Software engineers are notoriously bad at time estimation. When they receive a new bug report or product feature to work on, engineers are often asked by their project manager to guess how long it will take. It’s a very reasonable request. For example, if your website goes down, public relations needs to know how long […]
Category: psychology
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The Effect of a Placebo-based Policy
(Disclaimer: I don’t actually know that much about medical ethics or public policy, so I welcome all comments to educate me on the issues here. Also, I will miss citing things because I’m a lazy blogger, so I recommend that if you’re interested, you do your own research) The Placebo Effect is a well-known phenomenon […]
I have had a painful move out of psychology. Since I did research while I was still in school, I considered myself reasonably critical of experiments, basically fluent in psychological phenomenon, and quite up-to-date on recent findings. After I left school, I tried to keep in touch primarily through science writing, which I have actually […]
For November, my book club* read Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. In it, Turkle, a professor at MIT, investigates how our relationship with technology has developed. In part 1, she writes about robots, from tamagotchis and furbies to robots for elderly care, and how we interact with and feel about them. In part 2, she writes about […]
(Update 07/31/12: I just heard that Jonah Lehrer fabricated Bob Dylan quotes for “Imagine”, the book that inspired this post. Although I didn’t really rely on his work for this post, it seems prudent for you to keep that fact in mind while reading this. Let this be a reminder that science writing can sometimes […]
If you’re interested in what I’ve been doing for classes this quarter, I recorded myself rehearsing a final presentation for CS224U, Natural Language Understanding. I feel like I really fly through this material, but it might give you a sense of my work. Embedded below, and also a link here. And if you’re interested in […]
For several stretches of several academic school years, I have allowed my class-related work to become my blog content. Sometimes it’s more natural, such as the final essay for Creative Nonfiction, and sometimes it’s less natural, such as short critiques for Moral Philosophy. Most of my motivation for posting this work is pure laziness: it’s […]
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4 things I learned at Bing
This past quarter, I spent one morning every week in a classroom at Bing Nursery School, basically working as an assistant teacher for a class I was taking. The class focused on the development of young children (3 to 5 years old), and our journal entries (posted on this blog) and weekly discussions were structured […]
(This is the final paper for the class that I have been writing all these journal entries for. It’s probably a little spotty, and I’m not really proud of it, but I think it hits the highlights in the literature) At Bing, children as young as 3 regularly engage in pretend play, and the school’s […]
(This is my last journal for the class) This week, I was in the language area, but with low interest in writing stories and having Christian nearby as well, that ended up being a small part of my actual focus as I drifted around. Instead, I want to focus on a longer interaction I had […]