weekly comments for my ta
Posted by tommywiseau in Uncategorized on March 14, 2012
Facebook and syphilis are they linked?
Posted by tommywiseau in Psychology on March 11, 2012
An article from the age http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/facebook-linked-to-rise-in-syphilis-20100326-r17y.html The social networking site Facebook, according to data published by british newspapers ” indicated that cases of syphilis had increased fourfold in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside – the areas of Britain where Facebook is most popular” British public health experts reason that this means such sites make it easier for people to meet up for casual sex.
So does this mean that such data should be taken face value?
No, for various reasons such as which Facebook stated in a comment about the link to syphilis “ignores the difference between correlation and causation” While it is possible that increasing Facebook use in a community causes the community to rise in syphilis levels, a more reasonable idea is that the social demographic of the community is manipulative around using behaviour to conduct the lifestyle whereby they may contract syphilis. So those that do not use condoms may meet like minded individuals raising there chances of contracting possible sti’s.
Another problem is that of random sampling, whilst the data is said to have increased syphilis levels in cities such as Sunderland and Durham, there is a strong possibility that it may be possible communities within these cities that have high syphilis levels. By taking a number of communities it could have been found that the individual variables rise higher in one community than the whole. This is a possibility that this was how the data was collected.
The data is extremely generalised, it doesn’t take into account any ecological validity at all. Possible counties may have a higher syphilis level than others, but since Facebook is used all around the world believing the premise that every country in the world has been directly influenced with a higher sti rate because of a social networking site is quite a statement to make.
Shailendra Sawleshwarkar, a researcher in the University of Sydney’s STI research centre mentions how such social sites “It’s allowing people to meet more frequently, now that doesn’t actually directly mean that it’s going to increase the rates of syphilis” So therefore such social networking sites should be used to spread preventative messages about eliminating the chance of getting such diseases. Although the premise that these networking sites bring about high rates of sti’s is to much of a presumption to make. Sometimes people just want to believe what they see without taking into account any other details.
weekly comments for my ta
Posted by tommywiseau in Uncategorized on February 22, 2012
Psychology and memes.
Posted by tommywiseau in Psychology on February 19, 2012
weekly blogs for ta.
Posted by tommywiseau in Uncategorized on February 7, 2012
http://rgjblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/can-correlation-show-causality/
http://prperc.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/research-participants-or-human-fruitflies/http://prperc.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/research-participants-or-human-fruitflies/
http://re3ecca.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/the-ethical-implications-of-mind-reading/
http://psucd6psychology.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/the-effects-of-caffeine-on-cognition/
Another day, Another blog
Posted by tommywiseau in Uncategorized on February 5, 2012
People Watching. I’m pretty sure it can be classed as a recreational hobby. As a psychologist is training, I can’t help but have a cheeky gander around at people in there natural environment, who can’t? Well this fits in snuggly with the process of naturalistic obeservation which is a technique that involves observing subjects in their natural environment. This type of research is often utilized in situations where conducting lab research is unrealistic or could alter the subjects behaviour. Think about it, for an easy example when you are walking along and you smile at someone there instinction is to smile back as well, maybe with a feeling of slight discomfort but a smile nonetheless. Now throw in gender differences and you’ve got yourself an experiment in waiting!
In the psychology department at Newcastle University, there is a coffee station where people can help themselves, so long as they leave money in the tray — 50 pence for a coffee and 30 for tea. It operates on an honor system. Although apparently not everyone is very honourable and the level of contributions is quite low. It was presumed that people if are more honest if they know they’re being observed — so when nobody’s watching, they feel they can get away with, well..a free cup of coffee in this case.
A few psychologists of the university decided to carry out an experiment. For 10 weeks this spring, they alternately taped two posters over the coffee station. During one week, it was a picture of flowers; during the other, it was a pair of staring eyes. Then they sat back to watch what would happen. They found that the weeks when the eyes poster stared down at the coffee machine, people contributed 2.76 times as much money as in the weeks the flowers were on the wall. The apparent feelings of being watched seemed to make people behave more honestly.
