Evolutionary Questions

margolove @ Flickr

GENERAL

Why do humans reproduce sexually and not asexually?

Why do humans have two genders? What implication does this have on behaviour?

How can evolutionary theory help us to understand human behaviour?

Contrast the EP and HBE approaches in the study of human behaviour and psychology, with emphasis on their strengths and limitations.

"Many of the complexities of human behaviour have their roots in our biology trying to stay fifteen seconds ahead of the parasites." (Sharpfella, 2008). Discuss.

How can traits that reduce viability and survivability be favoured by evolutionary processes?

Good genes models of sexual selection can only explain why males evolve sexually dimorphic traits. Discuss.

Why is parental investment theory of such value to modern evolutionary psychology?

SEXUAL STRATEGIES

Males are polygamous; females are monogamous. Discuss the accuracy of this statement and explain why this might/might not be the case.

What have the solutions to the problems of mate choice produced in terms of different sexual strategies?

There is disagreement as to whether human mating is solely designed for long term mating or for short-term promiscuous mating. Why might contemporary evolutionary psychologists consider this dichotomy incomplete?

Discuss the different mating strategies available to humans and couch them in a theoretical framework.

Why might women typically dislike casual sex?

Humans are designed to operate pluralistic mating strategies. Discuss.

How does balancing genetic quality and parental quality in mate choice manifest itself in human sex differences?

What are the differences in jealousy between the sexes? Why might this be?

Are humans polyandrous?

What can the study of human faces tell us about mating strategies?

Discuss the trade-off between quality of offspring and quantity of offspring.

In what ways are mating strategies context-specific?

RISK

Account for risk proneness in males using theories of sexual selection.

In evolutionary terms, what might homicide as an extreme index of aggression and risk taking tell us?

What risk factors increase the likelihood of homicide? Justify your answer with evolutionary logic.

America and Canada both allow their citizens to have guns and yet the homicide rate in America is significantly more. One of the major differences between the two countries is the income inequality. Discuss from first biological principles why this might be the cause of this gross homicide discrepancy.

INFANTICIDE

Infanticide is an evolutionary adaptation. Discuss.

Who is more likely to kill their offspring: genetic parents or stepparents? Why?

Discuss how evolutionary psychology bears upon infanticide.

KINSHIP, RECIPROCITY AND SHARING

"Bats will help each other out because ultimately this is a selfish act for them. In humans this line of reasoning is simply not consistent with the data. We need a better theory." (Bob, 2008). What, in your justified opinion, is an example of a 'better theory' of human altruism?

How can our genetic relatedness to a person determine whether we will help them altruistically?

Some theorists believe that kin selection (Hamilton, 1964) is not the only reason why altruistic behaviour has evolved. Discuss.

Social exchange reasoning is a domain-specific, cognitive adaptation that allows us to detect cheaters (Cosmides & Tooby, 2005). Discuss.

Are there modules for social exchange?

Are people altruistic to non-relatives? Why?

Are the classical theories enough to account for human altruism?

Will it be necessary to look at group selection to account for some human behaviours?

What is strong reciprocity and is it useful?

Reviews: LTMM

geekmom @ Flickr

Language, Thought, Modularity of Mind

• Bloom, P. & Keil, F. (2001). Thinking through language. Mind and Language.16, 351-367 (copy here)
• Kay, P., & Regier, T. (2006). Language, Thought, and Color: Recent Developments. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 51–54 (copy here) (also see the rest of Kay & Regier's recent publications)
• Boroditsky, L. (2003). Linguistic Relativity. In L. Nadel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, (pp.917-922). London: Macmillan (copy here) (be careful though because she has been shown to be wrong about a few things; see Chen, J. -Y., [2006] and January and Kako [2006])
• Fodor, J. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press Cambridge, Mass. (this chapter)
• Bates, E. (1993) Modularity, domain specificity and the development of language. Technical Report 9305. Center for Research in Language, UCSD (copy here)
• Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1999). Is vision continuous with cognition? The case for cognitive impenetrability of visual perception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(3), 341-423 (copy here)
  

Reviews: Human Factors

davemorris @ Flickr

Human Factors

• Parasuraman, R. (2003). Neuroergonomics: Research and practice. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 4, 5-20. (copy here)
  
• Fundamental Human Factors Concepts, Civial Aviation Authority (copy here)
• Chalmers, P.A. (2003). The role of cognitive theory in human-computer interface. Computers in Human Behavior, 9, (5) (copy here)
  
• There's also a great chapter or paper from 2007 by Christopher Wickens called 'Aviation' or something like that. Even with the full force of the Google machine I can't find it again though. It's great because it covers so much of the course material with nice examples from aviation. The only snippet of original info I have from it is a quotation, "how they should be carried out, and when they should be done.” and the ref (Wickens, 2007, p.375). Good luck searching for it...

