ILLUSIONS

MEASURE THE DISTANCE: CLICK HERE



Stare at the middle of picture with black squares 15-30 seconds. Are those really dots that appear at the corners of the squares? What happens if you focus on a dot? Now look at the middle of the picture with the white squares. Do you see dots again? What color are they?

Afterimage

Instructions:

1. Focus on the small white square in the middle of the picture for about 15 seconds (ignore the moving circle). Try not to blink. Then LOOK TO THE RIGHT of the picture...you should see colors. What colors do you see?

2. Try the experiment again, except this time move your eyes to follow the little circle. After following the circle for 15 seconds, LOOK TO THE RIGHT of the picture. Do you still see the colors?

Instructions:

Focus on the middle stripe of this flag for 20-30 seconds. Try not to blink. Then LOOK TO THE RIGHT of the image. You should see the US Flag in the correct colors. Sometimes it helps to blink once or twice after the background changes.

What's Happening: in the retina of your eyes, there are 3 types of color receptors (cones) that are most sensitive to either red, blue or green. When you stare at a particular color for too long, these receptors get "tired" or "fatigued.". After looking at the flag with the strange colors, your receptors that are tired do not work as well. Therefore, the information from all of the different color receptors is not in balance. Therefore, you see different color "afterimages"...in this case I have used the "mirror" colors so you see the proper colors in the afterimage. You can also see that your vision quickly returns to normal since the afterimage does not last for more than about 5 seconds.

BLIND SPOT

We have talked about the blind spot in class. The blind spot is where the optic nerves exits the eye and goes to our brain (occipital lobe - visual cortex). As a result, an image falling in that region will not be seen by us...think of it like the blind spot of a driver (even though you all ride the Metro or the Jitney). :)

Let's see if we can find your blind spot: CLASS ACTIVITIES



For this image, close your right eye. With your left eye, look at the red circle. Slowly move your head closer to the image. At a certain distance, the blue line will not look broken!! This is because your brain is "filling in" the missing information.




This next image allows you to see another way your brain fills in the blind spot. Again, close your right eye. With your left eye, look at the +. Slowly move your head closer to the image. The space in the middle of the vertical lines will disappear.


Here is another image to show your blind spot. Close your right eye. With your left eye, look at the +. You should see the red dot in your peripheral vision. Keep looking at the + with your left eye. The red dot will move from the left to the right and disappear and reappear as the dot moves into and out of your blind spot.

Ch. 4 Essay

Three-year-old Dimitri frequently takes other children's toys from them, showing little concern for their feelings, even when they cry. When he does this, his mother tells him to “imagine how other kids feel when they lose their toys.” Use your understanding of cognitive development to explain Dimitri's antisocial behavior. Why is his mother's comment unlikely to influence his behavior? How would you encourage Dimitri to stop behaving this way?

Why Do Kids Kill?

8-Year-Old's Killing Spree Raises Questions About Why Children Murder

By RUSSELL GOLDMAN
Nov. 12, 2008

Investigators are still piecing together exactly what took place in an eastern Arizona home, where an 8-year-old boy allegedly shot and killed his father and another man, systematically reloading a rifle and firing at close range.

Nicholas Browning, top center, was accused of killing his parents and his two brothers. Other...

Nicholas Browning, top center, was accused of killing his parents and his two brothers. Other children who have been accused of killing include Lionel Tate, top left; Washington, D.C., sniper Lee Malvo, 17, top right; 12-year-old Nathaniel Abraham, accused of shooting a stranger in Michigan; and Florida brothers Derek and Alex King, ages 13 and 14 at the time of their trial, who were tried as adults and convicted of beating their father to death.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

Details from the St. Johns crime scene are scant, and with a court-imposed gag order, little new information is likely to come out unless the boy is tried for the two counts of murder on which he has been charged.

Police initially suspected the boy had been physically or sexually abused, but before the gag order was imposed Monday, investigators said they had found no evidence of trauma.

"That's what makes this so troubling," Roy Melnick, chief of police in St. Johns, told the New York Times Tuesday.

