CORRESPONDENCE. BARRY DOCK WORKS.

Correspondence bias in performance evaluation: why grade inflation works.

Performance (such as a course grade) is a joint function of an individual's ability (such as intelligence) and the situation (such as the instructor's grading leniency). Prior research has documented a human bias toward dispositional inference, which ascribes performance to individual ability, even when it is better explained through situational influences on performance. It is hypothesized her...

Barry Duncan

1. What exactly is an evidenced-based practice? It usually means an approach that has established itself better than placebo or treatment as usual in two clinical trials. Such demonstrations are nothing to write home about; intervention of nearly any kind has demonstrated its superiority over placebo for 50 years! This research tells us nothing that we already do not know: Treatment works. So, ...

Ontology Barry Smith

Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. 'Ontology' is often used by philosophers as a synonym of 'metaphysics' (a label meaning literally: 'what comes after the Physics'), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called 'first p...

Authority in the Dock

The dock problem revisited

The dock problem (cf. [2], [4, 5]), which is that of understanding the scattering of surface water waves by a thin semi-infinite rigid plate floating on the free surface of water of infinite depth, gives rise to the following mixed boundary value problem, involving Laplace’s equation in two dimensions, with (x, y) representing the rectangular Cartesian coordinates, assuming linearised theory of...