Reviews: Evolutionary

What a beard.

Evolutionary

• Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (2003). Evolutionary psychology: Theoretical Foundations. In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. (pp. 54-64). London: Macmillan. (copy here)
  
• Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2005). Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 5-67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. (copy here)
• Ermer, E., Guerin, S., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., & Miller, M. (2006) Theory of mind broad and narrow: Reasoning about social exchange engages ToM areas, precautionary reasoning does not. Social Neuroscience, 1 (3-4), 196-219. (copy here)
• Cosmides, L, Tooby, J., Fiddick, L. & Bryant, G. (2005). Detecting cheaters. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(11), 505-506 (copy here)
• Daly, M. & Wilson, M. (2007) Is the "Cinderella effect" controversial? A case study of evolution-minded research and critiques thereof. In C Crawford & D Krebs, eds., Foundations of evolutionary psychology. Mahwah NJ: Erlbaum.
• Daly, M. & Wilson, M. (2005) The 'Cinderella Effect' is no fairy tale. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9: 507-508. (copy here)
  
• Daly, M. & Wilson, M. (2005) Carpe Diem: Adaptation and devaluing the future The Quarterly Review of Biology 80: 55-61. (copy here)
• Daly M, Wilson M (2002) Introduction: two special issues on risk. Evolution & Human Behavior 23: 1-2. (copy here)
• Daly M, Wilson M (2001) Risk-taking, Intrasexual Competition, and Homicide. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 47: 1-36. (copy here)

Reviews: Developmental Disorders

ylvas @ Flickr

Developmental Disorders

• Mervis, C.B. & Becerra, A.M. (2007) Language and communicative development in Williams syndrome. Ment Retard Dev Disabil Res Rev, 13 (1), 3-15 (copy here)
  
• Brock, J. (2007). Language abilities in Williams syndrome: a critical review. Development and Psychopathology, 19, 97-127
• Abbeduto, L. Warren, S.F. & Conners, F.A. (2007) Language development in Down syndrome: From the prelinguistic period to the acquisition of literacy. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 13 (3), 247
• Silverman, W. (2007). Down syndrome: Cognitive phenotype. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 13 (3), 22
• Roberts, J.E., Price, J., & Malkin, C. (2007) Language and communication development in down syndrome. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 13 (1), 26-35
• Smith, S.D (2007). Genes, language development, and language disorders. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 13 (1), 96-105
• Müller, R.A. (2007) The study of autism as a distributed disorder. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 13 (1), 85-95
• van der Lely H K. J. (2005). Domain-specific cognitive systems: Insight from Grammatical specific language impairment. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 9 (2), 53-59 (copy here)

Reviews: Neuropsychiatry

ethanhein @ Flickr

Neuropsychiatry

• Kendler, K. S. (2005). Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry. American Journal of Psychiatry, 162, 433-440.
• Yudofsky S. C., & Hales E.H (2002). Neuropsychiatry and the Future of Psychiatry and Neurology. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159(8), 1261-1264.
• Price, B.H., Adams, R.D., & Coyle, J.T. (2000). Neurology and psychiatry: closing the great divide. Neurology, 54(1), 8-14.
• Martin, J. B. (2002). The Integration of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience in the 21st Century. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159(5), 695 – 704.

Reviews: Social Psychology

simonbooth @ Flickr - Banksy's Kissing Policemen.
One of Banky's main tricks is to subvert deeply established stereotypes. In cognitive terms, we are extremely sensitive to this because it stands in such stark contrast to the stereotype - it is category-inconsistent.

