AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

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 »

Vaughan Bell over at Mind Hacks posted a link earlier today to a classic 1949 paper by Bertram Forer titled "The Fallacy of Personal Validation a Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility. I love this paper.

I've used a variation of Forer's 'personality profile' in my Critical Thinking course for years. It's a fantastic example of vague language, appeals to flattery and other abuses of language.  I got my example via James Randi, who demonstrated the effect in a great episode of Nova a few years back.

While my analysis tends to be in fallacies of language, Forer himself says "Personality evaluations can be, and often are, couched in such general terms that they are meaningless in terms of denotability of behavior. Or they may have 'universal validity' and apply to everyone."  Forer gave his students a brief 'personality vignette' and asked to rate the degree to which the vignette "reveals basic characteristics of your personality" on a scale of 0-5. All vignettes were the same. The 13 items Forer included in each vignette were:  read more »

While I was looking for data, I stumbled across this:

Anyone recognize her? Congrats on the big shout-out! (you have to get past the inane discussion of clubs and good-looking guys)

For years, I've been using the old standby:

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

To make various points about syntax. (If you're not aware of the standard example: 'buffalo' is a verb that means to 'bluff aggressively'. The subject of the sentence is 'buffalo,' referring to the creatures. Those creatures are then from the city of Buffalo, thus being 'Buffalo buffalo' who bluff other Buffalo buffalo aggressively).

A few years ago, I noticed (unoriginally) that 'buffalo' is also used as an adjective to refer to a certain kind of spicey sauce, as in 'buffalo chicken' or 'buffalo wild wings'. Thus, if one could spice buffalo from Buffalo and then let them buffalo other similarly spiced Buffalo buffalo, one could say:

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

And for years, I've been mentioning in class that there is another well-known english word that is used as all the parts of speech, including (unlike 'buffalo') as an interjection.  I leave it up to the imaginations of the students to figure out a 7-word sentence using that word (which takes -ing and -ed to operate as an adjective or adverb). Today, Ben Andres, 3rd year Phil major, created an 11-word sentence based on F--- that I believe grammatically correct. Here it is:  read more »

Julie Meloni over at ProfHacker inspired me the other day with her post about Wordle. You may remember that some time ago, I created a site that count words from abstracts freely available from philosophy journals.  I modified the output of that site slightly so that the 'complete' list could be fed into Wordle, and voilà:

Useful videos here from D. Chalmers:

There isn't that much here that come as a surprise to any of us who have followed his career [read 'in his wake'] over the past 15 years, but it should be useful for any intro class. He is engaging and charismatic as always.

Although I will note that he's speaking much more slowly than when I saw him speak at Princeton back in '98. Either he's been coached by the TV presenters, or we're all getting old.

Hugh Dancy talks about his father Jonathan Dancy (Texas / Reading) on Conan O'Brien. Not all that useful as content (i.e. there is no actual argumentation here), but he does talk mostly about his teaching. And it appears that Conan has trouble distinguishing between philosophy and physics: