 All right, shall we get rolling? Okay, so what's gonna, we're gonna get started now. Good morning. Good morning. All right, so in the back, can you hear me okay? All right, so a few pro tips about this room. The back of the room is terrible. When this room is filled with people, it blocks the sound. That's science. Okay, so if you're sitting in the back, you're going to be in an auditory disadvantage to sitting closer to the front. Now, obviously not everybody can sit in the front row. But if there are seats available, I always recommend people move forward. We've also noticed an average of about 10 to 15 points difference between sitting in the back of the room and sitting in the front of the room. It's correlation, not causation, but keep it in mind. Question. Okay. All right, so welcome to PHY3333, CFB3333, KNW2333, Introduction to the Scientific Method. We have a lot to do today, and we'll begin with some introductions here in a moment, but we wanted to welcome all of you to the course. We promise you it will be a entertaining and very dense semester. Okay? So we have a lot of stuff to do today. This is the big first day to-do list. So let's start by going through our background information. So I will pass the microphone awkwardly to John. Yeah, this is a little bit of a scramble here. If everything works out, we'll have two wireless microphones hardly so we won't have to do this. Anyway, one thing you might ask, somebody always did, is why are there two of us? It's very unusual. You will find a class that is taught by two instructors who are here every time, unless, like Steve's at CERN doing research. Nearly every time. Yeah. But since we're here all the time, the reason is, let's be honest, the workload in this course is so great that one person would be overwhelmed. That's essentially it. Also, you get two different takes on things, which we'll understand in a moment. But there's reasons why there's two of us, and the primary one is the paper-creating load gets so huge that one person gets overwhelmed. Now me, background, you want to find out who we are? One, I've been doing this course. It's starting, finishing the 11th year of doing this. We've been doing this for quite a while. And it's been a lot of fun. My background is, if you go back and look at transcripts, is engineering. I'm a generalist at this point because I've studied and done so many different things that I've never been specialized in once. I consider myself as a generalist, but if you scratch deep enough, you'll find an engineer. And that means I have a particular way of approaching problems and dealing with things. Because, again, my background is what I call it. Unlike a PhD, which is a foot-wide and a mildee, my background is a mile-wide and a foot-deep. So they're very different people. Also, as you might be able to tell, I'm a little older, Steve. Anyway. Half a long. No, you'll catch up. Just kidding. But anyway, the difference in background and both the necessity for two is why there's two of us. And you'll find this attitude going on. So, as John said, in contrast to his being a mile-wide and a foot-deep, I guess I'm more a mile-deep and a foot-wide. So this is me on the right. Just in case you're not clear. I'm Professor Stephen Secula. I am a member of the physics faculty here as well. I spend my bulk of my time doing research. And my research is focused on studying the origin of the cosmos, the laws that govern the structure of the cosmos in the hopes of understanding the whole thing from the beginning to its eventual end. I do this using a massive subatomic particle collider located at the CERN laboratory just outside Geneva, Switzerland. That does mean that I'll be doing some traveling this semester. So I apologize in advance. I'll try to let everybody know about my travel schedule. But there will always be somebody on call to help you out if you have questions. So that's the bottom line. The thing in the background here is the piece of equipment that I get to use from my research. This is about two meters wide here that you're seeing. And this thing goes for half a football field in length, and it's about 10 stories tall. So this is in a cavern about 150 meters under the ground. And to get there, you've taken elevator ride. One of the days I took a tour of my own experiment, the elevator broke. And so they had to hold us down there for an extra long time. It happens. That's life. There's no stairway. Well, there is a stairway, but no one wants to walk 150 meters vertical. So, yeah. Okay, so next thing on the to-do list is about you. So one of the things that we're going to need you to do is to invent a code name for yourself. Okay? So let me explain. We're going to use this for gathering information for a survey that we're going to do. Now, do not use your actual name, including your middle name. You want nothing personally identifiable about yourself in the code name. It's okay if you use a nickname, but you really want to make sure nobody else in the room knows that nickname. So for instance, pretty pony. Okay? If I were to choose a code name for myself, you'd never guess that I would pick that. Now that means nobody gets to use that now. No one gets to be pretty pony. So think of, think for a moment, focus on what your code name is going