Social

• Macrae, C. N., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2000). Social cognition: Thinking categorically about others. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 93-120. (here)
  
• Bargh, J.A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479 (here)
  
• Bargh, J. A. (1999). The cognitive monster: The case against controllability of automatic stereotype effects. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual process theories in social psychology. New York: Guilford.
• Wenzlaff, R.M. & Wegner, D.M. (2000). Thought suppression. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 59–91. (here)

Reviews: Critical Issues

apoptotic @ Flickr

Critical Issues in Psychology

Wikipedia article on Philosopy of Science
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2005). Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 5-67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. (copy here)

Ketelaar, T & Ellis, B.J (2000). Are Evolutionary Explanations Unfalsifiable? Evolutionary Psychology and the Lakatosian Philosophy of Science. Psychological Inquiry, 11 (1), 1-21
Controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology by Edward H. Hagen, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Berlin. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 5-67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. (copy here)
Laland, K.N. & Hoppitt, W., 2003. Do animals have culture? Evolutionary Anthropology, 12, pp. 150–159
Block, N. (1996). What is Functionalism? The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy Supplement. New York: MacMillan Reference Books
Nichols M.J. & Newsome, W.T. (1999) The neurobiology of cognition. Nature, 402, 35–38 (copy here)

Reviews

cidsoe @ Flickr

I'm pretty sure I promised a series of posts detailing good reviews. I think we can get that started today...

Spilling the beans fast

mayaevening @ Flickr

Had a few emails this week about structuring paragraphs. My main bit of advice here is the title of this post: spill the beans fast. That means saying your point before giving evidence for it.

You are not writing detective fiction. The conclusion you arrive at in a paragraph doesn't have to be a wonderful 'aha!' surprise to the reader. It's better if it isn't.

So when you are writing, (1) state your point outright. (2) Then support it. (3) And then explicitly relate it back to the question if the point's done.

E.g.,
(1 SPILL THE BEANS) Tom Cruise is a nutter. (2 EVIDENCE) This, this, this, this, this, this and this. (3 SUMMARY) Taken together, the evidence indicates that Tom Cruise is bat-shit crazy.

Obviously, the way I have laid it out here is rather stark and if you were to write an essay which used this method doggedly it would be a jolty read. However, beneath the nuance and sophistication of essays and papers with better suspension, if you look deep enough into the structure, you will find this method at work.

(Watch this brilliant spoof of Tom below; the mannerisms are just perfect)

Sentence minimalism

“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil” - Truman Capote

Bad papers, essays and writing in general use overly-long sentences. When you are dealing with difficult stuff inside the sentences don’t add to the confusion by making your sentences themselves difficult. Long sentences produce more cognitive sweat and deliver comprehension a harder kick in the nuts than shorter sentences. They are the enemy of effortless reading.

The most actionable way of achieving this Zen state of brevity is to avoid multiple subordinate clauses or run-on sentences, which means your reader is not saddling and unsaddling the whole time. Two commas are more than enough for a sentence and if there are any more it can be chopped up.

Then there are those bloated sentences. Constant revision of your work should help trim them down. If words aren’t buying you something say bye to them. Waffle is costly.

Quite a lot of bloatiness I've spotted on the uploaded essays is repetition of an experiment's method and results. Carve it off; try blending the two together.

For example,

"Functional magnetic resonance imaging was carried out on 23 participants by Beardface (2008) to establish whether there was a 'beard module' in the human visual system. Beardface found the neuroimaging revealed a distinct island of activity in the inferotemporal cortex"

can easily be written as,

"Functional magnetic resonance imaging on 23 participants found a distinct island of activity in the inferotemporal cortex with the presentation of beard stimuli (Beardface, 2008). This little change amounts to a halving of the word count.

Overall, you should be aiming for sentences like Apple design; all that is needed is there and nothing more. You should get the feeling that your words delicately pick up your idea and place it softly into the reader’s mind. Sentences that are lengthy, bloaty or repetitive will deploy clumsily - a discourtesy for which the marker may punish you.

So. Keep. Them. Short.

Personal Genteelism

Some people have asked me about using "I" in essays. Although there are some areas of scientific publication where this is (becoming) acceptable, I recommend that you avoid it for the moment, unless you have cleared it with a specific lecturer.

You should usually be able to state your position in third person. So instead of "I think the data are unreliable for the following reasons" you should say "The data are unreliable for the following reasons."

The other thing you can do is refer to yourself as "the author". I would avoid frothy phrases like "the present author of this communication" because you sound like a dick. Keep it simple.

