Food Follies

A tiny hazmat team cleaning up a crème brûlée spill . . . and other delights. It's the work of culinary photographers Akiko Ida And Pierre Javelle, as reported via Boing Boing.

Don't Think and, Especially, Don't Overthink

news@nature.com reports that the best way to make a complex decision is to think about something else . . . and then just decide. While simple decisions benefit from some forethought, "At least when making some complicated decisions, such as choosing a car or house, the results suggest that we would actually do better to go with our gut."

In a laboratory experiment, researchers at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, found that a group of graduate students did better on complex decisions when they didn't think about the problem. Then the researchers carried the study into the real world:

For the simple decisions, students made better choices when they thought consciously about the problem. But for the more complex choice, they did better after not thinking about it, Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues report in Science. To carry this idea into the real world, the team also studied people who were shopping: either in an Amsterdam department store, where they bought straightforward clothes or kitchenware, or in IKEA, where they bought furniture, which one might expect to be a more complicated decision-making process. The team asked the shoppers whether they had thought hard about their purchase beforehand, and a few weeks later asked them whether they were happy with it.

These results confirmed the earlier ones. Department-store shoppers who made simple purchases were happier if they had thought consciously about their choice in advance. IKEA shoppers, on the other hand, were happier with their choice if they hadn't mulled them over.

Ergo, for complex decisions, don't draw up a list of pros and cons and don't agonize over your choice. Instead, sleep on it and then just do it. Forethought need not apply.

The complete report--"On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect"--is available online from Science or for free in the periodical section of Hinckley Library.

Email . . . Tricky, Really Tricky

According to a study reported in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, you've got only a 50-50 chance of correctly interpreting the tone of emails. And yet most people (90%) think they understand the tone of their emails perfectly:

"That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley.

Wired News, in reporting on the research, says egocentrism makes us get it wrong:

The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.

"People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they 'hear' the tone they intend in their head as they write," Epley explains.

At the same time, those reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times.

You can access the full article--"Egocentrism over E-mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?" (Dec 2005)--online at the journal's web site.

A 9% Increase in Frivolity

According to Wired News, a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that online surfing for its own sake is up 9% from last year. That means about 30% of all internet users go online just to have fun. Surfing ranks behind only email as users' main interest in the 'net.

Classic Rock 'n' Roll

Bill Graham Presents produced more than 350,000 concerts all over the world and recorded thousands of them. In 2003, Wolfgang's Vault acquired those tapes and now presents selections online via Vault Radio. Just go to the web site and click PLAY NOW! Ah . . . it sounds like my dorm room.

Black History Month

Black History month, observed in February, has its roots in cultural celebrations that have existed since 1926. Just in time for this year's observance, the library at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has released a list of reliable Web sites on black culture and history.

You can view the web guide at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.

(Above, portrait of Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who became a seamstress for Mary Todd Lincoln, from Keckley's autobiography.)

Torino Online

Gary Price's information weblog the ResourceShelf has published a special list of online information about the 2006 Winter Olympics

Finding Web Sites You Can Trust

When you conduct an online search and end up with thousands of web sites on your topic, how do you winnow the results to one you can trust?

Google puts out a newsletter for librarians to help them in their work, and the most recent issue contains a brief article in it by Karen G. Schneider who also writes for the Librarians' Internet Index--Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust. Schneider identifies five benchmarks:

1. Availability: To determine if information "behind the wall" is worth your time and/or money, skim the web site's mission statement, "About" page, or registration sign-up page. For example, the Ellis Island Foundation makes it clear that by registering for free, you'll be able to take full advantage of the site's functionality.
2. Credibility: Look for an "About" page or an author biography.
3. Authorship: If you think a web site has more than the average number of typos, copy a representative page and dump it into a Word document for a spell-check.
4. External Links: Look for evidence that the web site maintains its links, such as notes indicating when a page was last updated, and beware of student project web sites and personal web pages with many, many links!
5. Legality: Trust your instincts. If a web site looks and feels like a rip-off, it probably is. Take a chunk of its text and paste it into Google to see if it shows up elsewhere.

Then Schneider tosses in a bonus set of questions to help a researcher dig deeper:

1. Does the author provide sources for information?
2. If the site provides opinion rather than facts, are these opinions clearly identifiable as such?
3. Who are the audiences for this site? Is the site appropriate for the intended audiences?
4. Does the point of view provide balance to the information seeker?
5. How does the site compare with other sites on the same subject?
   

The Hero's Journey

In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his cross-cultural study of the mythology of the hero's journey. In it, Campbell identifies the process and stages of the hero's progress and examines the journey's psychological relevance to our contemporary lives.

The pattern Campbell identifies--the monomyth of the hero's journey--provides an interesting starting point for understanding any number of narratives. Campbell's representation of the journey looks like this:


Campbell's work also has been the inspiration for some lovely graphical representations. One of our favorites is from the University of California, Berkeley's Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS). That site features a beautiful interactive picture like the one below (which is not interactive):

Finally, we recently found a modified hero's journey, a greatly simplified version of Campbell's monomyth translated into modern language:

No Child Left Behind Goes to College

On October 18, 2005, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings convened her Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Inside Higher Ed reported her opening remarks as follows:

"I’ve convened this commission to ensure that America remains the world’s leader in higher education and innovation,” because “the world is catching up,” the secretary said, noting that the U.S. now ranks seventh internationally in college graduation rates. “And we’re not keeping pace with the demand for skilled labor in the new high-tech economy,” she added, quoting Tom Friedman in arguing that “our students are facing and education and ambition gap, and they’re on the wrong side."

Secretary Spellings asked the panel's Chair, Charles Miller of Texas, to focus on four areas: "accessibility, affordability, accountability and quality."

Faced with a deadline of August 2006 to come up with recommendations on ways "to ensure that America remains the world’s leader in higher education and innovation," the panel is currently mulling over one option: standardized testing for colleges.

On Feb. 9th, the work of the panel was covered in an article in the New York Times. In a memo, Miller wrote "What is clearly lacking is a nationwide system for comparative performance purposes, using standard formats." The Times goes on to report,

Mr. Miller said he was not envisioning a higher education version of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires standardizing testing in public schools and penalizes schools whose students do not improve. "There is no way you can mandate a single set of tests, to have a federalist higher education system," he said. But he said public reporting of collegiate learning as measured through testing "would be greatly beneficial to the students, parents, taxpayers and employers" and that he would like to create a national database that includes measures of learning.

We at nHumanities admit we find no comfort in Miller's remark that he's not "envisioning a higher education version of the No Child Left Behind Act," for we remember the old adage, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it must be a duck. We've seen how these things work before, and the odds are excellent that very shortly after that "national database" has been created, efforts will be underway to tie the performance of individual colleges to the receipt of federal funds. From our perspective in the trenches of community college education, NCLB has made matters worse, not better. A similar approach for colleges is wrong-headed at best and destructive at worst.

Links:
Higher Ed Commission Gets to Work
Panel Explores Standard Tests for Colleges

Photos of Bluto from The National Lampoon's Animal House.