Scrutinizing the Cybersell: Teen-Targeted Web Sites as Texts

Darren Crovitz explains that the explosive growth of Web-based content and communication in recent years compels us to teach students how to examine the “rhetorical nature and ethical dimensions of the online world.” He demonstrates successful approaches to accomplish this goal through his analysis of the selling techniques of two Web sites targeted to a teen audience and his description of a project in which team members devise ways to teach students to consider the language and design elements of a selected site

Sudden Possibilities: Porpoises, Eggcorns, and Error

[...] the keys to their development as writers often lie hidden in the very features of their writing that English teachers have been trained to brush aside with a marginal code letter or a scribbled injunction to Proofread! (5) A punitive emphasis on correctness, Shaughnessy argues, can actually have the opposite of its intended effect on basic writers, stifling their experiments with language for fear of failure (8). A reflection on the rationale of error-making must extend beyond a student\u27s apparent inability to memorize and apply a rule, toward deeper considerations: a teacher who would work with [basic writers] might well begin by trying to understand the logic of their mistakes in order to determine at what point or points along the developmental path error should or can become a subject for instruction (13)

Register and Charge: Using Synonym Maps to Explore Connotation

To help students think carefully about specific words and their uses, Darren Crovitz and Jessica A. Miller conceive a diagram that visually expresses the spaces and ties between words. Students eagerly explore contextual connotations and defend subtle shifts in word meaning, discovering how time, use, and circumstance all influence meaning

Panel III: Congressional Control of the Administration of Government: Hearings, Investigations, Oversight, and Legislative History

My remarks will be the first on the panel to address the problems of legislative history. We have heard two quite illuminating discussions of congressional oversight activities, with which I largely agree philosophically. When one then reaches the questions of why is this happening, and whether anything can be done about it, the issues become more difficult. My remarks address some complications that may arise from the current distaste for legislative history that may make the oversight problem a little bit worse

What\u27s Next?: The Future of RICO

Editor\u27s Note: After the presentation of the articles, the symposium concluded with a structured debate and an open discussion. The participants in the debate were Professor Blakey and Mr. Crovitz. The ensuing discussion was moderated by Professor Coffee and featured Professor Blakey, Mr. Coffey, and Mr. Crovitz, as well as questions from the audience. The edited transcript is presented here

Towards memory supporting personal information management tools

In this article we discuss re-retrieving personal information objects and relate the task to recovering from lapse(s) in memory. We propose that fundamentally it is lapses in memory that impede users from successfully re-finding the information they need. Our hypothesis is that by learning more about memory lapses in non-computing contexts and how people cope and recover from these lapses, we can better inform the design of PIM tools and improve the user's ability to re-access and re-use objects. We describe a diary study that investigates the everyday memory problems of 25 people from a wide range of backgrounds. Based on the findings, we present a series of principles that we hypothesize will improve the design of personal information management tools. This hypothesis is validated by an evaluation of a tool for managing personal photographs, which was designed with respect to our findings. The evaluation suggests that users' performance when re-finding objects can be improved by building personal information management tools to support characteristics of human memory

Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: A dual process account

© 2019 Springer Nature.This is the final published version of an article published in Psychological Research, licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-bution 4.0 International License. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01262-7.In this article, we address an apparent paradox in the literature on mental time travel and mind-wandering: How is it possible that future thinking is both constructive, yet often experienced as occurring spontaneously? We identify and describe two ‘routes’ whereby episodic future thoughts are brought to consciousness, with each of the ‘routes’ being associated with separable cognitive processes and functions. Voluntary future thinking relies on controlled, deliberate and slow cognitive processing. The other, termed involuntary or spontaneous future thinking, relies on automatic processes that allows ‘fully-fledged’ episodic future thoughts to freely come to mind, often triggered by internal or external cues. To unravel the paradox, we propose that the majority of spontaneous future thoughts are ‘pre-made’ (i.e., each spontaneous future thought is a re-iteration of a previously constructed future event), and therefore based on simple, well-understood, memory processes. We also propose that the pre-made hypothesis explains why spontaneous future thoughts occur rapidly, are similar to involuntary memories, and predominantly about upcoming tasks and goals. We also raise the possibility that spontaneous future thinking is the default mode of imagining the future. This dual process approach complements and extends standard theoretical approaches that emphasise constructive simulation, and outlines novel opportunities for researchers examining voluntary and spontaneous forms of future thinking.Peer reviewe