Food for Thought

Fotographic by the great Carl Warner; everything in the photo is made of food. Click image to enlarge

The brain is the 4x4 of the body, guzzling fuel in epic proportions. Every neuron needs energy every time it changes state, and you have 100 billion of them. When you are revising you are flexing your mental muscle considerably more than your usual student day. So, are there any ways you can get the best out of your brain for energy and memory? Here’s a nice little article which asks that question. It's from New Scientist in 2005:

***

“First, go to the top of the class by eating breakfast. The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people's performance at school and at work.

But it isn't simply a matter of getting some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention. Beans on toast is a far better combination, as Barbara Stewart from the University of Ulster, UK, discovered. Toast alone boosted children's scores on a variety of cognitive tests, but when the tests got tougher, the breakfast with the high-protein beans worked best. Beans are also a good source of fibre, and other research has shown a link between a high-fibre diet and improved cognition. If you can't stomach beans before midday, wholemeal toast with Marmite makes a great alternative. The yeast extract is packed with B vitamins, whose brain-boosting powers have been demonstrated in many studies.

A smart choice for lunch is omelette and salad. Eggs are rich in choline, which your body uses to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Researchers at Boston University found that when healthy young adults were given the drug scopolamine, which blocks acetylcholine receptors in the brain, it significantly reduced their ability to remember word pairs. Low levels of acetylcholine are also associated with Alzheimer's disease, and some studies suggest that boosting dietary intake may slow age-related memory loss.

A salad packed full of antioxidants, including beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, should also help keep an ageing brain in tip-top condition by helping to mop up damaging free radicals. Dwight Tapp and colleagues from the University of California at Irvine found that a diet high in antioxidants improved the cognitive skills of 39 ageing beagles - proving that you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Round off lunch with a yogurt dessert, and you should be alert and ready to face the stresses of the afternoon. That's because yogurt contains the amino acid tyrosine, needed for the production of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin, among others. Studies by the US military indicate that tyrosine becomes depleted when we are under stress and that supplementing your intake can improve alertness and memory.

Don't forget to snaffle a snack mid-afternoon, to maintain your glucose levels. Just make sure you avoid junk food, and especially highly processed goodies such as cakes, pastries and biscuits, which contain trans-fatty acids. These not only pile on the pounds, but are implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders, from dyslexia and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to autism. Hard evidence for this is still thin on the ground, but last year researchers at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, California, reported that rats and mice raised on the rodent equivalent of junk food struggled to find their way around a maze, and took longer to remember solutions to problems they had already solved.

It seems that some of the damage may be mediated through triglyceride, a cholesterol-like substance found at high levels in rodents fed on trans-fats. When the researchers gave these rats a drug to bring triglyceride levels down again, the animals' performance on the memory tasks improved.

Brains are around 60 per cent fat, so if trans-fats clog up the system, what should you eat to keep it well oiled? Evidence is mounting in favour of omega-3 fatty acids, in particular docosahexaenoic acid or DHA. In other words, your granny was right: fish is the best brain food. Not only will it feed and lubricate a developing brain, DHA also seems to help stave off dementia. Studies published last year reveal that older mice from a strain genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's had 70 per cent less of the amyloid plaques associated with the disease when fed on a high-DHA diet.

Finally, you could do worse than finish off your evening meal with strawberries and blueberries. Rats fed on these fruits have shown improved coordination, concentration and short-term memory. And even if they don't work such wonders in people, they still taste fantastic. So what have you got to lose?”

***

Ok, it's me again. The take home message is that putting the best fuel into your biological 4x4 is absolutely necessary for good performance and better memory. Don't scrimp on good food; you need to eat well during your revision and exams - marks depend on it. If you still want more information visit here for some pearls from the FSA.

Verbal overgrowth

Superlative writing is imbued with an unornamented elegance rather than appropriating a sesquipedalian demeanor. Or put better, the best writing is simple, not complex. The advice here is: Don’t be pretentious and puffed up with your vocabulary or style. It's all over the essays on the hub, this strange top-button-done-up register.

I am sure many of you have right-clicked and selected 'Synonyms' (or for the geekier, Shift+F7) thinking that you were cunningly upping your essay’s intellectual prowess.

You are not alone. 86% of Stanford undergrads admitted to doing the same. The figure is probably higher once you factor in the dishonest and those in denial.

