Citing blogs in academic papers

Blogs are not simply online diaries. Today in a story from Boing Boing, (permalink) discussed how to cite blogs for medical research. I was curious how the American Psychological Association (APA) publication manual was keeping up with not only technology, but also with the need for academics to make available materials that may not necessarily be the kind of stuff put in academic journals. However, these materials may be just as important to furthering science.

I found out that the APA website has criteria for electronic media including blogs. Here's an example based on the recommendations from the site:
Becker, R. B. (2007, September 19). Prospective memory: A new construct? The language gut reaction. Retrieved October 12, 2007, from http://scsgrads.blogspot.com/2007/09/prospective-memory-new-construct.html. http://scsgrads.blogspot.com/

I have provided the homepage after the specific archival link, because at least if that link is removed the home page may still be available.

The online APA guidelines for citing blogs are in need of some revising or updating. The problem that I see compared with the guidelines for medical researchers for citing content from such places as Kidney Notes is that it is focused on citing journal articles found in online databases, and not alternative electronic media sources like blogs.

I applaud the medical community for giving bloggers in their field credit enough to make guidelines for citing them. Hopefully with time editors in cognitive science will make exception to citing blogs in academic journals, which will encourage APA to make more of an effort to improve their guidelines. While I realize that blogs are not peer-reviewed in the sense that academic articles are, I also think that the content in blogs does not require the same outdated process of peer-review. If blog moderators/editors use the same principles that are as important to ethical reporting and scientific progress as academic journal editors, then re-envisioning the peer-review process to expedite moderated content in blogs may be possible. By following these principles it is possible that this form of expression of ideas and communication could make an impact on the current state of scientific reporting.

Wikipedia has more examples on citing electronic content. But keep in mind this source does not meet the criterion of peer-review as defined by most academic journals. Still a lot of people find it quite useful.

Why do I curse? Steven fucking Pinker

The impetus for the title of this blog is a book by Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct. Quite simply, I wanted to parody that notion and so I did a search in a thesaurus for the term instinct. I found the search result of gut reaction amusing and the rest is history. Given that one of his first books was the impetus for the title of this blog, I think that it is only fair that I should post about his recent book, The Stuff of Thought, and its subsequent media coverage.

Although I will not buy his book, I want to comment on what he wrote in The New Republic. The problem with Pinker is that his work is so readable. It lulls the reader into to thinking that it's so amusing and interesting it also must be right. Well I'm sorry to shit in your cereal, but he's not. So just a quick disclaimer. Enjoy the book for what it is, a fun read, but don't unequivocally believe him.

The criticism of Pinker is that he is a defender of Chomsky, and thus overly focused on grammar as necessary and sufficient for meaning. His position is obvious in the way he begins the article with a discussion of the classification of curse words. Are they nouns? Verbs? Adverbs? Yes, that is why we curse, because the grammatical category of curse words is so important to the speaker that when he choses to say, You are a fucking idiot. versus You are fucking an idiot. is all up to syntax. Neither the speaker nor the listener need to consult their grammar trees to understand the nuances in meaning between these two utterances. Different contexts dictate their uses and not the analysis of language in a vacuum.

To close on a positive note, a better approach that I believe Pinker could elaborate on in his work is this quote from the section on the work of the biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran,

"Although the strongest component of the disgust reaction is a desire not to eat or touch the offending substance, it's also disgusting to think about effluvia, together with the body parts and activities that excrete them. And, because of the involuntariness of speech perception, it's unpleasant to hear the words for them."

What is the involuntariness of speech perception, and how does it make hearing words unpleasant? There's a chapter in the book, Grounding Cognition, which may point him in the right direction. I just hope he doesn't call it an instinct, or even a gut reaction.

First-person shooters narrow the gender gap in spatial abilities

Jing Feng, Ian Spence, and Jay Pratt, the University of Toronto authors of an article in the October 2007 issue of psychological science, provide evidence of improvement in both a test of spatial attention and a mental rotation task. Female players showed more improvement than male players, however, that improvement did not completely eliminate the male gender bias in these tasks.

Participants pretested with the useful-field-of-view task, shown by Edwards et al. (2005) to be a valid and reliable measure of spatial attention. Also, they did a mental rotation task to assess what the authors distinguish as higher level spatial cognition. Then the participants play 10 hours of either Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault (a first-person shooter) or Ballance, a game the authors predicted would not affect spatial attention or spatial cognition abilities. Next the participants did the two psychological tasks again in order to see whether or not they improved. As predicted females and males both improved their spatial attention and cognition skills, but only in the group that played the first-person shooter.

In general I liked the incorporation of video games as a way to study cognitive abilities instead of just video game violence and aggression. However, I felt a little frustration myself with the many unanswered questions these experiments only seemed to highlight. Why are they (and others) finding gender biases in spatial abilities anyway, because most guys play first-person shooters?!? No. So what is it? Also, what is the link between spatial attention and mental rotation, and how are they improved? It seems that the authors think low-level attentional processes are improving and that leads to an improvement in high-level cognitive processes. But how does that work, and why in that direction?

Then I wondered what it was about the games that affected performance on both of the psychological tasks. For the game Ballance it looks like the player must pay attention to spatial locations and plan where to roll the ball to next. Why isn't that enough to aid spatial attention abilities? What is it about first-person shooters? Is Medal of Honor the only first-person shooter that works, or does Gears of War and Halo 3 narrow the gender gap as well? One factor may be the social aspects of Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. From the videos on the games website (link above) it shows the player commanding a small group of soldiers toward a goal. That is pretty different from a first-person shooter like Resident Evil 4, in which the player pretty much takes care of business on one's own.

So, while it is good that an article can generate a lot of interest and more questions, it is also nice to feel like a bit of a handle on the phenomenon has been provided. This article did not answer many questions that I had, and the framing concerning who goes into science or arts just was not very interesting to me.