1008 - 1037 Responses to student improvements and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, i.e. DON'T PANIC !

Message no. 1008[Branch from no. 952] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:37pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Indeed Daniella, Architecture is a powerful tool to control the mind as you have said. Read about the work of the architect known as LE CORBUSIER and you will see how he wanted to use architecture to control the public. His style is still used to that effect today, and many people find it hideous (although his original work was rather inspired!).

Le Corbusier's most famous line is "A House is a Machine to Live in" -- he would have never understood your mother's love of the baked clay look of the paint in her room -- he would have prefered a dining room that got people to efficiently consume their nutrients as quickly as possible and then get back to work. His attitude made a lot of cafeteria designers go for ugly functionalism that creates a higher turn over.

Nice summary!

Message no. 1010[Branch from no. 964] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:40pm Subject: Re: summary

Glad to see how a personal experience with the correctional system has influenced your thoughts about utopia. I also now feel that we must eliminate abuse from all systems -- punishment is not a way to prevent crime, in fact it breeds it!

Message no. 1026[Branch from no. 1013] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:25am Subject: Re: chapter 7-janita

That is so true Danilea, and the trick of learning and giving yourself a powerful education as a life long learner is to find a way to relate EVERYTHING to your own life history. It seems hard at first (what is my relationship to statistical mechanics, or stained glass making, for example?) but it turns out that if you dig a little bit, you will find you are related to everything.

Personally I believe this is because we are all the creation of the one and only loving God, and thus we are all connected. Learning is about finding those connections.

As written in THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY:

"...since every piece of matter in the Universe is in someway affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake."

You may also be familiar with the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" which shows that we are all connected to everybody else by an average of six other people (six degrees of separation). This also applies to every TOPIC in the world. Once you find your connection, away you go! You can write, muse, talk for hours....

It is all about relating to yourself, isn't it?

Glad you have made that discovery!

Message no. 1027[Branch from no. 1014] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:34am Subject: Re: Summary

Your story about the effect of changing the conditions of the bar you worked in are inspiring! I will use this anecdote in my future discussions about how environment affects behavior. Thanks for that incredible piece of evidence!

That is what makes these relational summaries so valuable -- you add your own data to an ever growing pool of data that can be used to make society a better place! You see, you can make a real difference, just by reporting your experiences in a context.

Now you may get an idea for why I conduct the course the way I do -- I am doing research, and your relational summaries are, in effect, survey responses. The "questions" in my survey are the topics in the chapters, the answers are what you report about your experiences. This way the entire class acts as a giant laboratory for environment and the psychology of behavior! I have learned, from you guys, how changing the atmosphere of a bar affects business, about how chaning the environment in a hospital or old age home affects the people within them etc...

Thanks!

Message no. 1028[Branch from no. 987] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 5:47am Subject: Re: relational summary

Keep turning those lights off Daniela!! I do the same thing! It is an ethic we must all adopt! And I loved your story about the ticket for the Chicken McNuggets litter -- I will tell this to people here in Cairo. The other night, just outside the McDonald's drive through, a man and his friends were about to throw their entire bag of trash out the window at my feet. I glared at the man and he thought better of it. So instead he drove a hundred feet down the road, then stopped and threw the whole bag into a garden and then sped off! Wish I had the ability to write a ticket, or that the police (who were standing right there doing nothing, as usual) cared!

In fact, Egypt could raise a lot of money fining polluters and litterers!

Thanks for the insights in your summary!

Message no. 1037[Branch from no. 1032] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 4:14pm Subject: Re: Chapter 2 redo-

This was great Janita! I really enjoyed how you linked the chapter to the development of your son and to your own dawning awareness of how your behavior impacted others and your environment. Well done!

989 - 1005 Responses to student improvements

Message no. 989[Branch from no. 986] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, May 17, 2007 4:13pm Subject: Re: Daniela Final Part II

Glad you are enjoying it Daniela!

