I noticed in Macy’s recently that almost all of their furniture is imported from the Far East. On-line investigation showed that this is representative of American furniture sellers today. Whatever happened to all those manufacturers in our South? Mostly gone. CORRECTION, they are not hiring or manufacturing but many of those corporations still exist, often collecting money from China for NOT manufacturing. As this Washington Post article points out, (more…)
September 18, 2014
November 14, 2013
I confess! I did it! I studied polygraphs and taught others about it in General Psychology.
1) Use of polygraphs was outlawed by our government a few decades ago because of the high error rate, particularly false positives that identified innocent people as likely liars. Significantly, after declaring this, government made an exception for government itself. (more…)
August 6, 2013
Arrested at Lockheed Martin today (Hiroshima Day, 2013).
Today I walked onto the grounds of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest war profiteer, in order to ask employees to reconsider their working on nuclear-related systems, including drones that (more…)
April 10, 2013
Princeton Graduate Psychology Reunion after 50 years, with examples of the influence of money/power and of revisionist history
Fran and I recently attended a Graduate Psychology Reunion at Princeton. Besides having an enjoyable time at the reunion, the event stimulated re-thinking of my experience there nearly a half-century ago. (more…)
January 2, 2013
Andrea del Sarto (Called “The Faultless Painter”) and Paul’s three-legged stool.
Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning
I reread this poem on New Year’s Day 2013. I believe that I had not read it fully since high school, and it is amazing how different it feels to read it in my late 60’s compared to reading it as a teenager. (more…)
July 26, 2012
Has women’s lib become women’s chains (comparable to men’s)?
One of the greatest capitalist rip-offs of the second half of the 20th century was to convince women that they would be better off and happier being “liberated” to leave their families and to emulate the meaningless hamster-wheel work life (so falsely glamorized) that their mates “enjoyed.” So now we end up with (more…)
My venture into comparative sensory capability — with tarantulas
At one time I was going to do auditory behavioral research with spiders, and chose tarantulas because they were fairly easy to work with (at least you could observe their reflex behavior readily — crouch to an air blast, and they are not web weavers). I would use classical conditioning to check for frequency discrimination associated with an air blast for similar frequencies pairs. Anyhow, this creepy crawly box arrived while I was on vacation. A graduate assistant was assigned (more…)
May 14, 2012
Student course evaluations — what do they mean, how should they be used?
Put my Spring grades in a couple of days ago. Of 21 students, there were two A’s (one of them was almost a last-minute gift with the help of departmental extra credit), three A-‘s, but no B+’s, and so on. Wonder what my course evaluations will look like considering (more…)
March 15, 2012
My life and education under the National Defense Education Act of 1958.
About half a century ago, the U.S. government began to impose its will on education, big time. And I was a student unknowingly in the midst of it. (The following quotes are from hi-lited links) “The National Defense Education Act of 1958 was the most important federal bill related to higher education since the 1862 Morrill Act” “By 1958 the Soviet threat grew more immediate; (more…)
July 13, 2011
Vocationalism, Academic Freedom and Tenure (NYTimes by Stanley Fish)
My Comment on this article was the following:
The admiral notion of self-improvement and the perhaps more-realistic notion of occupational survival have resulted in great growth and concomitant change in so-called “higher” education. My concern with tenure is not with its principles but with its misuse.