Since it got cold and snowy, I’ve been walking to work and wearing snow pants to deal with the weather.  Today, for the first time that I remember, I apparently got the snow pants off the hook by the front door and put them with my coat to get ready and had no memory of […]

Back from vacation today and greeted by a Chicago Tribune headline with a beautiful example of how to badly confuse people with numbers. Now I wish I hadn’t skipped my “how to lie with statistics” lecture in 205 last quarter since this is the main trick I talk about. The short form: if somebody is […]

We are thinking of skill learning as depending on sequence learning in which a set of actions are chained together into a fluid, well-performed execution sequence.  In SISL, like Guitar Hero, the interface steps you through a specific sequence (repeatedly) and you become better at the sequence.  The William James idea of water carving an […]

Sherman’s Lagoon is doing a series on Guitar Hero.  This is today’s (11/30/10) from the Chicago Tribune.

From a few weeks ago, but it’s still funny to me.

It’d be interesting to find out what sort of percentage of students take advantage of paper-writing mills. Either way, this is a pretty interesting article from someone who works at one. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

For some reason, I decided that my Research Methods class would gain by a discussion of the phenomenon of regression to the mean. In hindsight, it didn’t connect to the rest of the material that well. I think I was just captured by this quote from Danny Kahneman. I’m excepting it here from wikipedia (Regression […]

Extra randomness today.  I had seen this awhile ago and decided to go find it again on youubte.  It’s a 2m completely pointless sequence of actions practiced and near-perfected by WGN news anchors to pass the time during commercial breaks. I meant to count the actions sequenced, but I always get distracted by wondering why […]

It seems like dreaming and memory are still huge topics in popular science. I guess we can thank Hollywood (Eternal Sunshine, Inception). The article is about epileptic patients with intracranial electrodes and how they have particular MTL firing when viewing particular pictures. However, as it progresses across the internet and is re-written, some of the […]

There’s a famous old data set on skill learning & expertise on workers rolling cigars that is used as an example of trying to understand the underlying skill learning rate (and therefore process).  I was reminded of the data by Scott Grafton last week and thought I’d dig it up for the lab website.  I […]