- Newscientists.com: Randy Olson’s Top Five Science Communication Tips
- Information is beautiful The Billion Dollar Gram
- Bishop Berkeley’s Cherry
- Proportion of those in various UK professions who were privately educated
- Behavioural change through the power of fun: Piano Stairs (YouTube)
- Colour pictures of Nazism
- Pavlov, Office Style
- Early Risers Crash Faster Than People Who Stay Up Late
- High-speed dextrous robot
- Physical interpretation of imaginary numbers
- ‘for today’s smug and pampered American radicals to wrap themselves in the mantle of victims of fascism, while relying on civil rights no fascist system grants its citizens, displays a profound disrespect for those who have actually suffered under totalitarian regimes.’
- Schwartz, D. L. (1995). The emergence of abstract representations in dyad problem solving. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(3), 321-354.‘The results are interpreted to be a natural result of the collaborative task demand… To facilitate discourse dyads negotiated a common representation that could serve as a touchstone for coordinating the members’ different perspectives on the problem. Because the representation bridged multiple perspectives of the problem structure, it tended to be an
abstraction.’
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3 replies on “links for october 2009”
The Schwartz looks interesting – shall have a look.
I know of no research which combines detailed profiling of individuals’ abilities, preferences for processing certain kinds of information, personality, etc, etc, and some measure of group performance – group IQ profiles? Group personality? Is there a 5 factor model of group, as opposed to individual, personality? There must be something!
Every week I ask my students to read a paper and write a short summary of it. Amazing individual differences on the things people pick up on: methodological weaknesses, alternative interpretations of the stimuli, outrage at interpretations (especially this week as we are discussing a study on autism), pondering about philosophy of science, alternative causal interpretations, etc, etc… I can see that certain kinds of people infuriate others with what they find most salient in a study, then in the group discussion there are issues of shyness and desire to display one’s intellect (outgoing people with a desire to display high IQ are sometimes particularly challenging). Certain triggers make the (certain kind of) shy people angry enough to state their opinion. There’s a lot of variation in the degree to which people are willing to play the academic psychology game, e.g., many will say “Look, student samples are crap – why are we still doing this?!?!?”… with a little expansion you’d have a very publishable paper on the importance of studying cross-cultural, cross demographical, differences. Others are more pragmatic and argue that understanding students says something about psychological processes…
And on it goes…
These sorts of individual differences and group processes must be terribly common. But where is the lit that I’m dying to read? Where would I publish a study on group processes in interpreting reasoning tasks? One item on my to-do list is starting with a reasoning task with different interpretations. Sorting people on their interpretations, and then (say) pairing different kinds of people up (maybe four possibilities) to see which interpretation wins in the group output…
That robot is unreal! Charles and I really want to go to a Japanese robotics conference. As most of the work is done for companies, they don’t publish in journals. It’s all seriously advanced to what you get in the UK though.
I was interested in how communication networks affect the outcome of group processes at one stage. The research into it sort of died in the 60s, I recall, but you’d have thought there’d be a resurgence into it in these network-crazy times. I don’t know of anything that looks at how individual differences in reasoning affect group outcomes (although Charlene Nemeth (?) did do research showing that single contrarians dramatically increased overall creativity/divergence of group conclusions