to be. And you're going to put that code name at the top of the survey that's being handed around. Okay? And if we happen for some mysterious reason to get two code names that are the same, we'll try to figure out who did that and then we'll make one of you choose a different code name. Okay? We will toss a coin to decide which one gets to change. Right. It's fair. Right. Coin toss. That's a nice fair. And we promise you it's an unbiased coin. It doesn't always come up heads or something like that. So what you're getting now is something called the survey of beliefs. It's on a scale of one to five where five is you strongly agree with a statement. Okay? And one is you strongly disagree with the statement. You strongly disagree with the statement. Now zero would mean it's absolutely false and six would mean it's absolutely true. But we cannot prove anything as absolutely true or absolutely false in life. Okay? We can only say what the weight of the evidence is. So five is you believe strongly that the statement is true. One is that you believe strongly that it is not true. That's the strongest belief anybody can have. Okay? So I walked around and noticed that people were about typically halfway through or more through the survey. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move on to sort of an interactive portion of the lecture here. And I apologize to the people in the front or not. That's the one. So why do I need this course? Believe it or not, you live in a culture or you're studying in a country where there are a lot of interesting beliefs out there. And many of those beliefs can be assessed critically using the scientific method because they make claims that are actually testable about the natural world even though the claims themselves may sound like they exceed the confines of the natural world they can be tested. Okay? So for instance, this is something we'll do in the course and we'll talk a bit more about this in this lecture. About 28% of Americans believe in something called astrology. This is the belief that where the stars are located in the sky on the day of your birth, maybe even at the moment of your birth can be important in this case, determines who you are. It determines your personality. It determines the events of your day-to-day life. You can pick up just about any paper legitimate or otherwise and find a horoscope section. And so if you're interested, if you know what day you were born on, which I hope you do, then you can look that up and you can find out what your horoscope is. And this is based on astrology, which is this claim that the positions of the stars on the day you were born affect you. They change who you are. 18% of Americans aren't sure whether or not they believe in it. So if you add those numbers together, you're getting to about 50% of Americans who either believe in this or they're not sure they don't know whether it's true or not. Okay? 60% of Americans believe in extrasensory perception or ESP that there's some kind of sixth sense. We're in psychopinetic powers that the power of the mind can be used to move physical objects or read people's thoughts. 30% believe that we've been visited by extraterrestrials. 25% to 50% kind of depends on how you frame the question, believe in ghosts, in faith-healing, and communication with the dead and lucky numbers. Now that might sound like something that is outside the realms of your ability to test it, but in fact, there are many specific claims made about ghosts, about faith-healing that can be critically assessed and tested. And it's this course where we hope to give you a toolkit that you need in order to make those kinds of assessments. And we will expect you to make those kinds of assessments through the class, okay? You're entitled to your beliefs. I have beliefs that sometimes seem a little cockamamie in the face of the fact that I'm also a scientist. Nonetheless, I don't let my science life cross into my belief life. In this class, you'll learn to assess exactly why you and others believe what you believe. Because why you believe what you believe is as important as what you believe, all right? This is really critical because firm beliefs can be totally wrong, and that may seem harmless sometimes, depends on the belief, but they can kill. And I'll give you some examples of this, okay? Now something I want to make you aware of, I am priming you. There is a psychological phenomenon, actually two related psychological phenomena, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. Cognitive dissonance is an emotional response, fear, panic, anger, dread. When you receive information that conflicts with your established set of beliefs, that's cognitive dissonance. It feels like your brain's being suffered in half, and your heart feels like it tightens up, you maybe get a little nauseous, okay? We all have this biological response because we process information so that we can survive. And when we are presented with information that conflicts with prior beliefs, it can cause real problems physically, okay? You may experience this during this class. Don't freak out, it's normal. Related to this is confirmation bias. To avoid the feeling of cognitive dissonance, one strategy that humans have is to avoid evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. So