Your final is almost there. As with Adrienne's I need you now to list, not just summarize, the results of your survey questions along with each person's consumption patterns so we can see what correlates with what. Then your analysis will be more targetted and not just a general summary. In other words, since you suggest that AGE is related somehow to consumption and size of family is too, let us know how old person one and person two and person three etc. are, and let us know the size of their families and all that good stuff. That way we can draw our own conclusions and see if they match yours? Capisce?

A little more detail and we're there Daniela! Go for it!

Good first stab!

T

Message no. 991[Branch from no. 974] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 18, 2007 5:39am Subject: Re: chap 10- Janita

This summary is one of the best you have posted Janita -- just as you felt connected to the passage in the book, we feel connected to you and your experiences and the psychology of your behavior through your writing about your insights. And that is the point of these relational summaries. If you could insert a bit more of "YOU" into the other summaries, even at this late date, it would make a world of difference and make it easier to grade well. You know, inject a bit of your personality into the other summaries, as you have done this one. The others are so dry -- as if they were mere restatements of what the book said, which we have all read. What we have been interested in in this class is YOU -- how you relate to the ideas in the book, how your personal environment affects your behavior and how you were affected by what you learned! And by the way, having grown up in inner city Chicago on the south side, Playgrounds for me were just as you described them -- safe places where everyone looked after one another and interacted. In fact, even in those times of tension and crime, my parents thought it safe to let us go to the playground alone. As you say times have changed! I agree we should bring the playground standard back to society.

Message no. 1004[Branch from no. 938] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 4:52pm Subject: Re: chapter 3-

Janita -- to get credit for these summaries remember they have to be RELATIONAL -- that is RELATED TO YOUR LIFE AND EXPERIENCES! Otherwise they appear to just be cut and paste factoids from some book or website.

You MUST (and this applies to any of you who have written summaries that are mere summaries, without personal info and without quotes and page numbers so we can SEE what you have copied) go back and insert the personal information and the reference pages and quotes or IT DOESN'T COUNT!!

This is the time to do it ... open all your relational summaries, re-read them and ask yourselves "does this document show others HOW I RELATE TO THE IDEAS IN THE TEXT?"

DO NOT be afraid to be personal. You count. You matter. Your psychology is important. Stop thinking that learning is about facts. It is about how you integrate facts into your daily life. It is about YOU YOU YOU.

No go for it!

Message no. 1005[Branch from no. 939] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:24pm Subject: Re: chapter 5

This is a very good relational summary Janita! It is very much what I am looking for in all of your summaries -- a personal relationship with the material. You know, as a trained nurse, that personal relationships can make all the difference in the life and death of a patient! We need to be personal in our relationship with everything and everyone we touch -- authentic in our engagement.

Thanks for showing me the level of interaction you can achieve with a subject when you feel related to it!

Message no. 1006[Branch from no. 958] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:27pm Subject: Re: chapter 7

Again you have done a nice job on this one Janita, and again I think it is because the topic relates so closely to your nursing experience. It was a pleasure reading about your insights into the trauma nurses suffer doing their job and dealing with disasters! It certainly opened my eyes!

Message no. 1007[Branch from no. 931] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, May 21, 2007 5:30pm Subject: Re: Summary

I liked this summary Dana. I realized that I am a "hugger" and wondered about my effect on people who feel invaded by this behavior. I think I am comfortable in the Middle East and Mediterranean cultures because they are very tactile. Strange that I should marry a German though... hmmm...

983 988 nature vs. environment

Message no. 983[Branch from no. 978] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:37pm Subject: Re: Final pt.2...Varshawn

I like the way you set up your survey Varshawn, with the multiple choice answers. It makes it much easier to formalize and code the data for analysis!

I agree with your conclusions (similar to Adrienne's and Michelles) but don't get too pessimistic -- the turning point is near I think! Reading the book "Critical Mass" by Phillip Ball, which I have mentioned often, convinces me that things will change for the better even without most people being aware!

Anyway, now that you have got your data, just follow the same recommendation I gave Adrienne and Michelle -- list ALL your data so we know which person said what and can correlate it with their consumption, and analyse by pointing those correlations out to us and you have a winner!

