, on average, than do students from wealthier families. Some researchers have taken those results to argue that intelligence is determined for the most part by genetics and that certain races are inherently smarter than others. In 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray presented that case in their book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
But the new results from neuroscience indicate that experience, especially being raised in poverty, has a strong effect on the way the brain works. "It's not a case of bad genes," said Ms. Farah.
She and her colleagues have investigated the issue by trying to tease out which aspects of poverty alter specific cognitive skills, such as memory, language, and the ability to delay gratification. The researchers studied a group of African-American children of low socioeconomic status, who had been tracked from birth through high-school graduation by Hallam Hurt, a pediatrician at Penn.
Over the years, Dr. Hurt's team had assessed the home environments of the children, monitoring how nurturing parents were, and how intellectually stimulating the homes were—for example, whether the children had access to books and visited museums.
When Ms. Farah's team tested 110 of those children, they found that particular cognitive skills were linked with certain aspects of the environment. Children with better language abilities were more likely to come from intellectually stimulating homes, no matter how nurturing their parents were. Memory skills, however, matched the nurturing levels in the home, reported Ms. Farah, who will publish her results in an upcoming issue of Developmental Science.
Effect of Nurturing on the Brain
To test why, the researchers did MRI scans of the children. They found that students raised in nurturing homes generally had bigger hippocampi, the portion of the brain associated with forming and retrieving memories. The discovery dovetails with previous research in rodents, which showed that rats raised in a stressful environment develop smaller hippocampi.
The results of the new work suggest that "it's worth making intervention and prevention programs because clearly a lot of the action here is experiential," said Ms. Farah. "This points out the fact that these phenomena are the result of adverse environments."
At the science association's meeting, Courtney Stevens, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oregon's brain-development laboratory, described other experiments on the cognitive effects of poverty. In one study, researchers put a net of electrodes on the heads of children and measured their brain waves. The children were seated between two speakers playing different stories and they were asked to pay attention to only one of the stories.
While the stories were being read, the children heard identical bursts of distracting noise coming from either of the speakers. The brains of the children responded differently to those same noises, depending on whether it came from the side they were listening to or ignoring. It's almost as if the brain has a volume control, turning up the sound on the side it is attending to, said Ms. Stevens.
The study revealed that students from lower-income families were less able to screen out the noises embedded in the stories they were supposed to ignore.
The students in the higher-income group, however, "had more gain on their volume control," she said. "Their brains were able to make a larger distinction between what they were trying to hear versus ignore."
With those results and others suggesting that cognitive skills are strongly influenced by environment, the Oregon team is developing intervention programs to try to counteract the effects of poverty. At the meeting, Ms. Courtney described one experimental program that has shown initial success.
Parental-Intervention Program
The program, developed by Jessica Fanning, a doctoral student at Oregon, trains parents to improve their communication skills and provides them with tools to improve their children's behavior, with the aim of reducing stress in the home. To test her program, Ms. Fanning recruited families from a Head Start program.
She found that after eight weekly sessions with parents, they reported less stress in the home, and their children performed significantly better on tests of language skills, nonverbal intelligence, memory, and attention.
The researchers have thus far tested only 14 low-income children and 14 controls. And they are tracking the children to see whether the effects persist. "At the end of the day, what we don't care about is a 5-point difference in I.Q.," said Ms. Stevens. "We care about this measure if it's going to translate into something persistent and useful."
While many of the researchers at the session supported the hypothesis that socioeconomic status plays a strong role in affecting brain development in children, Mabel L. Rice, director of the doctoral program in child language at the University of Kansas, described a new study that goes against the hypothesis, at least in the case of early verbal abilities. In tests of 1,766 children in Australia, Ms. Rice and her colleagues found no correlation between a child's verbal abilities at 24 months old and the parents' socioeconomic status or their education levels.
"The conclusion is that we don't want to assume too strongly that children of poverty are unable to acquire early vocabulary," she told The Chronicle.
Ms. Rice and three other researchers reported their results in December in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Researchers Gain Understanding of How Poverty Alters the Brain
By RICHARD MONASTERSKY
Brain studies of poor children reveal that their neural systems develop differently from those of other children, a finding that potentially points the way toward creating methods for ameliorating the effects of poverty on academic achievement.
"Growing up poor is bad for your brain—we've known that for a long time," said Martha J. Farah, director of the center for cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. "What's new is that neuroscientists have begun to try to understand this problem," she said last week at the annual meeting here of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which ends today.
For generations, psychologists have noted that children raised in poverty perform poorer on cognitive tests, on average, than do students from wealthier families. Some researchers have taken those results to argue that intelligence is determined for the most part by genetics and that certain races are inherently smarter than others. In 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray presented that case in their book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
But the new results from neuroscience indicate that experience, especially being raised in poverty, has a strong effect on the way the brain works. "It's not a case of bad genes," said Ms. Farah.