maybe you only read a certain news site because you agree with the political bend of that site. And if you read another news site with an alternative political bend, you get very angry, and you don't like getting angry, so you only pick up the confirming evidence and you ignore the disconfirming evidence. That's confirmation bias. Again, a well-documented psychological phenomenon. It's a coping mechanism we have as living beings, all right? So because we know that humans do this, I'm human, you're human, you think he's human. Look at that shirt, okay? All right, you have to fight your fear. You will feel fear. You will feel nausea and dread at some of the things you're going to see in this class. I know, and some of you are like, what? This is supposed to be about the scientific method, but there are parts of this class where even I haven't gotten used to seeing some of it, and I'm an instructor in the course, all right? So it's okay, other people in the room are probably feeling it. Get your emotions in check. Remember your training, it will save you. Remember the toolkit we give you, okay? You're going to have to really fight the instinct, and you will have this instinct to refuse to believe something simply because it conflicts with pre-existing beliefs that may have been placed there by teachers, parents, friends, loved ones, religious authorities, whatever, okay? Again, the purpose of this course is to assess why people claim what they claim. All right? All that matters in science is the evidence for the claim, the quality of the evidence, and whether or not the claim can be openly and critically assessed. The minute you pull back from any of those, you have now exited the scientific realm, and don't expect science to have anything nice to say, okay? Because it can't be assessed anymore if you close up. So you have to be willing to be open, but not so open that your brains fall out. That's the trick in science. Keep an open mind, okay? But don't accept everything that comes across your plate. Learn to critically assess information. Learn... I want you to become an information consumer. Learn early on that I don't know is a perfectly good answer. If something comes up, it's perfectly fine to say I don't know. And it's also important in a way of thinking to understand that the fact that you have not seen or heard of something, which will happen all the time, you've never heard of that, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that even if it exists, it's not true. If somebody tells me, I never heard of that, I accept that as a statement of fact. You never heard of it, but that's as far as I'm going to let it go. We cannot interpret that to mean it's not true. That's another thing to keep in mind. It's fine to say I don't know. I say I don't know to the graduate students that I work with probably two to three times a day. And it's shocking to them. My office is expecting me to have all the answers, but if I had all the answers, why would I be science? Science is about finding answers, not knowing answers. It's not about facts. It's about the methodology for establishing facts. And so when my graduate students come in and say, hey, I have a question, why does this do that? And I say, I don't know. And they look at me like I just landed from the planet Mars. Who are you and why are you being paid to do this? If I knew everything, I would take this microphone off and I would just go make a billion dollars. Okay? I don't. And I like finding things out. And part of that, a critical part of that, is admitting I don't know. That is the start of all learning. So thank you for making that point. That's excellent. Okay, yeah. So if you're done with the surveys, please pass them down to the person at the end of your row over by the aisle side. And they will be picked up. And now that we're freeing you to participate a bit more, what I want you to do is pick up your flash cards. Okay? So this is the class participation exercise we'll do today. Now I'm going to have some poll statements or questions. There are three choices. A, B, C, if we take these cards apart. You see there's an A, a blue B, and a pink C. All right? Now I want this to be a private poll. I want you to feel like you're not under any peer pressure. Okay? And that you're not being judged by your peers. So here's how we're going to do the poll. I'm just going to pick a random answer and I'm going to pick C. So let's say I put my cards down in front of me. I shuffle them until I get to the one that I'm interested in answering. Cover them up with my hands. And then I simply box them like this. And then hold it up to my chin. Okay? So all I want you to do is pick the card you think is your best answer to this question. Okay? This is what I want you to tell me. A is acquired immune deficiency syndrome. What's it caused by? Is it caused by a person's behavior? A is it caused by an invasive virus? B is it caused by divine punishment? C. And what are you doing? Put your camera phone away. This is about class etiquette. Mr. Pink, if that's your name. All right. So let's go ahead and all go ahead and poll. All right? So take a few seconds to do this. What do people think the correct answer is in their view? Okay? So there's no pressure. Okay. Thanks. You