Thanks!

T

Message no. 988[Branch from no. 985] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, May 17, 2007 4:07pm Subject: A job well done!

Consider yourself done with the final Adrienne -- you've done a tremendous A class job! This will set the standard for others to follow.

Looking at your data, I agree that the variables don't seem to have much explanatory value -- in fact the two values that you talk about but which are not specifically in your questionnaire -- income and the lavishness of lifestyle -- seem to have the most explanatory strength -- it does indeed appear that those who have the most money do the most consuming (which makes some sense) and are the most wasteful (because they can afford to be?). Interestingly, they are the one's who could do the most good (because they could immediately afford clean efficient technologies that are too expensive for others of more modest means). Unfortunately, most of my rich friends and relatives are the first to tell me that "solar is too expensive" (for example) -- I once told a rich friend in Malibu that I had installed a solar electric system on my apartment roof in L.A. for $7000 dollars on my teachers salary of 28,000 a year. He said that was way too expensive for him, but later that afternoon told us about his trip to Canada and Las Vegas the previous weekend where he had a great time - he rented a private jet to get to the Hockey game in Canada, then flew into Vegas to gamble -- the weekend cost him 50,000 dollars! Hmmmm. Values....

Interesting you should note that people consider "nature" and "environment" different things -- of course for the rich "nature" is usually preserved at some resort somewhere, and the environment of the rich is kept clean and healthy by gardeners and service staff... they are different things...

Anyway, no need to belabor the points -- you have done a marvelous job of pulling your data together and starting down the road to a serious scientific analysis. Thanks for spending the extra time! Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did!

Cheers and congratulations,

Professor T.

981 982 Peer Review

Message no. 981[Branch from no. 969] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:29pm Subject: Re: Final

Thanks for your patience and mutual assistance group! My computer is on the fritz again, so it is great to know I can count on you guys to help each other toward clarity. Please take a look at Adriennes final and my response to see how you can create the "perfect final". As for when it is due, this week is a good time! We need to get grades in next week! I don't mind you polishing things us over the weekend though, in light of my comments!

Enjoy, and keep helping and inspiring each other!

T

Message no. 982[Branch from no. 972] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:33pm Subject: Re: final part 2

Yes, it is an eye opener, isn't it Michelle!

As with Adrienne's post, can I urge you to give us all the raw data and tie your analysis to correlations that we can also see? This is what science is about -- PEER REVIEW. We must not only share our conclusions, but HOW we derived our conclusions. Otherwise scientists could just make up figures and tell us things like "video games lead to violence" or "the death penalty deters crime". In fact many bad scientists have done just that, but it is wrong to do. Good scientists present their data so the rest of us can see if we agree with the conclusions or if we see some other pattern in the data.

The idea is to lead us through the data and tell us why you think it proves what you think it does.

Cool?

Do that and you will have a great final!

Thanks!

980 Almost perfect Final!

Message no. 980[Branch from no. 970] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:26pm Subject: Re: Final Adrienne

Hi Adrienne,

Wow! This is an almost perfect final! I say "almost" because there is one piece missing that makes all the difference in science -- the raw data from which we can correlate the variables and look for co-variates. That is a fancy way of saying we need to know WHICH of the people you surveyed answered which questions so we can look for a link between, say, the person who said that "yes" they were a nature lover and the number of planets they use and their carbon footprint. If we don't do that, the data doesn't help us understand how environment and the psychology of behavior are related. Do you see what I mean?

