18.206 new on WWW: Critical Thinking resources; D-Lib Magazine 9/04

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 09:26:22 +0100

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 206.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: Tim van Gelder <tgelder_at_trinity.unimelb.edu.au> (180)
         Subject: Latest Additions to Critical Thinking On The Web (Apr-
                 Aug)

   [2] From: Bonnie Wilson <bwilson_at_cnri.reston.va.us> (34)
         Subject: D-Lib Magazine 9/04

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 07:21:18 +0100
         From: Tim van Gelder <tgelder_at_trinity.unimelb.edu.au>
         Subject: Latest Additions to Critical Thinking On The Web (Apr-Aug)

7 Sep

<http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24631>Get it
Right! Interview with Jamie Whyte, from New Scientist.
If only everyone were this critical, what a better place the world would
be. An entertaining interview. The segment about why there is no need to
explain cricket batsmen go out on for a duck (score of zero) than any other
score is a terrific little take-away. [7 Sep 04]

6 Sep

<http://www.debatemapper.net/>Debate Mapper
Peter Baldwin's tool for collective mapping of complex
debates. "DebateMapper... is a new software application designed to help
address this problem. Fully web-enabled, it allows global communities of
users to collaborate in building and evaluating large-scale diagrammatic
representations, termed Argument Maps, of the structure of complex
controversies. Such maps can be filtered and sorted in different ways, and
the basic argumentative elements evaluated by a user community. Each user
can create and store Selective views reflecting different assumptions. By
using recent web and database technologies, DebateMapper can support very
large and complex map structures." [6 Sep 04]

22 June

in Political Correctness

<http://www.sydneyline.com/Home.htm>The Sydney Line
If you thought there was little more to Sydney than an Opera House, try
this: a website presenting chiefly the writings of that audaciously
incorrect historian Keith Windschuttle, and more general an attitude or
philosophy Windschuttle sees as distinctively Sydneyesque. The website
also promotes the ideas and writings of the brilliant Australian
philosopher David Stove. [22 June 04]

in Language and Thought - Reviews

<http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040628crbo_books1>Bad Comma by
Louis Menand
Review of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach
to Punctuation. Truss's screed urges us to take care with our punctuation;
Menand's review turns her own fussiness back on her book like a
blowtorch. I haven't read the Truss book, but Menand's review makes it
seem almost as poorly thought out as that other recent and appalling work,
Watson's Death Sentence (see the
<http://www.austhink.org/monk/watson_review.htm>review by Austhink's Paul
Monk). Both books were popular hits. Readers seem to lap up intellectual
slop when it is sloppily casting aspersions on the linguistic sloppiness of
others. [22 June 04]

15 June

in Argument Mapping

<http://www.austhink.org/monk/Fenner/Fenner.htm>Enhancing our Grasp of
Complex Arguments by Paul Monk and Tim van Gelder
An overview of the use of argument mapping to augment our capacity to
handle complex reasoning and argumentation, and to improve deliberative
judgment. This paper was presented by Paul Monk as a plenary address to the
<http://www.science.org.au/proceedings/fenner/>2004 Fenner Conference on
the Environment, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 24 May 2004. [15
June 04]

in Argument Mapping - Software

<http://www.knosis.com/argutect.html>Argutect
Offers basic argument mapping functionality, aimed at document
production. [15 June 04]

7 June

in Textbooks

<http://mdm.gwu.edu/forman/DBO.pdf>Decision by Objectives by Forman and
Selly (pdf file, 2.46mb)
Complete textbook on decision making. Aimed at management, but the
contains a lot for the general reader (or decider?). Centered on a general
decision framework known as the Analytic Hierarch Process (AHP). This may
not be the best textbook on decision making out there, but there is plenty
of value here, and it does have the advantage of being freely downloadable.
[7 June 04]

30 May

in Miscellaneous and Fun

<http://www.private-eye.co.uk>Pseuds Corner
[This link takes you to the Private Eye website; click on Pseuds Corner on
the LHS menu.] Private Eye, the British satirical magazine, includes in
every issue a selection of quotes, each of which indicts its own author as
a pompous twit. [30 May 2004]

10 May

in Political Correctness

<http://www.culturecult.com>The Culture Cult
Website presenting a lifetime's worth of acerbic writings by anthropologist
Roger Sandall. "The Culture Cult is about romantic primitivism­the belief
that traditional ethnic cultures provide a better home for humanity, more
fair, more healthy, more harmonious, than today's free and open
civilization. In fact, traditional cultures usually have most of the
following: domestic oppression, endemic disease, poverty, clan enmity,
violence, religious intolerance, and severe artistic constraints. If you
want to live a full life, then modern civilization­not romantic
ethnicity­deserves your thoughtful vote." [10 May 04]

8 May

in Political Correctness

<http://www.nationalinterest.org/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=B2F215684DA24BFAADA5C22454C3F776&nm=Publications&type=pub&mod=Publications::Articles&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=3&aid=829C11F21B334525AC094D9C2E2DC6B8&dtxt=Winter+2003/04>Political