Experts familiar with parental murders by young children, but not involved in this case, said abuse is almost always a factor in such crimes.

According to FBI statistics, there were 62 cases between 1976 and 2005 in which children, aged 7 or 8 were arrested on murder charges. Of those, parents were the victims in just two cases.

"The number of homicides committed by children under 11 is infinitesimal. These are very rare events," said Paul Mones, the only lawyer in the country whose clients consist exclusively of children accused of killing their parents.

"The vast majority of parricides -- the murder of a parent -- committed by minors involve physical abuse and generally involve teenagers. Seventy-five percent of such murders involve boys who kill their fathers and 15 percent involve boys who kill their mothers," said Mones, who has defended hundreds of minors in 25 years of practice, though none younger than 10.

The most recent previous case of an 8-year-old killing his parent occurred in August 1990, when a Pennsylvania boy found his father beating his mother. The boy repeatedly plunged an 8-inch kitchen knife into the back of his father William Jones, 59.

A coroner's jury cleared the boy in the stabbing after authorities urged a finding of justifiable homicide.

Psychologists said that besides abuse, mental illness or even simple feelings of frustration could set off a child and lead him to kill.

"We don't yet know what was going on in that house, so it is hard to know exactly why this child reacted the way he did," said Naftali Berrill, a forensic psychologist who specializes in juvenile perpetrators.

"Was he molested? Was he being beaten? Did he shoot his father because his father frustrated him, because he wouldn't let him play a video game?" Berrill asked.

The idea that a child would be led to murder because his desires were frustrated may seem far fetched, but in 1989 a 10-year-old boy in Houston fatally shot his father and wounded his mother after they would not let him go outside to play.

Much of the hearing that took place in Arizona Monday focused on the psychological evaluation the boy would undergo. His attorney, Benjamin Brewer, sought permission to visit the crime scene -- a two-story home where police say the boy's father, Vincent Romero, a 29-year-old construction worker, and his co-worker and roommate, Timothy Romans, 39, were shot with a .22-caliber rifle Wednesday.

Brewer complained that police questioned the third-grader without representation from a parent or attorney and did not advise him of his rights.

The boy was accompanied in court by his mother. His parents had recently divorced and Romero gained full custody of the boy and remarried.

Romero, investigators said at a press conference over the weekend before the gag order had been issued, was the first of the two victims. He was shot in the head and chest inside the house shortly after 5 p.m.

The boy stopped to reload between shots and before targeting Romans, who was also shot in the head and chest.

The boy was trained in using guns. He and his father reportedly hunted prairie dogs together, and that familiarity with weapons may have played a role in the killings, psychologists said.

"The fact that the boy stopped and reloaded only indicates that he is familiar with shooting. It also suggests he may have been in a pretty dire situation," Berill said. "We'll have to see what comes out later, but it is clear that your average 8-year-old would not have done this."

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Should kids be able to graduate after the 10th grade?

High school sophomores should be ready for college by age 16. That's the message from New Hampshire education officials, who announced plans Oct. 30 for a new rigorous state board of exams to be given to 10th graders. Students who pass will be prepared to move on to the state's community or technical colleges, skipping the last two years of high school. (See pictures of teens and how they would vote.)

Once implemented, the new battery of tests is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects, lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams - which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests - as many times as they need to pass. Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year. "We want students who are ready to be able to move on to their higher education," says Lyonel Tracy, New Hampshire's Commissioner for Education. "And then we can focus even more attention on those kids who need more help to get there."

But can less schooling really lead to better-prepared students at an earlier age? Outside of the U.S., it's actually a far less radical notion than it sounds. Dozens of industrialized countries expect students to be college-ready by age 16, and those teenagers consistently outperform their American peers on international standardized tests. (See pictures of the college dorm room's evolution.)

With its new assessment system, New Hampshire is adopting a key recommendation of a blue-ribbon panel called the New Commission on Skills of the American Workforce. In 2006, the group issued a report called Tough Choices or Tough Times , a blueprint for how it believes the U.S. must dramatically overhaul education policies in order to maintain a globally competitive economy. "Forty years ago, the United States had the best educated workforce in the world," says William Brock, one of the commission's chairs and a former U.S. Secretary of Labor. "Now we're No. 10 and falling."