So, for example, we would like to know if Person #7 used 3.6 planets, and person #3 used 12.9 ( a big range, as you have pointed out!), what did person #7 say about loving nature, about awareness of the five simple things they could do, and how did person #3 answer those questions? Where did they live? We should know this about each person. The data should look like this, for example:

Person #7 Food 2.6 Mobility 0.7 Shelter 1.2 Goods 2 Total 6.5 3.6 Planets

Survey for person #7: 1. Do you live in the U.S. or the Middle East? Mid East 2. Do you commute more that 10 miles to work one way? No, I walk to work. 3. Would you say that you live a stressful lifestyle? No, I live off of the fruit trees in my garden. 4. Do you have children? Yes, and they do all the composting. 5. Are you a nature lover? Definitely. 6. Are you able to identify more that one stress reliever other than drugs/alcohol? Gardening does it for me! 7. Do you have a college education? Yes. Undergraduate only. 8. Are you very concerned about the condition of our world? (i.e. global warming, quality of our food supply and water supply, clean air, the environment etc.) Very! 9. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual? La illah allah illa allah! 10. Are you aware of approximately 5 simple things that you are doing to protect our environment? Yes, I use a fan instead of an airconditioner, I eat local produce, the meat comes from my neighbor's sheep, I take public transportation, we use the bath water to irrigate the fruit trees and use the sheep droppings to make biogas for the stove.

Person #3 Food 4.9 Mobility 0.7 Shelter 26.7 Goods 24.9 Total 57 12.9 planets

Survey: 1. Do you live in the U.S. or the Middle East?

U.S., Florida 2. Do you commute more that 10 miles to work one way? 150 miles each way 3. Would you say that you live a stressful lifestyle? Always! 4. Do you have children? Three 5. Are you a nature lover? Only on T.V. -- Discovery Channel 6. Are you able to identify more that one stress reliever other than drugs/alcohol? If I could, I'd go hunting. 7. Do you have a college education? Multiple degrees, up to M.D. 8. Are you very concerned about the condition of our world? (i.e. global warming, quality of our food supply and water supply, clean air, the environment etc.) Global warming is a myth - Michael Chrichton said so in a book I read on an airplane to golf in a resort in Malaysia. 9. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual? Not particularly 10. Are you aware of approximately 5 simple things that you are doing to protect our environment? I take out the garbage on sunday, and pay my greens fees to the country club...

Note that I have obviously made up these answers according to stereotype assumptions that may have nothing to do with consumption!! Your actual data contradicts my stereotypes - you said that ALL claim to have stressful lives and that all claim to be religious. Thus those two areas are probably NOT covariates with consumption, as my stereotype answers would suggest. That makes us wonder "is there anything that truly differs between the low and high consumers"?

Can you give us the real answers for Persons #1 through #10, so we can see what patterns jump out, if any? And then, in your analysis, make reference to those specific values -- as you do, but so that we can see what the facts are and what your interpretation is. For example, you mentioned that the Florida doctor consumes the most, but that your brother in law in Saudi Arabia also is a high consumer, and you said that they have relatively similar incomes. The conclusion that one could draw from this (though it is most likely very wrong!) is that "hot climates make people big consumers." We would have to have a data point from someone in a cold climate and a medium climate to test this hypothesis.

Anyway, your job is not to do all of that, because this is an introduction to the methodology, not a Ph.D. thesis! But you are so close to having what I consider a PERFECT final I would love it if you could just give us that raw data and refer to it in your analysis, and with that you will be a model for the rest of the class and a contributor to the exciting and ever growing library of human knowledge!

Thanks Adrienne, well done!

T

950 Multitudes in the Valley of Decisions

Message no. 950[Branch from no. 946] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 4:10pm Subject: Re: Relational Summary

What a fun summary Dawn (though it ends kind of abruptly, wouldn't you say... we kind of expected a summary to the summary, a "and they all lived happily ever after" tag at the end... some conclusion...

Your metaphors (the dog choker, and the "where's Waldo"for example) are great, and you paint great imagery.

Also, thanks for bringing new perspective to the idea of why people don't leave home even if it is dangerous. I think I go a bit overboard trying to paint people as rational, and you helped me see the powerful emotions that come into play when considering one's territory or home environment.

