AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

My paper 'Teaching Modeling in Critial Thinking' was just published in Teaching Philosophy. I moved the URLs that are included in the paper slightly since I wrote it (one of the many problems with the long review process in Philosophy), but left aliases in place so everything should still work.  However, just in case there is a problem getting to the flash movies mentioned in the text, I'll post them here:

Before you begin, put your name (any name will do) in the box of BOTH flash movies and press 'OK'. Using the same name allows me to match up your actions and see how you investigated Gizmo.

Click on the three buttons on the controller to turn gizmo on. Click 'open' to open gizmo and reveal the hidden nodes. And use the three tools to activate, stimulate and lesion Gizmo's nodes.

You can model Gizmo using this tool:

Currently - and it is excruciatingly slow. At least I'm consistent, however.

The lag is undoubtably the curse of a shout-out by @pzmyers. The experiment is a great idea - but they're running the game via *.cgi scripts! Surely we can rally the community to get them some jquery or flash-based system to alleviate the server load? @soulonefifteen - I'm looking your way.
Battleground God

A big welcome to Michael McClain, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at St. Joseph's College (NY).  His blog is:

http://mmcclain.philosophyteachers.org/

And the RSS feed is here:

http://philosophyteachers.org/aapt-members/blog/211/feed/

@garns, @johnbasl and I (@pbradl42) presented on Sunday 8/1 at the 2010 AAPT Biennial meeting - the International Workshop Conference on Teaching Philosophy on using social networking technology to improve teaching philosophy.  We archived the presentation using Wimba, which allowed us to show slides during the talk while simultaneously video conferencing John, who was in Wisconsin at the time. You can watch the archive here (you may have to run a wizard to test for Java):

http://mcdaniellive.wimba.com/launcher.cgi?room=_mcdan_s__93713_1_541332_2010_0801_1340_34

You'll notice that Sandel doesn't really address the question of whether or not we have an instinct for philosophy (or posit a mechanism that produced that instinct, as say, Pascal Boyer has suggested), but rather the instinct for political philosophy. But that's OK. It's worth 5 minutes of your day, and may be useful as a discussion starter in a Social-Political class:

It keeps you entertained during graduation ceremonies, I can testify:
AskPhil Lets You Take Philosophy on the Go - AppScout

Comrade Physioprof recently posted a little video encapulating his recent experience at a conference. You can make these videos online from texts - so I could't resist. Enjoy:

Sorry, I really wanted a bad Irish accent for Philonous, but they only had three 'generic UK' accents, so I choose the one that most closely matched the 'Guide' in Hitchiker's Guide. Seems fitting enough.

This video has just started becoming viral, so I thought I'd post it here.

The new HP computers have 'face tracking' software that appears unable to track people with dark skin. One might think that it is unlikely that global corporation would put a product out that wasn't tested on people with various complexions, but having worked with engineers at global technological companies (not HP, notably), I'm not so easily duped. There is little doubt in my mind that this was just never tested thoroughly - a simple oversight that demonstrates a severe lack of critical thinking and social awareness. Engineering ethics are often thought of in terms of the utilitarian calculus required for any major construction project - but this f***-up by HP shows the complexity of that field. Engineering a product for public consumption requires significant ethical reflection, and this may be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the depth of that challenge.

YouTube - HP computers are racist

HP computers are racist  read more »

PRI's 'The World' interviewed Michael Walzer about Obama's Nobel acceptance speech and the concept of a 'just war.' The transcript is here:
President Obama's peace prize | Homepage Feature | PRI's The World

The Royal Society has been getting a great deal of press lately for its new 'trailblazing' website. The site provides an interactive timeline with links to major works that appeared in their 'Philosophical transactions', interspliced with some historical events.  The timeline is cool, and probably useful for teaching. But all of this was already freely available via Jstor - and browsable here: http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/by/year

Don't get me wrong: I love the RS. I live in their debt, as a professor at a small college, my research life has evolved to depend almost entirely on these public archives.  And I'm not one to get down on the coverage either, as any coverage of primary source articles in the history of science cannot be a bad thing. 

Royal Society - trailblazing

But still. Something about all the coverage annoys me. Maybe I'm just irritated that the secret is out. Now everyone will be writing about John Locke's observations on a French kid with really long fingernails:  read more »