As more and more jobs head overseas, Brock and others on the commission can't stress enough how dire the need is for educational reform. "The nation is running out of time," he says.
New Hampshire's announcement comes as Utah and Massachusetts declared that they, too, plan to enact some of the commission's other proposals, such as universal Pre-K and better teacher pay and training. Still more states are expected to sign on in December. And the largest teacher union in the U.S., the National Education Association, is encouraging its affiliates to support such efforts.

Some reform advocates would like to see the report's testing proposals replace current No Child Left Behind legislation. "It makes accountability much more meaningful by stressing critical thinking and true mastery," says Tracy.

No date has been set for when New Hampshire will start administering the new set of exams, which have yet to be developed. But to achieve the goal of sending kids to college at 16, Tracy and his colleagues recognize preparation will have to start early. Nearly four years ago, New Hampshire began an initiative called Follow the Child. Starting practically from birth, educators are expected to chart children's educational progress year to year. In the future, this effort will be bolstered by formalized curricula that specify exactly what kids should know by the end of each grade level.

That should help minimize the need for review year to year. It will also bring New Hampshire's education framework much closer to what occurs in many high-performing European and Asian nations. "It's about defining what lessons students should master and then teaching to those points," says Marc Tucker, co-chair of the commission and president of the National Center for Education and the Economy in Washington. "Kids at every level will be taking tough courses and working hard."

Right now, Tucker argues, most American teenagers slide through high school, viewing it as a mandatory pit stop to hang out and socialize. Of those who do go to college, half attend community college. So Tucker's thinking is why not let them get started earlier? If that happened nationwide, he estimates the cost savings would add up to $60 billion a year. "All money that can be spent either on early childhood education or elsewhere," he says.

Critics of cutting high school short, however, worry that proposals such as New Hampshire's could exacerbate existing socioeconomic gaps. One key concern is whether test results, at age 16, are really valid enough to indicate if a child should go to university or instead head to a technical school - with the latter almost certainly guaranteeing lower future earning potential. "You know that the kids sent in that direction are going to be from low-income, less-educated families while wealthy parents won't permit it," says Iris Rotberg, a George Washington University education policy professor, who notes similar results in Europe and Asia. She predicts, in turn, that disparity will mean "an even more polarized higher education structure - and ultimately society - than we already have."

It's a charge that Tracy denies. "We're simply telling students it's okay to go at their own pace," he says. Especially if that pace is a little quicker than the status quo.

'We' are finally part of `We the People'

Another look at Social Psychology: We often times refer to different American "experiences" based on our socioeconomic status. In February, Michelle Obama was criticized and called "anti-American" for a comment she made. Below is the quote she made followed by an article written by Leonard Pitts.

''For the first time in my adult lifetime I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.'' -- Michelle Obama, Feb. 18, 2008

I always thought I understood what Michelle Obama was trying to say.
You are familiar, of course, with what she actually did say, which is quoted above. It provided weeks of red meat for her husband's opponents, who took to making ostentatious proclamations of their own unwavering pride in country.

But again, I think I know what the lady meant to say. Namely, that with her husband, this brown-skinned guy with the funny name, making a credible run for the highest office in the land, she could believe, for the first time, that ''we the people'' included her.

It is, for African Americans, an intoxicating thought almost too wonderful for thinking. Yet, there it is. And here we are, waking up this morning to find Barack Obama president-elect of these United States.

In a sense, it is unfair -- to him, to us -- to make Tuesday's election about race. Whatever appeal Obama may have had to African Americans and white liberals eager to vote for a black candidate, is, I believe, dwarfed by his appeal to Americans of all stripes who have simply had enough of the politics of addition by division as practiced by Karl Rove and his disciples, enough of the free floating anger, the holiday from accountability, the nastiness masquerading as righteousness, the sheer intellectual dishonesty, that have characterized the era of American politics that ends here.