Correctness, Or The Perils of Benevolence by Roger Kimball
Essay exploring the historical and conceptual contours of political
correctness, and explaining why conservatives and critical thinkers alike
disdain it. A poor piece of writing - rambling, often confusing, without
any strong logical architecture or narrative. Nevertheless, it contains
enough by way of valuable insight to be worth struggling with. "Alas, the
result is not paradise but a campaign to legislate virtue, to curtail
eccentricity, to smother individuality, to barter truth for the current
moral or political enthusiasm. For centuries, political philosophers have
understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species
of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of communist tyranny. The rise of
political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of
issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling
masses, but "reproductive freedom", gay rights, the welfare state, the
Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It
looks, in Marx's famous mot, like history repeating itself not as tragedy
but as farce." [8 May 04]

5 May

in Fallacies

<http://www.246.dk/38tricks.html>Thirty-eight dishonest tricks which are
commonly used in argument, with the methods of overcoming them by Robert
Thouless
Classic. Excerpted from Thouless' 1930 book Straight and Crooked Thinking.
Example: "(25) Prestige by the use of pseudo-technical jargon (pp 116-118)
Best dealt with by asking in a modest manner that the speaker should
explain himself more simply." Thouless' modest description of his own
offering is priceless: "Practical convenience and practical importance are
the criteria I have used in this list. If we have a plague of flies in the
house we buy fly-papers and not a treatise on the zoological classification
of Musca domestica. This implies no sort of disrespect for zoologists; or
for the value of their work as a first step in the effective control of
flies. The present book bears to the treatises of logicians the
relationship of fly-paper to zoological classifications." [5 May 04]

4 May

in Media

<http://mediamatters.org/>Media Matters for America
New liberal counterpart to the <http://www.mrc.org/>Media Research Center.
"Media Matters for America will document and correct conservative
misinformation in each news cycle. Media Matters for America will monitor
cable and broadcast news channels, print media and talk radio, as well as
marginal, right-wing websites that often serve as original sources of
misinformation for well-known conservative and mainstream media outlets."
[4 May 04]

19 April

in General Resources

<http://www.decision-making.co.uk/Welcome/Publications.htm>Towards Wise
Decision Making by David Arnaud and Tim LeBon
A series of papers describing Progress, a procedure put together by two
philosophers attempting to provide a genuinely useful framework to aid
ordinary people in making wise decisions in everyday situations. These
papers, and there rest of the site, are well worth a look. [19 Apr 04]

11 April

in Blogs (new category)

<http://www.churchofcriticalthinking.com/index.shtml>Church of Critical
Thinking
"Your Suspicion is Our Mission." Spreading the gospel of critical
thinking. Primarily interested in separation of Church and State, but this
blog covers many other topics besides, and is unusually well written. The
only thing which gives me a bit of pause is that the author - a "David" -
reveals so little about himself. [11 Apr 04]

<http://www.fallacyfiles.org/ffweblog.html>Fallacy Files Weblog by Gary Curtis
Blog associated with Curtis' excellent Fallacy Files website. [11 Apr 04]

<http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notes.php>Notes and Comment by Ophelia
Benson
Blog associated with <http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com>Butterflies and
Wheels, which Benson edits. "Our short and pithy observations on the
passing scene as it relates to the mission of Butterflies and Wheels.
Woolly-headed or razor-sharp comments in the media, anti-rationalist
rhetoric in books or magazines or overheard on the bus, it's all grist to
our mill. And sometimes we will hold forth on the basis of no inspiration
at all beyond what happens to occur to us." [11 Apr 04]

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--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 07:22:46 +0100
         From: Bonnie Wilson <bwilson_at_cnri.reston.va.us>
         Subject: D-Lib Magazine 9/04

Greetings:

The September 2004 issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now
available.

This issue contains a commentary, three articles, an opinion piece, two
conference reports, the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from recent press
releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in
'Clips and Pointers'. The Featured Collection for September 2004 is OYEZ:
US Supreme Court Multimedia, courtesy of Jerry Goldman, Northwestern
University.

The Commentary is:

The "Rights" in Digital Rights Management
by Karen Coyle, kcoyle.net

The articles include:

Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Moving from Theory to Practice
by Friedrich Summann and Norbert Lossau, Bielefeld University Library, Germany

Library Web Accessibility at Kentucky's 4-Year Degree Granting Colleges and
Universities
by Michael Providenti, Northern Kentucky University

Reengineering a National Resource Discovery Service: MODS Down Under
by Roxanne Missingham, National Library of Australia

The Opinion is:

Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve
by Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory; John Erickson,
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories; and Sandy Payette, Carl Lagoze, and Simeon
Warner, Cornell University

The Conference Reports are:

Report from the International Symposium on Digital Libraries and Knowledge
Communities in Networked Information Society (DLKC'04)
by Shigeo Sugimoto, University of Tsukuba, Japan

7th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD
2004): Distributing Knowledge Worldwide through Better Scholarly
Communication, 3 - 5 June 2004, Lexington, Kentucky, USA
by Suzie Allard, University of Tennessee

[material deleted]
Received on Fri Sep 10 2004 - 04:34:52 EDT

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