can put them all down now. Thank you. All right. So I saw a whole lot of B. All right? So scientifically the correct answer is B. A is caused by an invasive virus. All right? So the scientific consensus unequivocally is that A is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV. But there are people in the world who have had influence on other people in the world who reject this idea. They reject the scientific explanation of AIDS. One of these people is a professor at UC Berkeley named Peter Dusberg, actually a professor of biological sciences. So this is not somebody you can claim out as a philosopher or a history professor. It's just a nutball. Okay? It's actually somebody who would like to know how to critically assess scientific evidence. Okay? Now, Peter by himself might be harmless, but he has followers. Including, I haven't listed this here, President Tavo Mbeki of South Africa who changed AIDS policy in South Africa in response to Dusberg's claim that HIV is not the cause of the problem. And this caused mass outbreaks of AIDS in South Africa compared to neighboring countries that had instituted policies to deal with the HIV problem. Okay? One of the other people that's a famous follower of Dusberg's cause is a woman named Christine Mangiori. She's pictured here on the cover of this mothering magazine. She again rejects the HIV hypothesis that HIV is the cause of AIDS, well, really the HIV theory because it's been established by multiple lines of evidence now. So she followed his teachings and she refused to take the antirefroviral drugs that would prevent, in large part, transmission of HIV through the placenta to her infant children. And so she had two children. One of them was named Eliza Jane. She's pictured here around age two or three. And she died at age three of AIDS, induced by HIV. So pseudoscience, that is the rejection of science or the twisting of scientific structure to suit a belief system can have devastating consequences. In this case, it killed a child and eventually it killed Christine herself. She died of AIDS-related complications in 2008. So pseudoscience can kill. I have a question. Yeah. Heater's Dusberg? No, no, he's a published scientist. His ideas have been debated heavily in the scientific community and thoroughly run against the evidence that's out there. I mean, he's published on the subject. You can find his publications. If you find this to be an interesting topic for a research paper, come and talk to us about it. There's tons of resources, both sources of the claim, including papers and books that he's published and then scientific evidence, assessing the claim but also assessing other things like HIV itself. So Dusberg's claim is that lowers your immune response and that's what causes AIDS, not HIV. HIV is just opportunistic. It happens to get in there when you abuse drugs. But then what about babies that are born to women who didn't abuse drugs but had HIV? So you can already start to pick that claim apart very quickly, right? So there's a wealth of stuff out there, both for the claim and against the claim. And if you were going to write a research paper for this course, which you will go right to, you would have to assess evidence for the claim, evidence against the claim, and tell us what the weight of the evidence is for or against the claim, okay? Claim assessment. That's going to be in the heart of this course. All right, so that's a great question. So no, he's a scientist. I mean, he's like me or... He's done some good work. He's done some good work. He's done some good work. Yeah. And that's what makes this dangerous. Okay, another great example, Linus Paulin, Nobel Prize winner in physics and chemistry, held the belief that vitamin C mega-doses can cure all kinds of problems. There is no scientific evidence that vitamin C mega-doses do anything but make your pee very expensive and possibly to a vitamin C overdose, which can make you sick, okay? Linus Paulin, Nobel Prize winner, held this belief. Lots of other stuff he did, totally legitimate. That, cockamamie, all right? No evidence to back up the claim whatsoever. So this happens, okay? So you really have to ask, why does somebody believe what they believe? And even credentialed people can say the most outlandish things. In fact, that's when you're most at risk. When somebody credentialed in the area is speaking about a subject, that's when you drop your defenses. And that is probably when you most need to stop and think, wait, toolkit, what's the weight of the evidence? Whether the publications say, is this a minority claim and how should it be assessed? Okay, scientifically. So this is all good stuff, okay? All right, so another class poll. All right, so here we go. What is chiropractic medicine? A, a practice of manipulating the body that resulted from decades of good research on par with the best modern medicine. B, an ancient form of Chinese medicine based on the presence of 365 meridians in the human body, one for each day of the year. Or C, invented by a grocer in Iowa, it is no better than doing nothing and rejects the germ theory of disease. So, think about that for a second, okay? And again, secret poll. So cup the cards in your hand, all right, and then raise them up when you think you have your answer, okay? Just