But in the end, after all that, there still is race.
And it would be a sin against our history, a sin against John Lewis and Viola Liuzzo, against James Reeb and Lyndon Johnson, against Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, against all those everyday heroes who marched, bled and died 40 years ago to secure black people's right to vote, not to pause on this pinnacle and savor what it means. It would be a sin against our generations, against slaves and freedmen, against housemen and washerwomen, against porters and domestics, against charred bodies hanging in southern trees, not to be still and acknowledge that something has happened here and it is sacred and profound.
For most of the years of the American experiment, ''we the people'' did not include African Americans. We were not included in ''we.'' We were not even included in ``people.''

What made it galling was all the flowery words to the contrary, all the perfumed lies about equality and opportunity. This was, people kept saying, a nation where any boy might grow up and become president. Which was only true, we knew, as long as it was indeed a boy and as long as the boy was white.

But as of today, we don't know that anymore. What this election tells us is that the nation has changed in ways that would have been unthinkable, unimaginable, flat out preposterous, just 40 years ago. And that we, black, white and otherwise, better recalibrate our sense of the possible.
There was something bittersweet in watching Michelle Obama lectured on American pride this year, in seeing African Americans asked to prove their Americanness when our ancestors were in this country before this country was. There was something in it that was hard to take, knowing that we have loved America when America did not love us, defended America when it would not defend us, believed in American ideals that were larger than skies, yet never large enough to include us.
We did this. For years unto centuries, we did this. Because our love for this country is deep and profound. And complicated and contradictory. And cynical and hard.

Now it has delivered us to this singular moment.

Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States.

And we the people should be proud.

A Rapper Salutes the Slave Trade

This is an early look at Social Psychology, which is the last chapter in the book. This area deals with social interactions, causes of social behavior, and how social conditions impact the individual. This is an article from an interview with Soulja Boy I just simply could NOT pass up. Perhaps Hip-Hop is truly DEAD. It began as a way to express social commentary for people in the inner-city...and now this is what we have come to. Read and Respond.

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Our music critic calls Soulja Boy on the carpet.

One of the biggest songs in the country last year was an inane, sex-chant-infused Southern rap called "Crank That (Soulja Boy)," by young Soulja Boy Tell Em, from tiny Batesville, Mississippi, population 7,113. Soulja Boy Tell Em turned 18 this summer and is looking forward to voting for the first time. His monster hit song included repeated assertions of a cartoonishly absurd sex act: supermanning, or as he elaborated repeatedly in the song, "Superman that ho," which means to come on a woman's back and then put a sheet over her so it sticks to her back and she looks like she’s wearing a cape. Ridiculous stuff. He also chants repeatedly, "Supersoak that ho,” the meaning of which needs no explanation, given the neighborhood we're already in.

These are ludicrous suggestions that play into the Cro-Magnon conception of men using sex and sperm to attack and slay women. It's such a mean-spirited vision of sex that every time I heard the record I thought, I bet that before this came out, he was a virgin.

I asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?” He said, "Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we'd still be in Africa.”

Last week in Atlanta, I got to interview Soulja Boy Tell Em. I found out just how young he really is. He was one of about ten rappers I interviewed in one day for my BET show, The Black Carpet. I decided it'd be fun to give all the rappers part of the Proust questionnaire. I thought it'd be a way to get beyond image and into who they really are. Most of the guys gave good, thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive answers. I asked Juelz Santana, “How would you like to die?” He said, "Loved."

Then came Soulja Boy Tell Em. I asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?” He was stumped. I said, "Others have said Hitler, bin Laden, the slave masters..." He said, "Oh wait! Hold up! Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we'd still be in Africa."

My jaw, at this point, was on the ground."We wouldn't be here," he continued, having no idea how far in it he'd stepped, "to get this ice and tattoos."

Wow. Never mind that diamonds come from Africa. Never mind that there were many generations of pain in between leaving Africa and getting diamonds. Never mind that the long-term cataclysmic effects of subtracting about tens of millions of young, strong people from Africa over the course of a couple of centuries is a large part of the reason why Africa now appears so distasteful to you. Never mind all that, Soulja Boy. You put country first.