Class syllabus updated for 2007 / 2008 Reading Assignments and Overheads Links to Useful and/or Entertaining Pages Academic Research amd Writing (Purdue OWL) Nipissing University Home Page Nipissing's Policy on Academic Dishonesty 2505 2k5 Blog (edited) |
PHIL 2505 Email Forum sign-up (2007 / 2008) (Important...and required) 2505 WEBLOG 2k7 (newest information at the top)
April 10 I'm off to England tomorrow, but will be back the 20th or so. Good luck with all your exams.... March 19 I think, perhaps, that my fifteen pages of notes on causality was too big an attachment for yahoogroups to process. So, I'm posting them here. A pointer to a book on statistics, Joel Best's Damned Lies and Statistics. If you click on the book cover you can read the first few pages. I couldn't have told you where the word 'statistics' comes from before reading this. The book is in our library. March 10 Sorry to have missed class today. I would have handed out this little sheet as examples of how statistics can be misleading. Remember that the extra-credit can be either pseudo-science or statistics. Here is the handout. Statistics will still be on the final exam but probably only the relevant fallacies -- how to do statistics wrong to get the effect you want. I will review this a bit next week. You won't have to actually do any statistics on the exam. They're just too important to skip entirely. If anyone was going to hand in a late essay today, please slide it under my door, but also email it to me so that I have a date-stamp for it's being done. Thanks... March 7 Just an early peak at the extra-credit exercise I will be handing out on Monday. This is intended both for students who missed an exercise entirely or for those who wish to raise a low mark. It is not required work. The mark will replace the lowest of the exercises marked out of 10 originally. January 3 December 19 I've sent interim midway marks to the dean's office as per their request. I've also uploaded them here. I've had ongoing computer problems since mid-November. If you've sent something important and I haven't answered, please email again. Thanks.
November 12 An apology for my tardiness in getting the 2k7 up for this week's readings. In fairness, I've removed the 'required' from two of the readings and substitued 'recommended'. Now that Remembrance Day has come and gone, and in keeping with our unit on Groupthink and propaganda, I would recommend this movie review. I'm assuming that many of you have seen Saving Private Ryan. And more here... October 20 A note about the overheads for lecture 3. One of your fellow students pointed out (correctly) that I had left a few errors in the overheads for lecture 3. They had to do with the syllogisms about the dogs and the warm-blooded mammals and so on (on page 5 of the original overheads for that week). They were not placed in proper major premise, minor premise order. Please use my corrected version here or on the readings page to amend your notes. My thanks to the student who pointed this out and my apologies to anyone who was confused. I should have caught this myself. October 17 Just a reminder that the exercise listed at the very end of the lecture 4 overheads (just before Thanksgiving week) will be addressed and collected on October 22nd.
October 12 A reminder of the many treasures at Purdue's OWL (online writing lab) site. Some of you will be starting to research and write papers for assignments in your other classes. Here's some advice for doing a good job developing an argument and a thesis statement.
September 19 Just a reminder that I'm expecting your 'College grads' article to be annotated and returned along with your exercise. I mentioned also that you don't need to try and imagine what annotations I am looking for. I'm only looking for seriousness of purpose.
September 14 Canada votes 'no' on UN native rights declaration. If you have something to say about this, tell us in the email group...
September 6 Just a news story to practice some critical thinking on... 'NHS should not treat those with unhealthy lifestyles' say Tories If you're interested, I've also posted some other stories from today's news on my moral issues course webpage September 2 PHIL 2505 Email Forum sign-up (2007 / 2008) (Important...and required) |