She and her colleagues have investigated the issue by trying to tease out which aspects of poverty alter specific cognitive skills, such as memory, language, and the ability to delay gratification. The researchers studied a group of African-American children of low socioeconomic status, who had been tracked from birth through high-school graduation by Hallam Hurt, a pediatrician at Penn.
Over the years, Dr. Hurt's team had assessed the home environments of the children, monitoring how nurturing parents were, and how intellectually stimulating the homes were—for example, whether the children had access to books and visited museums.
When Ms. Farah's team tested 110 of those children, they found that particular cognitive skills were linked with certain aspects of the environment. Children with better language abilities were more likely to come from intellectually stimulating homes, no matter how nurturing their parents were. Memory skills, however, matched the nurturing levels in the home, reported Ms. Farah, who will publish her results in an upcoming issue of Developmental Science.
Effect of Nurturing on the Brain
To test why, the researchers did MRI scans of the children. They found that students raised in nurturing homes generally had bigger hippocampi, the portion of the brain associated with forming and retrieving memories. The discovery dovetails with previous research in rodents, which showed that rats raised in a stressful environment develop smaller hippocampi.
The results of the new work suggest that "it's worth making intervention and prevention programs because clearly a lot of the action here is experiential," said Ms. Farah. "This points out the fact that these phenomena are the result of adverse environments."
At the science association's meeting, Courtney Stevens, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oregon's brain-development laboratory, described other experiments on the cognitive effects of poverty. In one study, researchers put a net of electrodes on the heads of children and measured their brain waves. The children were seated between two speakers playing different stories and they were asked to pay attention to only one of the stories.
While the stories were being read, the children heard identical bursts of distracting noise coming from either of the speakers. The brains of the children responded differently to those same noises, depending on whether it came from the side they were listening to or ignoring. It's almost as if the brain has a volume control, turning up the sound on the side it is attending to, said Ms. Stevens.
The study revealed that students from lower-income families were less able to screen out the noises embedded in the stories they were supposed to ignore.
The students in the higher-income group, however, "had more gain on their volume control," she said. "Their brains were able to make a larger distinction between what they were trying to hear versus ignore."
With those results and others suggesting that cognitive skills are strongly influenced by environment, the Oregon team is developing intervention programs to try to counteract the effects of poverty. At the meeting, Ms. Courtney described one experimental program that has shown initial success.
Parental-Intervention Program
The program, developed by Jessica Fanning, a doctoral student at Oregon, trains parents to improve their communication skills and provides them with tools to improve their children's behavior, with the aim of reducing stress in the home. To test her program, Ms. Fanning recruited families from a Head Start program.
She found that after eight weekly sessions with parents, they reported less stress in the home, and their children performed significantly better on tests of language skills, nonverbal intelligence, memory, and attention.
The researchers have thus far tested only 14 low-income children and 14 controls. And they are tracking the children to see whether the effects persist. "At the end of the day, what we don't care about is a 5-point difference in I.Q.," said Ms. Stevens. "We care about this measure if it's going to translate into something persistent and useful."
While many of the researchers at the session supported the hypothesis that socioeconomic status plays a strong role in affecting brain development in children, Mabel L. Rice, director of the doctoral program in child language at the University of Kansas, described a new study that goes against the hypothesis, at least in the case of early verbal abilities. In tests of 1,766 children in Australia, Ms. Rice and her colleagues found no correlation between a child's verbal abilities at 24 months old and the parents' socioeconomic status or their education levels.
"The conclusion is that we don't want to assume too strongly that children of poverty are unable to acquire early vocabulary," she told The Chronicle.
Ms. Rice and three other researchers reported their results in December in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
The skinny on Miss Cleo
Miss Cleo, the fake-Jamaican, psychic is back!
Now she's doing commercials for FUSE tv playing on her past notoriety. She also has a psychic website.
People just don't learn.
And here's the script for a "live tarot reading."
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence
WASHINGTON - About a quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence, U.S. health officials reported on Thursday, with ongoing health problems that one activist likened to the effects of living in a war zone.
Some men also experience domestic violence, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found.
The CDC said 23.6 percent of women and 11.5 percent of men reported being a victim of what it called "intimate partner violence" at some time in their lives.
The CDC defined this as threatened, attempted or completed physical or sexual violence or emotional abuse by a spouse, former spouse, current or former boyfriend or girlfriend or a dating partner. The CDC estimates that 1,200 women are killed and 2 million injured in domestic violence annually.
Read the rest of this Reuters report.
Original CDC Report
Some men also experience domestic violence, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found.
The CDC said 23.6 percent of women and 11.5 percent of men reported being a victim of what it called "intimate partner violence" at some time in their lives.