However, as you should have felt at the start of this post, dressing up complexity as sophistication is annoying, fogging up the clarity of reading.

At best, markers are going to perceive this as immature writing; at worst, as a (deceitful) substitute for actual understanding. In any case, you are not doing yourself any favours.

So, ironically, despite your best attempts at coming across more intelligently you will achieve the precise opposite by injecting some collagen into your words.

Cognitive science supports my point. In Oppenheimer (2006) “[f]ive studies [on undergrads] demonstrate[d] that the loss of fluency due to needless complexity in a text negatively impacts raters’ assessments of the text’s authors.”

In short, readers really won’t like you pimpin' your vocab and style for no good reason. I leave you with this spot-on quotation:

"Fools ignore complexity;
pragmatists suffer it;
experts avoid it;
geniuses remove it."
(Alan Perlis)

(I should add my point is specifically about unnecessary complexity of vocabulary. This is not a diktat against complexity of vocabulary per se because sometimes longer words do communicate meaning more piquantly than their horizontally-challenged siblings. So, as some clever person once said, make it as simple as it can be, and no simpler.)

iPod on. iPod off.

(thomashawk @ Flickr)

I often wondered whether those little buds in my ears delivering a soothing wave of music were helping or hindering my revision. So I did a bit of detective work.

The results? Broadly speaking, music is a bit of a cognitive criminal, stealing precious resources away. Music with lyrics is the worst, as it soaks up important language processing.

But listening to it before work can improve your mood and your cognitive prowess. So music that makes you smile is good before work; after that silence is golden.

So it's iPod on before work, iPod off when you start.

If you are anything like me and get distracted by tiny things like a dripping tap down the road, I suggest getting some earplugs. I have stuck a permanent link on the side bar (under 'Previous Goodies') to the site where I bought a load for my revision.

For people who wondered how I came to this conclusion or just want to burn some more time before getting back into the revision canoe, read on...

In 1993, Rauscher, Shaw and Ky reported the finding that listening to a Mozart piano sonata (K. 448) enhanced spatial test performance in adults for a period of 15 minutes after presentation.

This was dubbed the "Mozart effect" (Knox, 1993) and was inaccurately transmuted into public understanding as 'listening to Mozart makes your cleverer'.

Laughably, this distortion of the evidence led to a cottage industry being set up for parents who wanted their kids to be smarter as well as the misbegotten policy in the state of Georgia to send new babies Mozart CDs.

Unfortunately the evidence only points towards better mental rotation abilities (meta-analysis by Hetland, 2000) and this may only be due to the music putting you in a better mood for cognitive tasks (Schellenberg & Hallam, 2005; or here). Mozart isn't really important either (Smith, Osborne, Mann, Jones, & White, 2004).

Banbury, Macken, Tremblay, and Jones (2001) and Beaman (2005, review) have shown that there is a cost to 'auditory distraction' although some people aren't affected by it (Neath et al., 2003).

Added to that, Oswald et al. (2000) among others (Neely & LeCompte, 1999; Jones et al., 1990; Martin et al.,1988) have shown that meaningful speech not directly related to the task at hand is distracting.

Salamé and Baddeley (1989) report that music with speech is more cognitively disruptive to short term recall than speechless music (which still had a negative effect, just a smaller one). As information needs to go through short term memory in order to get into long term memory this can't be a good thing.

Answering the question

In March 2004 the then-White House Chief-of-Staff and counsel Alberto Gonzales rather dubiously went to the hospital room of John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, to obtain the reauthorization of a domestic wiretapping program.

In this video, after oddly commenting on it being the reporter's birthday (her retort is spot on: "I didn't realize the intel. brief was so far reaching"), Bush is asked a straight-forward question about this issue.

As you can see, he jerks around the question uncomfortably, visiting several adjacent areas including his comfort-blanket alarmist edict that "an enemy lurks".

This is not a Bush-bashing post (the blogosphere is overflowing with them) but the President's style of answering sets me up nicely to talk about what is the number one mistake in essays that I have seen (including on the online hub), made myself and been told about by lecturers. It's the one thing that if a lot of you stopped doing you would see a dramatic rise in your marks.

It is simply what Bush does here: avoid answering the question by talking about stuff vaguely related to the question (domestic security in this example).