An application to this study was that after the paper was published, the police department in Birmingham placed posters around the city of eyes watching people as a possible way to reduce crimes such as vandalism and car theft. At the end of the day, watching people is a great way to make a study although determining on the the aim, if a person changes their behaviour if they think they are being watched this could be classed as a disadvantage. To sum this up in the mental image of 1984, big brother is watching you.
homework for ta weekly blog 11
Posted by tommywiseau in Uncategorized on December 9, 2011
Do the dead know they’re dead? blog 11
Posted by tommywiseau in Uncategorized on December 9, 2011
Well with the final blog for this semester i’m going to discuss how psychology studies can be funny and yield some interesting data. I’m going to discuss a study by Bones, A.K., & Johnson using the implicit association test. The title of the study gives it away that it is going to be quite satrical – Measuring the immeasurable: Or “Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test”. This is a within designed measure used to detect the strength of a person’s automatic association between mental representations of objects. The two unborn hav researchers decided to tap into the untapped population of unborn children for the IAT test. They decided to present the hypothesis of do the unborn have an innate gender identity.Bones described them “Like people at airports, the unborn have very little to do and are confined to close quarters,” making the ideal test subjects. Although this does present a challenge as the unborn don’t understand words but this did not stop these brave researchers.Using a iat measure which is normally related to a computer measure but can be used via audio or sound, Bones and Johnson sought to determine whether unborn infants tend to associate “Me” with a gender identity and “Not Me” with a different gender identity. They found that Male and female fetuses showed the same level of association with both gender identities (the mean reaction time for all three groups for both identities was 3 seconds) who would have thought.
Now They then did a second study into this idea on another population, this time round, dead people. They point out that the work of people like M. Night Shyamalan has called into question the validity of people’s self-report about whether they’re alive or dead so this study could be devastatingly groundbreaking. They had dead people associate words related death ( “joined the choir of the invisible”) and words related to life ( “still kicking”) with either “me” or “not me.” The difference wasn’t supremely significant but they did find that dead people were faster in associating dead words with “me” and alive words with “not me” (2.9995 s) than alive words with “me” and dead words with “not me” (3 s). So therefore abraham lincoln and all those undead people out there could take the IATand realise that yes…they are dead and unborn babies don’t really have a gender identity. I think it’s safe to say that this is a pretty good quantitative technique and should be explored into other untapped populations like if chicken farmers have a deep maternal love for colnel sanders. A silly study with some interesting results wouldn’t you say?
http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/12/i_see_dead_people_taking_the_i.php
Qualitative you say, week 9 blog
Posted by tommywiseau in Uncategorized on November 26, 2011
Qualitative data, the art of commanding information from a human being with the magic of interviewing skills rather than quantitatively gathering such information through the use of computers and calculator type oddities. Can such forms be in any way ethical and deliver good data? Before we do this let’s take a quick check of what a form of qualitative data is like, such as the form of intervieiwing.
Now as we know to be interviewed by someone usually extends to a general conversation that has certain prompts and questions to maximise the longevity and detail of the answer. An advantage of the ways of interviewing is that it can be flexible for the interviewee allowing a certain degree of freedom to express ones view on the topic being interviewed. This can bring rich and detailed information the problem with this is the transcoding of this information which can be quite time consuming. Another disadvantage found by field and morse (Field PA,Morse JM Nursing research: the application of qualitative approaches. London: Chapman and Hall, 1989) was that the interviewer could bias the interview by engaging in there own opinion on the matter. This would bias the interview as the interviewee may feel more inclined to agree on the opinion.
As we can see shortly here that an ordinary interview can have it’s own advantages and disadvantages although there are various forms of interviews used in different situations such as cognitive interviews for situations such as an eyewitness testimony. An interview to this standard could not be done quantitatively as to gather information on a crime seen first hand quantitative data would not make sense, on a level whereby qualitative data and quantitative data could be used such as measuring the success rate of eyewitness testimonys to different types of crimes with the memory collection of those being interviewed works best for both worlds. Therefore both measures could be said to balance each other in order to achieve a cochise result although they may both come under fire for there limitations nothings perfect right?
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