I think in terms of the way an environment controls our behavior we have to ask what our behavior would be like without the context of an environment to constrain it. What is freedom without an environment to act in? Don't environments help determine how we want to behave? Joshua Epstein (2001) quoted in Phillip Ball's chapter "Multitudes in the Valley of Decision" (p. 295 of Critical Mass) "When I'd had my coffee this morning and went upstairs to get dressed for work, I never considered being a nudist for the day. When I got into my car to drive to work, it never crossed my mind to drive on the left. And when I joined my colleagues at lunch, I did not consider eating my salad bare handed; without a thought I used a fork." The author also quotes Karl Mannheim from 1936 saying, "Only in a quite limited sense does the individual create out of himself the mode of speech and thought we attribute to him. He speaks the language of his group; he thinks in the manner in which the group thinks."

I think one of the tensions in our modern society is that we are uncertain to which group we belong. We are aware of a pluricultural potential for behavior and it is hard to design for so many cultural norms. At some point though, we do conform to what we each consider normal. I think our dogs do too -- I observe that many animals, particularly pack animals like dogs, do not exhibit a free range of behaviors but "choke" themselves into postures of dominance and submission and "appropriate behavior" depending on the social environment around them.

Your thoughts?

949 Clarification of the Survey

Message no. 949 Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 11, 2007 3:55pm Subject: Coming up with the survey

Hi Class,

Varshawn sent me an email asking for clarification on the surveys. Here is my answer:

Yes, you come up with your own surveys -- pick the questions from the eco and carbon footprint websites you find most useful and will use and add to them your own questions about lifestyle that can help explain why people have the footprints they have. You then plug the information into the footprint calculators to get values for your friends and then try to explain the similarities and differences by the answers you get to your other questions.

For example, I put my father's footprint information in, and I found out his lifestyle would take 3.5 planets if everybody else lived like him, and I put in my uncle's info and found that he would need 8 planets. Now I want to know what the underlying differences are that affect their different behaviors. Yes I know that my cousin drives a gas guzzler and has a huge house and eats steak everyday and my father has a hybrid car. Okay. That went into the calculator. But what explains why my cousin is such an energy hog? Is it their beliefs, their jobs, their incomes, what?

It turns out , for one thing, that my uncle lives in the Midwest where there is no public transportation, where there is a tradition of having big trucks, where beef cattle are raised, and where real estate is cheap enough for middle class people to have big houses. So even though their incomes are the same, location helps explain the differences in their consumption. Also, interestingly, though my Dad grew up in the Midwest, my Dad saw Bambi as a kid and decided he didn't want to kill animals, and he moved to New York to be a writer, while his brother became a hunter and likes that "everything big is better" macho tradition. These things describe a possible "psychology of behavior" and that is what this course is about. See what I mean?

You should speculate on these things based on the questions you ask in your survey. As Philip Ball says in Critical Mass (page 296) "Not even the most ardent supporter of individualism could reasonably claim that our choices are truly independent. How in a society flooded with mass advertising, can we hope to make decisions free from the influences of our environment."

You might ask the question "how much television do you watch a day" or "do you shop at Best Buy" and see if people who watch alot of television have a larger or smaller footprint, or if people who answer yes to shopping at Best Buy have a larger or smaller footprint.

How you EXPLAIN the data you get is where you can have fun and be creative!!!

Mark Twain said, "there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics!". You may find, in your tiny data set, that out of 10 people you survey, 8 have an above average footprint and they just also happen to all love Alanis Morrisette (if that was one of your questions!). Does that mean that listening to Alanis Morrisette makes you consume more? Yikes, Alanis would hate that, because she is on a "green" campaign. But your data might show that! How would you explain the psychology?

It may be that listening to Alanis has NOTHING to do with consumption, but it was a case of the roll of the dice that your data shows a correlation! Remember CORRELATIONS ARE NOT REGRESSIONS, i.e., they aren't statistically significant. For example, as our textbook says, people who ate ice cream in one study were found to be involved in violent crimes. Does that mean that ice cream causes violent crimes? No, it just turned out that the crimes were influenced by a heat wave, and the heat wave also made people eat ice cream.

The fun of environment and the psychology of behavior is trying to figure out what causes what!

You don't have to come up with the survey all by yourself by the way == you can share ideas and develop it with other class mates!

See what you come up with!