The empirical literature has something to say about this: Campbell et al (1998) found that one of the big reasons for poor grades in essays is due to a lack of understanding about what is required of an answer.

Many students think that a good essay is rich in research and information about the area asked - and not much else. In technical terms this is called knowledge-telling. If you do this, stop! You are a naughty person and you have most likely upset some lecturers.

The trick is not to chuck the ingredients at the marker but to serve them up with a nice tasty dish. That is, you need to do some knowledge-transformation.

One of the things the Campbell et al study found was that those getting higher marks "…engaged in processes of reconstruction rather than “knowledge telling”" and "built “arguments” rather than “information” when structuring and drafting their essays".

Imagine the question, 'What (if anything) is wrong with an empiricist view of the mind?' That should have been a question in your coursework: it was a question in my exam.

A bad answer will go off on one, answering the separate, unasked question 'Tell me everything you know about empiricism (and behaviourism and constructivism and domain-generality and nativism and modularity and domain-specificity).' It will waste time talking about theoretical and empirical fluff - made fluffy by the lack of any direct relevance to the question.

A better answer may very well use the same facts that the bad answer used but it will use those facts in service of a point. It will be using evidence to say 'Hey, this study on G-SLI is pretty bad news for empiricism' or whatever. In short, it will be using relevant information to argue. You might think this is forehead-smackingly obvious but your essays on the hub suggest that this point is not translating into your behaviour.

For people wondering how to shift gears from knowledge-telling into knowledge transformation - and let your reader know you are doing this - I would simply add in an explicit statement at the end of each paragraph. Something like, "Taken together, the evidence from these two studies strongly support the empiricist notion of the mind."

Before you start writing your paragraph in exams have an idea of how this sentence will read. This will not only make your writing more relevant but will chuck a grappling hook up the page and lodge in the essay question letting the marker see the link between what you are saying and what they have asked. This might seem a bit clumsy but I would rather be slathered with the clumsy brush than have marks carved off for being irrelevant.

If you answer questions by irrelevantly telling and not relevantly transforming, you're just like Bush. And no one wants that.

Writing

gep @ Flickr

I have had a peek at some of your essays up on the online hub and thought as the exam season pushes back from the future onto the present the next sensible thing to do is start writing about writing.

This is an area where essay feedback is weak; you are rarely told how to improve your writing. Markers just don't have the time.

That's a shame because I would guess that a very substantial chunk of your degree marks will be contingent upon the way your thoughts leave your body via your fingers onto the page.

So, I'll try and get some posts on how to make your writing more concise, precise and generally nice.

I'll start with the most general gem:

"Hard writing makes easy reading"

This is such an important point. First, good writing should be effortless to read. Some people are selfish writers: they don't show enough consideration for the reader.

Second, and more importantly, this effortlessness of reading requires effort of writing. The essays that score fewer marks on the hub can blame their lost marks on a lack of such effort. The research, the innovation and criticism are there - it's just the writing to gel all those things together is missing. In the coming posts hopefully you'll find more gel to use.

Third Years

A question from a Level 2 psychologist:

"I was wondering whether you could send a message to third years, asking to please upload their second year coursework if they're putting their 3rd year stuff up as well? I think that it would really help us second years to have last year's coursework for revision purposes."

So third years, you heard the man. Head over to the online hub and help out a second year.

Adding comments

I've had a good question about removing your name from comments in your Word documents for the online hub. Just take a look at the following links (depending on your version of Word).

Word 2003 | Word 2007

Q&A

Some suggestions from people:

1) the blog should be organised chronologically

2) the blog should be arranged by module if the content is module specific.

3) Facebook Brain Milk group members should be notified when I post a blog.

My response:

1) Posts are arranged reverse chronologically, i.e., the freshest first - that is just the way all the blogs are in the world. Look down the right side in the "previous goodies" bit to get to see previous posts

2) You can arrange it by module if you click on the labels down the page on the right hand side. I will improve this though to make it easier; I think I forgot to tag some of the posts

3) I thought Facebook notifies you when I add a post to the Facebook Brain Milk group. Perhaps I am wrong. Add a comment if you are not getting this and I'll look into it. However, I publish at some pretty strange times so knowing when the latest post is out at 2am may not be all that helpful. Also, if people check in a few times a day then they'll always find something new as I put up a minimum of a post a day, unless otherwise specified.