Attendance is mandatory for the group presentations on Monday (12/10/07), Wednesday (12/12/07), and Friday (12/14/07). It's the only time I'll be a stickler for it. Basically, I want you to show respect for the other groups presenting.Also, be sure to keep the presentations under 15 minutes. A 10-minute presentation is ideal, so we can have time for a short question-and-answer session afterwards.
If you don't attend on either the days your group isn't presenting (and your absence isn't excused), your own personal presentation grade will drop. Each day you don't attend will lower your grade by a full letter grade.
Here are some links:
This may sound insulting, but one of the goals of this class is getting us to recognize that we're not as smart as we think we are. All of us. You. Me. That guy. You again."How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us that we are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing."
This mini-article on acne and anxiety raises a combo platter of questions relevant to what we're going over in class.
1) Reverse causation: Does acne cause stress, or does stress cause acne?What say you?
2) Questionable statistics: Do you trust the stat that students were 23 percent more likely to experience breakouts around the time of a test? Is it a good study? A reliable source? An undemanding stat?
3) Questionable use of statistics: If the above statistic is true, is it reasonable to conclude that anxiety causes acne? Or is there another plausible explanation?
pages 86-88: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18Git to gittin!
And here's the video for Mims's logically delicious song "This is Why I'm Hot":While there are a handful of Web sites that seek to debunk the claims of Mr. Jones and others in the movement, most mainstream scientists, in fact, have not seen fit to engage them.Also, here's an interesting article on instances when we shouldn't trust an expert's opinion.
"There's nothing to debunk," says Zdenek P. Bazant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and the author of the first peer-reviewed paper on the World Trade Center collapses.
"It's a non-issue," says Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology's study of the collapses.
Ross B. Corotis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the editorial board at the journal Structural Safety, says that most engineers are pretty settled on what happened at the World Trade Center. "There's not really disagreement as to what happened for 99 percent of the details," he says.
(P1) If dinosaurs rampage, people scream.Were you looking at the syllabus when you thought up this one?
(P2) Dinosaurs rampage.
(C) People scream.
(P1) All American presidents are men.Take that, sexist American hegemony!
(P2) All men are stupid.
(C) All American presidents are stupid.
(P1) Pigs are either awesome or horrible.I'd like to challenge the second premise. My evidence: Spider Pig.
(P2) Pigs are not awesome.
(C) Pigs are horrible.
(P1) The sky is blue.French toast and red bull: part of a balanced breakfast.
(P2) The grass is green.
(C) Jared loves french toast and red bull.
(P1) Gold is a natural resource.Isn't it fun using intentionally bad arguments to make good political points?
(P2) Gold is found in Africa.
(C) All Africans have lots of gold.
(P1) Some red objects weigh over 50 pounds.Actually, I'd be up for the challenge of a 50-pound jolly rancher.
(P2) A cherry jolly rancher is red.
(C) A cherry jolly rancher weighs over 50 pounds.
OK, before we start rocking all night, perhaps we should come up with a name for our logic band. What's a good name for us? Abi & the Naughty Structures? 
So why does this course have a blog? Well, why is anything anything?
A blog (short for “web log”) is a website that works like a journal – users write posts that are sorted by date based on when they were written. You can find important course information (like assignments, due dates, reading schedules, etc.) on the blog. I’ll also be updating the blog throughout the semester, posting interesting items related to the stuff we’re currently discussing in class. I used a blog for this course last semester, and it seemed helpful. Hopefully it can benefit our course, too.
Since I’ll be updating the blog a lot throughout the semester, you should check it frequently. There are, however, some convenient ways to do this without simply going to the blog each day. The best way to do this is by getting an email subscription, so any new blog post I write automatically gets emailed to you. (You can also subscribe to the rss feed, if you know what that means.) To get an email subscription:
1. Go to http://ccclogic07.blogspot.com.
2. At the main page, enter your email address at the top of the right column (under “EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION: Enter your Email”) and click the "Subscribe me!" button.
3. This will take you to a new page. Follow the directions under #2, where it says “To help stop spam, please type the text here that you see in the image below. Visually impaired or blind users should contact support by email.” Once you type the text, click the "Subscribe me!" button again.
4. You'll then get an email regarding the blog subscription. (Check your spam folder if you haven’t received an email after a day.) You have to confirm your registration. Do so by clicking on the "Click here to activate your account" link in the email you receive.
5. This will bring you to a page that says "Your subscription is confirmed!" Now you're subscribed.
If you are unsure whether you've subscribed, ask me (609-980-8367; slandis@camdencc.edu). I can check who's subscribed and who hasn't.
