nHumanities

Sarah Kay on "Rethinking"

2011-10-27T10:37:00.001-06:00

02.12.10 : tickle me pink

2010-07-30T13:17:00.001-06:00

02.12.10 : tickle me pink
Originally uploaded by PJ Taylor Photo

A Book & the Imagination

2009-05-12T10:02:00.000-06:00

www.evelienlohbeck.com
Noteboek from Evelien Lohbeck on Vimeo.
Noteboek (English title: Notebook) consists of 4 short experimental films where art student Lohbeck confuses reality and illusion. To see more of her work, visit www.evelienlohbeck.com
Music: The White Stripes, "Seven Nation Army"

How to Study--New Insight, Old Method

2009-04-27T14:24:00.003-06:00

"Close the Book. Recall. Write It Down."

That's the advice from the latest research on how to learn--and it's research that confirms ideas first floated back in the 1940s. Today many professors tell their students to study by reading and rereading carefully. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports,

That's not terrible advice. But some scientists would say that you've left out the most important step: Put the book aside and hide your notes. Then recall everything you can. Write it down, or, if you're uninhibited, say it out loud.

Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, "active recall" — recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing — is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory.

The entire article by David Glenn is online from The Chronicle.

Online Models for 2009 MLA Rules

2009-03-31T16:44:00.001-06:00

For those of you who wish to start using the new 2009 MLA documentation methods now, online resources are starting to reflect the changes. Here are four that you will find useful for explanation and models:

The OWL at Purdue: MLA Update 2009
A one-page guide from Bakersfield College (PDF)
A 12-page guide that includes examples of parenthetical citations from Fulton-Montgomery Community College (PDF)
A Hacker Handbooks Supplement (St. Martin's Press): Documenting Sources (the equivalent of section MLA-4--PDF)

Life Just Got Easier for Humanities Students

2009-03-13T15:47:00.007-06:00

This week, the Modern Language Association (MLA) just made life easier for anyone using its style sheet to document online research sources. In the newly released 7th edition of its MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers , the MLA has finally gotten comfortable with the idea of online materials and has accepted the fluidity of the web.

It's simplified the documentation method for web documents within the Works Cited page of a paper (the bibliography). The key improvement is its recommended handling of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators--the "address" of a web page). Of URLs, the Handbook says,

In the past, this handbook recommended including URLs of Web sources in works-cited-list entries. Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value, however, for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors’ names than by typing URLs. You should include a URL as supplementary information only when the reader probably cannot locate the source without it or when your instructor requires it. (section 5.6.1, my emphasis)

To illustrate the change in documentation style, compare the previously used citation for an article accessed via an online database to what MLA now recommends--the bits in red highlight the difference:

Formerly:

Potter, Dawn. "In Defense of Dullness or Why Fanny Price Is My

Favorite Austen Heroine." Sewanee Review 116.4 (2008): 611-618. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Hinckley Lib., Northwest Coll., Powell, WY. 13 Mar. 2009 <http://webboard.northwestcollege.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&an=35430704&site=ehost-live&scope=site>.

Now:

Potter, Dawn. "In Defense of Dullness or Why Fanny Price Is My

Favorite Austen Heroine." Sewanee Review 116.4 (2008): 611-618. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 Mar. 2009.

There now. Doesn't that look easier?

Is This the Face of Shakespeare?

2009-03-10T09:46:00.000-06:00

Representatives of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust are 90% sure that the portrait above--the Cobbe portrait--is "the only portrait of William Shakespeare painted during his lifetime" (NPR ).

The portrait appears to be the original of several well-known copies, such as the portrait hanging in the Folger Shakespeare Library. For the past three years, the provenance of the portrait has been studied: "The research conclusively demonstrates that the Cobbe picture is the prime version of the portrait and establishes beyond reasonable doubt its descent to the Cobbes through their cousin’s marriage to the great granddaughter of Shakespeare’s only literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton" (Science Daily ).

To learn about the remarkable discovery of this portrait, read the story at NPR , watch the video below, or visit the webpages listed by Google News .

The Doctor Is In: Writing & Good Health

2009-03-02T15:03:00.003-07:00

You know those TV ads where people swear that working out with their machine for only five minutes a day will give you good health and ripped abs?

They're lying.

If, however, you spend only two minutes a day writing about your emotions and do it for only two consecutive days, you will enjoy better physical health for as long as 4-6 weeks later.

