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Comment Psychology is a science. (Score 5, Insightful) 254

Every time a story appears that involves psychological research, numerous people make comments about how psychology is a sham, not a science, fluffy, or some other degrading adjective. I usually find that these people haven't the foggiest idea what psychology actually is. I'm willing to bet that many people here that are claiming psychology as a non-science are thinking about what is actually therapy or counseling. I suggest any doubters read actual psychology journals before they make such claims. Much of the advancement in our understanding of neurophysiology, sensory systems, cognitive processing, decision-making, social behavior, and human development is due to research conducted under the umbrella of psychology. The problem is that the public isn't aware of psychology's breadth.

Comment Re:Professors, not high school teachers (Score 2) 608

I'm all for well-paid educators, but I have no use for the dead weight whose focus is their research and paper-writing. If you want to do pure research, find a lab some where, don't drain the university and college systems. With the many thousands of dollars students pay for their education, they deserve better.

I think you're overlooking the fact that 1) teaching oriented schools usually focus on professors who can teach and who do very little research 2) research oriented schools are necessary for graduate education, which involves levels of complexity and skill beyond the realm of simply being a "good teacher." Some people have proposed separating graduate professors/researchers from undergraduate professors. That is something that could work, but at the same time, I would hope that undergrads would want to learn from accomplished researchers, even if the material is dry. That being said, there are still deadwood types who are bad at both teaching and research, who should have never been tenured in the first place.

Comment Re:Experiments performed only on 3 test subjects (Score 1) 521

Funding agencies are very concerned with making sure that whatever experiment you propose will work. As a research professor, I have to spend a ridiculous amount of effort in a grant application convincing the agency that my research will produce the expected results. In this case, I 100% buy into the fact that the funding agencies didn't want to pay for such a risky study. Another article I read about this said that the researchers now have money being thrown at them from many different agencies (including NIH/NCI), so I'm guessing the results are strong enough to warrant a much bigger trial.

Comment Journal of questionable reputation (Score 2) 954

I thought I'd look into this journal to see its impact factor and other metrics that would let me know if it is a reputable source. It is not indexed by ISI/Web of Science, so it has no published impact factor. Google scholar only picks up a few articles from this journal, most of which have been cited 0 or 1 time only. While this doesn't automatically negate the authors' findings, it says to me that no reputable journal wanted to publish it.

Comment Re:Higher Education is in a Massive Bubble (Score 1) 433

The effect of a bubble burst is pretty clear to me. High prestige schools will still charge whatever they want and get it from the hordes of people who will pay whatever for an Ivy degree. Most public universities will go on as normal, as the tuition they charge (in most cases under 10K/yr) is not all that outrageous. The losers? Low-prestige private schools (the category to which which all for-profits belong) will start to go belly-up as their enrollments drastically decline. (Meanwhile, lots of public universities are offering flexible & online programs that will steal the students from the for-profits.)

Comment Re:Uh oh (Score 3, Insightful) 519

This is what I was thinking. Although I'm sympathize with the developer, this is the wrong way to go about dealing with privacy. Aside from the text costs associated with the "pirate" sending all of those text messages, it is likely the case that many of the recipients of those messages will also have to pay for receiving them. If the app permissions don't specify automatically sending text messages, then this developer could get into hot water.

Comment Nook Color could satiate desire for iPads (Score 2) 193

I had been thinking about getting an iPad for a long time. Eventually, decided to hold out for the iPad 2. But one day I was walking through Barnes and Noble, and took a good look at the Nook Color. After reading up on the rooting instructions, I bought the NC for $250, rooted it, and, after a month, my desire for the iPad is gone. I suppose that there will always be people like me who want an iPad but will actually be just as happy with something else. (And the 50% discount from the iPad helps too.) I should also reiterate the fact that there are three flavors of the Nook Color, but not all will suffice as a tablet:

STOCK: Right now, the stock NC has a browser and could serve as a basic tablet for someone. But B&N is soon going to be updating the NC with Froyo and the app market, which will make it much more like a tablet.

ROOTED STOCK: This is the best option as of today. Rooting took me only about 20 minutes, and the process is non-technical/noob friendly. Rooting will get you the market, google apps, push gmail, a new launcher (which will make it look like a true tablet), and softkeys (to replace the missing navigation keys that are on all android phones).

CUSTOM ROM: This has the most promise, but it is not quite ready. Cyanogenmod has nightly builds of CM7 for the NC. As others said above, this will be awesome. I run CM7 on my phone, and I love it. Once it is fully ported to the NC, it will truly be a full-function tablet that can directly compete with the iPad. There are also some custom builds that you can install to a bootable microSD card that run both Froyo and Honeycomb.

Comment Re:Psychology Map May Be Incorrect (Score 1) 167

If that was the authors' intent, they didn't specify that in their paper. And, although there is plenty of fluff in psychology, some of the most highly cited journals in psychology are in social, developmental, and clinical. (In fact, the flagship social psych journal is the most often cited psych journal by articles appearing in "hard" science places like Science & PNAS -- there's some neat visualizations of this at eigenfactor.org.) If you look at the "top-tier" journals in each psychology subfield, you will find nothing but rigorous, experimental science.

Comment Psychology Map May Be Incorrect (Score 3, Interesting) 167

In looking at the psychology map, I am suspicious that the authors made a minor error in their data collection. The database they used (Web of Science, Science Citation Index) does contain a category for psychology; however, it lists only the 71 psychology journals that are in the physiological/cognitive subfields of psychology. The overwhelming majority of psychology journals (almost 500 of them) are not in those fields, so the search should have also included the Social Science Citation Index data (also part of the Web of Science, just involves clicking another box). I suspect the authors only used the Science (and not Social Science) database because the data displayed on the map seems to over-represent programs that are strong in physio/cognitive, and under-represents (or ignores) programs that are strong in social, developmental, and clinical psychology.

Comment Re:How many are paying sticker (Score 1) 391

This. I've seen several articles recently decrying the "cost" of elite school, yet every single article throws around the sticker tuition prices for the elite schools. If I had a child accepted to both Harvard and my state university, it would cost me more to send them to the state school. The only people who pay sticker for the elites are rich enough to not care about the ROI length on 200,000.

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