The CDC defined this as threatened, attempted or completed physical or sexual violence or emotional abuse by a spouse, former spouse, current or former boyfriend or girlfriend or a dating partner. The CDC estimates that 1,200 women are killed and 2 million injured in domestic violence annually.
Read the rest of this Reuters report.
Original CDC Report
Monday, February 4, 2008
From the Scholarship Center
Student Support Services has:
FREE SERVICES
Tutoring
Computer Resource Room
Counseling Academic Advisement
Textbook Loan
And MORE
Must be:
A freshman or sophomore (0-61 credits)
U.S. Citizen or permanent resident status
With Academic Need and one of the following:-
Low Income Status or-
1st Generation College Student or-
A documented disabling condition
Room 3E03Contact:Iris Lieberman 718-262-2422OrNicole Ruggiero 718-262-2052
FREE SERVICES
Tutoring
Computer Resource Room
Counseling Academic Advisement
Textbook Loan
And MORE
Must be:
A freshman or sophomore (0-61 credits)
U.S. Citizen or permanent resident status
With Academic Need and one of the following:-
Low Income Status or-
1st Generation College Student or-
A documented disabling condition
Room 3E03Contact:Iris Lieberman 718-262-2422OrNicole Ruggiero 718-262-2052
Whose myth? Ph.D.'s, of course!
The following article was sent around among the York faculty this week:
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/02/2008020101c/careers.html
This article makes three points about science and teaching:
1. Perspective
Us folks (professors, Ph.D.s, Psychologists) forget that we have a unique perspective about being human and being a college student: we were destined for Ph.D.s. That is, when we subjectively think about our experiences of being a plain old human or our experiences in college, they are being experienced by people who have the special traits which motivate and allow them to go on and excel intellectually.
We forget that we -- like everyone else -- are stuck in their own perspective.
The false consensus effect describes how everyone assumes a false consensus -- if I do x, most people do x. Saying, "teaching this say really had an effect on me in college, so therefore I should teach this way so my students will get the same benefit" is the false consensus effect!
2. Hypotheses
Ok 330 and 332 students: Is this (Clydesdale's work) empirical? Yes, he collects data systematically. Is it experimental? No. He creates no control conditions or other procedures to control for extraneous variables.
Students are often confused about sociology (Clydesdale's area) and social psychology. Both study normal people in social situations. The difference is in the level of study and methodology. Social Psychologists study individuals (i.e. psychology) while sociologists study groups. What attitudes do this social group hold? is a sociology question; how do people come to hold any attitude (the psychological process of attitude formation) is a social psychology question. Social Psychologists, as most psychologists, are experimental. We are more concerned about extraneous variables than realism. Sociologists are more concerned with realism (what is this real group thinking) than defending ourselves from extraneous variables.
3. Teaching
Clydesdale's conclusion is that classroom activities need to focus more on activities than lectures. Just wanted to mention that; my students are often uncomfortable with my teaching methods - for example, this week in Social Psych I won't lecture; I will do activities to teach basic psych skills.
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/02/2008020101c/careers.html
This article makes three points about science and teaching:
1. Perspective
Us folks (professors, Ph.D.s, Psychologists) forget that we have a unique perspective about being human and being a college student: we were destined for Ph.D.s. That is, when we subjectively think about our experiences of being a plain old human or our experiences in college, they are being experienced by people who have the special traits which motivate and allow them to go on and excel intellectually.
We forget that we -- like everyone else -- are stuck in their own perspective.
The false consensus effect describes how everyone assumes a false consensus -- if I do x, most people do x. Saying, "teaching this say really had an effect on me in college, so therefore I should teach this way so my students will get the same benefit" is the false consensus effect!
2. Hypotheses
Ok 330 and 332 students: Is this (Clydesdale's work) empirical? Yes, he collects data systematically. Is it experimental? No. He creates no control conditions or other procedures to control for extraneous variables.
Students are often confused about sociology (Clydesdale's area) and social psychology. Both study normal people in social situations. The difference is in the level of study and methodology. Social Psychologists study individuals (i.e. psychology) while sociologists study groups. What attitudes do this social group hold? is a sociology question; how do people come to hold any attitude (the psychological process of attitude formation) is a social psychology question. Social Psychologists, as most psychologists, are experimental. We are more concerned about extraneous variables than realism. Sociologists are more concerned with realism (what is this real group thinking) than defending ourselves from extraneous variables.
3. Teaching
Clydesdale's conclusion is that classroom activities need to focus more on activities than lectures. Just wanted to mention that; my students are often uncomfortable with my teaching methods - for example, this week in Social Psych I won't lecture; I will do activities to teach basic psych skills.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Why we use primary sources
Bewildered, academics pore over sex-trade hysteria
Farley's book cites -- incorrectly -- Brents and Hausbeck's primary research, and arrives at a very different conclusion.
Farley's book cites -- incorrectly -- Brents and Hausbeck's primary research, and arrives at a very different conclusion.
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