OK, OK, it was a little more than 2 weeks.  I have managed to post the truth-tables I developed at the end of august, but everything else has come to a bit of a screeching halt as the semester has kicked into high gear.  Here’s a list of current truth tables, and what is coming soon (unlinked forms are not yet posted).

• Simple – Negation
• Simple – Conjunction
• Simple – Disjunction
• Simple – Conditional
• Simple – Biconditional
• Simple – Sheffer Stroke
• Simple – Peirce Stroke
• Simple – Exclusive Or (Not – triple bar)
• Argument – Modus Tollens
• Argument – Modus Ponens
• Argument – Affirming the Consequent
• Argument – Denying the Antecedent
• Argument – Disjunctive Syllogism (2)
• Argument – Disjunctive Syllogism Fallacy (2)
• Argument – Hypothetical Syllogism
• Argument – Dilemma
• Argument – Reducto
• Equivalence – Contraposition
• Equivalence – De Morgan
• Equivalence – Implication

I counted through my files, and I’ve got about 50 more video ads to post, and an indefinite number of text examples to process.  I’ll try to get one or two up a week during the semester, but with any luck, I can recruit a work-study next spring to post my stuff regularly.

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I’ll be away from my work computer for a couple of weeks starting July 22nd, so no updates for a little while. I’ve got about 45 videos ready for posting when I get back, along with the updated truth tables, which I’ll spawn when I return.  Have a good couple of weeks!

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Here’s the updated Venn Master document – as you can see, this one is wrapped in friendly instructions and rewarding encouragements.  It is set for ‘O’-type Conversion, but I’ll generate one for each type and transformation once I’ve finished testing:

I’m updating my old tool for teaching categorical transformations (conversion, obversion and contraposition) using Venn diagrams. I should be able to adapt it easily to demonstrate the relationships in the traditional square of opposition as well. Here’s the ‘master’ document that I’ve developed so far – it needs to be wrapped in instructions and various other ‘prettifying’ functions before I post it, but it is coming soon.

The subject and predicate terms here are programmed dynamically, as is the form of the sentence (A, E, I, O). This master document will spawn a bunch of little ones, that will be wrap in tools that will let the user set their own categories before messing with the transformations, or setting the categories and then selecting the form, etc.

Comments – esp. those suggesting a good color – are welcome!

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Just under the splash banner ‘featured’ posts on the main page is a ‘slider’ that contains thumbnails of recent ‘popular’ posts. Up until today, it was calculating these on the star ratings, which, essentially, weren’t being used.

So I changed it to query based on page views – pvc_views, to be exact.  The results are, I think, useful. I may add another beneath it for most viewed ‘tools’.

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John Casey over at The NonSequitur shared a link today to a list of the 10 ‘More common faults in human thoughts‘ at listverse.com. Unfortunately, the list comes with no examples, no citations, no literature to continue research, etc.  In a way, this is exactly why CT2.0 was founded – the items on the list (see below) are what I’m classifying as ‘cognitive fallacies.’ There is great research tracking them, and it, in its best form, keeps alive the tradition of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce who saw Logic and Philosophy on a continuum with Psychology.  But lists like these need to be sourced – the web, and contemporary blogging software, has multiple ways of linking and classifying content. Each item on that top-ten list should have at least (a) citation to an academic study, (b) an real world example and (d) an example that can be replicated in the classroom [a 'tool' in the lingo of the site] and (d) links to more research for the interested.

That’s what we’re trying to build here. Granted, we’re a long way from completing that goal – the only one that comes close is the example of lesioning in modeling. But we’ll keep building.

Here’s the list, with links to my existing categories, if they exist (I’ll update them as we go)

1. Bias Blind Spot
2. Cryptomnesia (false memories)
3. Self-Serving Bias
4. Endowment Effect
5. Just-World Phenomenon
6. Restraint Bias
7. Planning Fallacy
8. Illusion of Control
9. Availability Heuristic
10. Confirmation Bias

One that is missing from here, but underlies many, is our tendancy to supply missing premises to fill out enthymeme arguments.  One could probably add to that the tendancy to see supply a conclusion when it is not drawn out by the speaker – i.e. to see an argument where there is none.

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I’m in the process of updating my old Flash ambiguous-lyrics demos into AS3, which gives me the opportunity to restructure the way I stored the lyrics.  In the new structure, the lyrics are served to the flash file via XML, broken into segments and stamped with time-code stamps for when each segment ought to appear. All in all, this should make the system far more robust.

At some point in the future, I’ll add a feedback loop at the end that will provide the collected data in a histogram – I have a flash movie in AS1 that does it, but I’ll need to update it to AS3 to integrate it here.

It also opens up the possibility of developing a JavaScript / CSS / HTML5 version of these demos.  If anyone is interested, please let me know, I’ll send you the URLs for the XML and MP3 files.

The first of the demos is here: R.E.M. Others, which are coming soon, include: The Clash, “Wrong ‘em Boyo,” The Rolling Stones “Tumblin’ Dice,” The Ramones “Sheena is a punk rocker,” OpIvy “Here we go again” and (the newest of the lot) The Pogues “Fairytale of New York” (I’m actually a little surprised to find that ‘Fairytale of NY’ had so many reported misheard lyrics, as it is probably the most understandable of the Pogues songs, but we work with what we have). Any more suggestions and/or confessions of misheard lyrics are welcome!

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As it turns out, Adobe’s flash-to-html5 ‘conversion’ tool Wallaby is unable to convert any of the interesting and useful features of Flash.  It is, in short, a useless piece of shit.

Apple still hasn’t approved Flash for iOS. So while these two stupid, immature egoists battle to get their own way, we’re stuck in purgatory.

Listening Apple & Adobe? Here’s the real problem: I’m not a corporation.  I don’t have a staff of programmers.  I’m an educator, who happens to think that interactive activities embedded in the textbook improve learning. I do not have the time or energy to recode these activities to iOS, Adobe AIR or HTML5.  That would be retracing my steps, and I have better things to do: like build more useful interactive exercises.

Your little spat puts people like me — small fries, as it were — in an untenable situation.  We can’t recode, we can’t rewrite, and we don’t want to continue development because the future is uncertain. In short: you are limiting innovation. Because you’re arrogant, controlling assholes.

Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.

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I’ve been experimenting with the iPad on the site today. The video is a mess: as documented at No.inc, the handling of HTML5 video on the iPod and iPad is insane.  When you put ‘include’ tags in the header, the videos will be overwritten by the static poster image, and hence won’t play on the iPad.  If you put them on the bottom of the page, you’ll break it on the iPod / iPhone.  The same problem happens with CSS as well as Javascript – it is seriously nuts. To make it worse, if you put two HTML5 videos on the page–using EXACTLY THE SAME CODE–one will work and the other won’t.

I’m just not going to bughunt all day through other people’s WP Plugins.  So I added a ‘if this isn’t working on the iPad, click here’ line to the caption (example).  This work around precludes embedded video, but it doesn’t increase the number of clicks on the user. I figure some update to the iOS will fix it anyway, so there isn’t much point in wasting my time.

I’ve also updated the handling of examples through a local plugin.  It’s documented in Policy on Content – Draft 1.

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