And we're telling you the truth.

These are the results reported by Chad M. Burton and Laura A. King in the British Journal of Health Psychology article "Effects of (Very) Brief Writing on Health: The Two-minute Miracle." Finally, an explanation for why middle-school girls who spend hours sobbing and writing in their diaries are so incredibly robust.

For a couple of decades, researchers have known that regular writing produces positive health benefits, as measured by the Pennebaker Inventory of Limbic Languidness (which measures 54 physical complaints). In the past, researchers used a writing sample of 15-20 minutes for several days.

What Burton and King set out to explore was the lower boundary of writing required to reap health benefits. Two. Minutes. Two. Days. That's all. Participants who showed positive effects wrote about either positive or traumatic events--both were effective. The key is that the writing contain emotional content, in effect “broaching the topic on 1 day and briefly exploring it the next” (Burton and King 1).

You can read the original paper online.
[Photo courtesy of Esther G via Flickr .]

More Software for Starving Students

2009-02-20T14:34:00.001-07:00

Sumo Paint is an online image editor that allows you to do many of tricky things you'd do with Photoshop . . . right there on your browser. For. Free.

Wordle -- Create a Word Cloud

2009-02-12T09:25:00.025-07:00

Wordle is easy to use. You type or paste in text and Wordle creates a word cloud for you--a visual representation of how frequently words appear within the text. The Wordle allows you to adjust shape, font, and color. Here, for instance, is a link to the cloud we just made for Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" (Bliss version). Click on the picture to view the full-sized version.

Then compare that word cloud to the one created by another Wordle user for President Obama's Inaugural Address.

Be sure you spend some time viewing the Wordle Gallery; some of the word clouds people create are beautifully inspirational. Call us sentimental, but we like this Valentine's Day cloud.

This wonderful web app was created by a software engineer at the IBM Research Visual Cognition Lab.

Save the Words

2009-01-30T14:56:00.030-07:00

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the dictionary.

Old Words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie abandoned and forgotten.

You can do your part. Help save the words!

If not for yourself then for generations yet to come.

This touching plea appears on Oxford's Save the Words website , a clever little widget where the words vie for your attention, begging you to adopt and use them.

Visit the web site! Then you, too, can write sentences like this: The woundikins of the teterrimous snollygoster were worse than the affictitious graviloquence of the legatarian historiaster who studied ptochology.

Grim Online Toys

2009-01-26T17:27:00.001-07:00

Peace is a good thing.

In our 1950s youth, we lived 13.7 miles from Offutt Air Force Base, under the flight pattern of bombers coming in for a landing. Given the movies we were shown in school at the time (urging us to "duck and cover") and the Cold War atmosphere, it was hard for a kid not to worry about all the Soviet warheads pointing at Offutt. Childhood consisted of anxiously computing blast radii, fretting over the prevailing wind direction, and counting the containers of water down in our farmhouse basement (which was our family's bomb shelter plan).

All that was guess work . . . now the internet gives us Ground Zero , a little mapplet using Google Maps to compute the blast radii of various nuclear ordinance from any ground zero one wishes to set. Just enter a location, choose a bomb, and then click "Nuke it!"

If one were to drop a "Tsar Bomba" (1961, USSR) on Offutt . . . well, the outcome doesn't look so good for the family farm:

To help keep these things in perspective, however, the mapplet also allows one to compute the impact of an asteroid strike. It makes all the bombs look puny.

On the Nightstand

2009-01-21T13:45:00.003-07:00

If you--ahem!--find the reading on people's nightstands much more interesting than what they have on their office bookshelves, then take a look at Discover Magazine's regular web feature On the Nightstand .

Example: Here's what Yale primate psychologist Laurie Santos has on her nightstand (which is actually a filing cabinet)--

The Squad by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a graduate student of Santos . . . who “doubles as a teen-girl-fiction writer.” The book is about cheerleader CIA agents, Santos says. “It’s awesome. I think all cognitive scientists should read it.”
The stuffed frog she sleeps with
The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson, which Santos describes as a “wonderfully British, philosophical attempt at promoting idleness”
A new iPhone to wake her up in the morning
Watchmen, an apocalyptic graphic novel (“a fancy way of saying it’s a big comic book”) that is due out as a movie in March

That's funny . . . we have Watchmen on our nightstand, too. Nice to learn that the sciences and humanities share so much.

