Tried to send this yesterday, but I had posted 3 times already.
Obviously, my original math was really off. I remember that I was trying to
compensate for the fact that multiplying decimals left you with more
decimals (so .1 * .1 = .01). I have tried to recalculate this and here is
what I got. If the thickness of paper is .1, and 1 meter is 1000 mm and 1
km is 1000 m and 1 mile (for everyone who is metric impaired) is 1.61 km,
then it would be 39,368,031,062,988,490,729,711 miles (approximately). The
distance to the sun is 93,000,000 miles. The distance to the next nearest
star (Proxima Centauri) from the sun is 4.3 light-years from the Sun.. A
light-year equals 5.88 million million miles (9.46 million million
kilometers).
At 02:06 PM 3/20/2008 -0500, you wrote:
Assuming a sheet of paper is .1mm thick:
.1mm x 2 (to the 100th power - lost my formatting here) = 1.27 x 10 (to
the 29th power) mm or 1.27 x 10 (to the 23rd power) km
Or 800,000,000,000,000 times the distance between the earth and the sun
-- a bit more anchoring and adjustment at work here, eh, Deb? ;-)
My students just can't believe this result. Of course, they want to know
where we'd get a sheet of paper that big! (And what would the square
mileage of such a sheet be - an additional problem for the math wonks
out there in TIPS-land!)
From Plous, S. (1993). The psychology of judgment and decision making.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
Plous has a quiz at the beginning of this text that is chock full of
good examples of heuristics, biases, and choice problems that typically
elicit various sorts of "irrational" decision making. He also provides
the answers and might have these indexed to the chapter where this is
discussed - either that or I annotated by copy (it is in another office
than where I am now).
Here is an example you can use to show when the availability heuristic
will produce a correct set of answers (if you want to talk about
Gigerenzer's argument that heuristics are quick and dirty ways to
usually get a good answer).
Rate the following words on their relative frequency in language (the
Kucera-Francis word counts are provided next to each word):
_____ BOTTLE K-F freq 50
_____ BUTTER K-F freq 100
_____ CHAOS K-F freq 9
_____ COTTAGE K-F freq 46
_____ PYTHON K-F freq 1
_____ VALLEY K-F freq 100
Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D.
Director, Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment
Associate Professor, Psychology
University of West Florida
Pensacola, FL 32514 - 5751
Phone: (850) 857-6355 or 473-7435
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/cutla/
Personal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: Deb Briihl [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 1:31 PM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: Re: [tips] Availability Heuristic Activities?
Almost to the moon (I forget how many miles it is). I typically start
singing the inchworm song (2 and 2 are 4, 4 and 4 are 8... - and for
those
of you who remember the old hair commercial of I told 2 friends, and
they
told 2 friends). After 9-10 folds, it is about as thick as their
textbook,
so I then state 2 textbooks, 4 textbooks, etc.
---
To make changes to your subscription contact:
Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Deb
Dr. Deborah S. Briihl
Dept. of Psychology and Counseling
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698
(229) 333-5994
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/dbriihl/
Well I know these voices must be my soul...
Rhyme and Reason - DMB
---
To make changes to your subscription contact:
Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
