A research and expository notebook by Orest Kinasevych
“Propaganda and manipulation are nothing new, of course. But whereas in the past they worked like carpet bombing, now they are becoming precision-guided munitions. … In recent years some of the smartest people in the world have worked on hacking the human brain in order to make you click on ads and sell you stuff. Now these methods are being used to sell you politicians and ideologies, too.” (¶16)
“… the results strongly suggest that the majority of first-year students at the institution studied are investing more hours than are designed by teachers, some reaching more than double a full-time workload during the period studied.
“Overwork can be a serious issue and anecdotally students are susceptible in some disciplines, such as computer science, architecture and design, to overwork substantially beyond the expectations and requirements of courses.” (p 1226)
“Polyculturalism directs attention to how people pick up proficiencies from multiple cultures throughout their life span through a range of different learning processes, some explicit and some implicit.” (p 639)
“The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to [page break] science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.” (p 46-47)
“The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how ‘people of faith’ possess moral advantages that others can only envy.” (p 32)
“Adolescents who spent more time on new media (including social media and electronic devices such as smartphones) were more likely to report mental health issues, and adolescents who spent more time on nonscreen activities (in-person social interaction, sports/exercise, homework, print media, and attending religious services) were less likely.” (p 3)
“… we have evidence that humans can learn how to multitask just about as much as they can learn how to fly.” (p 84)
“Two of these techniques — ERPs and fMRI — are often used in both language processing studies in general and to investigate SLA in particular.” (p 9)
“… there are many who have denied that time really _does_ pass. Of these a few share McTaggart’s view that time cannot pass because time does not exist. A more popular view, these days at least, is the view that while time certainly exists, it is more akin to space than it superficially seems. … Time _per se_ may not pass or flow, but there is undeniably something akin to passage and flow in our immediate experience, and this _phenomenal_ passage does not require _physical_ passage, it can exist a four-dimensional Block universe.” (¶270)
“The FBM asserts that for a person to perform a target behavior, he or she must (1) be sufficiently motivated, (2) have the ability to perform the behavior, and (3) be triggered to perform the behavior. These three factors must occur at the same moment, else the behavior will not happen.” (p 1)