N-Effect . . . Another Argument for Small Class Size

2009-01-15T10:43:00.002-07:00

Psychologists asked a question basic: "Modern life often seems like a rat-race. But does one's motivation to run the maze, to compete, depend on how many other 'rats' are in the race?"

Well . . . yes, apparently so.

The researchers found that people do better in smaller competitive situations than in large ones, which they call the N-Effect, "the discovery that increasing the number of competitors (N) can decrease competitive motivation." Their studies show "that average test scores (e.g., SAT scores) fall as the average number of test-takers at test-taking venues increases." That is, people do better on some tasks if they think they are competing against only 10 other other people instead of 100 people.

The psychologists suggest where further study is needed but note that their findings may shed light on debates about class size and student success:

. . . One such example concerns the debate on the role of class size in education (Mishel, & Rothstein, 2002), where some suggest class-size is rather insignificant (e.g., Hanushek, 2002) while others deem it important (e.g., Krueger, 2002). The N-Effect, however, sheds new light on this debate by revealing that as the mere N of students in the classroom increases, motivation to compete and exert academic effort are likely to decrease. In fact, perhaps the N-Effect could partly solve the mystery of the falling SAT scores in recent years (Finder, 2007), if one were to find that the average N test-takers reporting to testing venues is continually increasing.

Finally, we conclude by qualifying Zajonc’s (1965) recommendation in his seminal facilitation article, which stated: “If one were to draw one practical suggestion . . . he would advise his student . . . to arrange to take his examinations in the company of many other students, on stage, and in the presence of a large audience. The results of his examination would be beyond his wildest expectations…” (p. 274, Zajonc, 1965). Our social comparison account of the N-Effect would recommend having only a few others on stage; adding too many competitors may dampen, rather than enhance, the motivation to compete.

(Picture of large psych class courtesy of Karma Moths )

The paper by Stephen M. Garcia and Avishalom Tor--The N-Effect: More Competitors, Less Competition -- is forthcoming from Psychological Science.

Reading on the Rise

2009-01-12T10:38:00.004-07:00

According to a new survey from the National Endowment for the Arts, reading is on the rise in the United States, reversing a 26-year trend of decline.

The report concludes, "Whites, African Americans, and Hispanics have all shown significant growth in their reading rates, as have both adult men and women. . . . Best of all, the most significant growth has been among young adults, the group that had shown the largest declines in earlier surveys."

The report lists 12 statistical findings, including the observation that "The U.S. adult population now breaks into two almost equally sized groups--readers and nonreaders":

The report doesn't include any statistical reason for the rise in reading, although the increase among a broad demographic suggests that no single age-based reading program can claim responsibility. Instead, the rise seems the result of numerous efforts throughout schools and communities.

The New York Times reports that Dana Gioia, chair of the NEA, attributes "the increase in literary reading to community-based programs like the 'Big Read,' Oprah Winfrey’s book club, the huge popularity of book series like 'Harry Potter' and Stephenie Meyer’s 'Twilight,' as well as the individual efforts of teachers, librarians, parents and civic leaders to create 'a buzz around literature that’s getting people to read more in whatever medium.'"

You can download the entire, readable report from NEA's website: Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy .

Software for Starving Students, Part Deux

2009-01-06T10:46:00.001-07:00

We posted previously about Software for Starving Students , but--sadly--the main source of those valuable links at SoftwareFor.org has gone the way of the dodo.

So we're pleased to tell you about OpenDisc's education project, OpenEducationDisc , which provides high quality open source software for Windows. As OpenDisc explains,

The purpose of [the OpenEducationDisc] is to provide students with the software that they need to complete school work at home. Most students don’t have jobs and it is unfair to ask for them or a parent/guardian to buy expensive software to get the best out of their education.

We agree.

Holiday Misinformation Exposed!

2008-12-18T11:52:00.005-07:00

In the most recent edition of the British Medical Journal, Rachel C. Vreeman and Aaron E. Carroll examine six common beliefs we hold about holiday health and--through a review of the research--expose them as mistakes.

Here's the straight scoop on our holiday misconceptions, with all quotations coming from the article :

Sugar causes hyperactivity in children

Regardless of what parents might believe, however, sugar is not to blame for out of control little ones. At least 12 double blind randomised controlled trials have examined how children react to diets containing different levels of sugar. None of these studies, not even studies looking specifically at children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, could detect any differences in behaviour between the children who had sugar and those who did not. . . .

