I would like to point out that, by using these supports, you are becoming mindful of, and acquiring new behaviors. Given sufficient time, repetition, and success, they will become new, adaptive behaviors and eventually habits - assuming you are not prompting/reminding yourself to do maladaptive behaviors. This is not outsourcing self-control, but enhancing it to help with skill acquisition. During development we had external supports to learn many things such as tying shoes, learning trig, and so on, eventually we internalized these processes. This is simply an electronic means of doing so.

retention is surely not the answer - and not for the strawman of self-esteem - but because it increases drop-out rates ( possibly due to many aspects of learning and personality that i bet covary with self-esteem, such as self-efficacy and self-control) http://www.nasponline.org/about_nasp/pospaper_graderetent.aspx furthermore, this is why early intervention has become so important - catching failure at kindergarten and first grade for reading, and somewhat later for math skills is critical to ensuring low drop-out rates, and later ability to master sequential/subsequent information.

this is really dead on, although i have my phd, i still find myself thinking "shouldn't i know more about XXXXX phenomena?' of course, then i go and do the research... maybe that is the distinguishing feature, but then again, i think many of the non-phd folks here do the same.

so to clarify, only wrong about being wrong?

don't you mean your bedroom in your mom's basement?

in the situation of a scary looking stripper at a bachelor party, i just told her i was gay and sat on my friends lap, which by the way i am not, but it worked fine for the moment!

now i need a new periodic table

he can't play a slate? as in tabula rasa? how odd. after 30 years of drums or so, i never played one either. however, i have played tabla...