Scientists have even studied how parents react to the sugar myth. When parents think their children have been given a drink containing sugar (even if it is really sugar-free), they rate their children’s behaviour as more hyperactive. The differences in the children’s behaviour were all in the parents’ minds.

Suicides increase over the holidays

While the holidays might, indeed, be a difficult time for some, there is no good scientific evidence to suggest a holiday peak in suicides. . . . Further debunking myths about suicide, people are not more likely to commit suicide during the dark winter months. Around the world, suicides peak in warmer months and are actually lowest in the winter. . . . Studies from the US reflect this pattern, with lower rates in November and December than in typically warmer months.

Poinsettia toxicity

In an analysis of 849,575 plant exposures reported to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, none of the 22,793 cases involving poinsettia resulted in considerable poisoning. No one died from exposure to or ingestion of poinsettia, and most (96%) did not even require medical treatment. In 92 of the cases, children ingested substantial quantities of poinsettias, but none needed medical treatment, and toxicologists concluded that poinsettia exposures and ingestions can be treated without referral to a healthcare facility.

Excess heat loss in the hatless

A . . . recent study confirms that there is nothing special about the head and heat loss. Any uncovered part of the body loses heat and will reduce the core body temperature proportionally. So, if it is cold outside, you should protect your body. But whether you want to keep your head covered or not is up to you.

Nocturnal feasting makes you fat

. . . just because obesity and eating more meals at night are associated, it does not mean that one causes the other. People gain weight because they take in more calories overall than they burn up. . . . Other studies found no link at all between eating at night and weight gain.

You can cure a hangover

No scientific evidence, however, supports any cure or effective prevention for alcohol hangovers. . . . A hangover is caused by excess alcohol consumption. Thus, the most effective way to avoid a hangover is to consume alcohol only in moderation or not at all.

For more fresh air from BMJ's Vreeman and Carroll, see Medical Myths from 2007 (1288-1289).

As We Move into Finals Week . . .

2008-12-15T13:22:00.000-07:00

As we move into finals weeks here at Northwest College, we all could use a little pick-me-up. This video is just the ticket--thanks to Matthew Belinkie, who has cut together 40 speeches from classic movies into a two-minute inspirational montage:

It's a Wonderful Life . . . the Dark Side

2008-12-11T07:00:00.001-07:00

A. O. Scott, film critic and editor for The New York Times, has produced a little feature on the dark side of Frank Capra's classic in Critics' Picks: 'It's a Wonderful Life.'

By ennumerating everything that's wrong in the world of George Bailey, Scott demonstrates why it's such a comforting film for the holidays.

Happy Birthday, Milton!

2008-12-09T09:18:00.001-07:00

Today is the Puritan poet's 400th birthday. To honor him, we recommend a trip to the Milton Reading Room at Dartmouth College . There, you'll find a beautifully annotated version of his masterwork, Paradise Lost.

The last lines of the poem describe Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, which William Blake so beautifully illustrated: "They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, / Through Eden took thir solitarie way."

Christmas in Williamsburg | Then & Now

2008-12-08T17:04:00.003-07:00

A little Christmas bonus we created for an early American literature class:

RSS Feeds in Plain English

2008-12-08T08:59:00.001-07:00

A good introduction to RSS feeds from Lee LeFever, April 23, 2007:

Viral Video | Bruce Lee

2008-12-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

Viral videos are little film clips which gain popularity exponentially by being shared through today's many multimedia means: YouTube, emails, instant messaging, blog posts, etc. Case in point: This Nokia phone ad which appeared last month in China. It features the late, great Bruce Lee playing table tennis . . . with nunchakus!

Gift Ideas for 2008 | Book Lists

2008-12-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

Set organized, saved and shared with Agglom

Dance Your [Science] Ph.D.

2008-12-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

The AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) has sponsored its second Dance Your Ph.D. contest and the winners are in! The contest asked scholars to express their Ph.D. in dance form; the contest was open to anyone who has (or is pursuing) a Ph.D. in any scientific field or in science-related fields.

As the web site says, "the human body is an excellent medium for communicating science--perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting." You can see the winning YouTube videos and the rest of the submissions on the 2009 AAAS/Science Dance Contest web site.

Below is the winning Graduate Student entry from Sue Lynn Lau for her Ph.D. dissertation "The role of vitamin D in beta cell function" from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research / University of Sydney, Australia. For an explanation of this dance, click "(more info)" to the right of the video on YouTube.