a few seconds here, okay? Okay, great, thank you. So I see a lot of A, a lot of B and some C. This is great. This is exactly what I wanted to... What's up? Oh, well, it was about, I'd say it was about 50-50, A and B for those that answered A today, roughly. Okay? All right, so A is a practice of manipulating the body that resulted from decades of good research on par with the best medicine. B is an ancient form of Chinese medicine and C is invented by a grocer. The answer is C. It was invented by a grocer. It is actually no better than doing nothing based on now a long history of scientific study of chiropractic and it rejects the germ theory of disease. Chiropractors were overwhelmingly against the march of dimes, which was the cause to raise money for polio vaccination, okay? Because they believed that chiropractic was all you needed to cure polio, which cripples and maims and kills. And it's caused by a virus. Okay? So, pseudoscience can kill here too. The science unequivocally says that medical problems result from biological and chemical origins and the germ theory of disease unites these to explain how invasive organisms, or how, for instance, genetic traits handed down from generation to generation can cause disease in the body. Okay? Chiropractic medicine claims that disease is caused by bones being misaligned and interrupting the flow of nerve energy in the body. And the nerve energy can't be detected and the displacements often can only be detected by entrained chiropractors, so goes the claim. So, they won't show up on x-rays. X-rays can detect displacements at the size of, what? A few atoms if you really wanted to be precise about it. Okay? So, how can something that's displaced by a few atoms cause all the disease we know being humankind? Okay? So, that's the chiropractic claim. Is that most chiropractors actually have no medical training. They're not medical doctors. There are medical doctors that have degrees of chiropractic. Okay? They wise though. What's that? They wise though. Yeah, that's a bit safer to go to. If you had to go to a chiropractor, that would be a better choice. But they overwhelmingly, about 60%, reject vaccination to prevent disease because they think all you need is a routine adjustment and you don't need all these vaccinations to prevent polio and measles and mumps and rubella and chickenpox and the flu and all that stuff. They actually believe they can cure the common cold with adjustment of your back. Okay? There are famous examples of people suffering stroke or paralysis from neck manipulation. So, we'll have a chiropractor come in and demonstrate this for you when we talk about alternative medicine. You'll see this and what it looks like and what it sounds like. One of the more recent examples that was famous for my generation, not for yours, but it's a very handsome BC actor named Kevin Sorbo played Berkely's and was in a sci-fi TV show in the late 90s and early 2000s. And he regularly went to a chiropractor for one neck adjustment. He suffered three strokes in rapid succession in his car in the parking lot and that's because the strain of having your neck snapped can actually puncture one of the main blood vessels in your body and start causing you to bleed out because it winds through bone to get to your brain. So, when you jerk the bone it can tear the blood vessel and you can stroke out within minutes. Okay? So, there's a lot of evidence now accumulated that the risk of stroke and other things like paralysis go up with chiropractic manipulation of the most severe kind. Chiropractic when compared to massage works just as well on things that can be treated with massage. But if you're talking about the common cold or flu or things like that it's not any better than doing nothing at all which is called the placebo effect and we'll talk about that later in the course. Yeah, another question. There was actually a couple of chiropractors decided they had they believed in vaccination and they were worried they didn't know how many of their colleagues rejected the germ theory of disease in vaccination. So, they actually conducted a poll in the early 2000s of chiropractors. So, they got a sample of chiropractors to respond to their poll and of the ones that responded about 60% of them said they don't recommend vaccinations for their patients at all nor for their own families. So, that's fairly recent data. It's within the last 10 years. Now, I'm sure it's changed. The question is whether it's gone up or down. I don't know. But I'm sure it's changed. Okay, so, if you go to our lecture on alternative medicine either in the slides or in the notes there should be a link to that paper and if it's not, I'll put it there. It was in my introduction slides from two semesters ago. Okay, another class poll. Alright, so vaccines are known through multiple research studies to A, prevent illnesses that once killed or maimed major fractions of the human population with negligible negative side effects. B, prevent illnesses that once killed or maimed major fractions of the human population but also cause huge modern problems like autism and C, be ineffective against diseases that affect the human population having only negative side effects with no benefit to the population. So, think about that for a moment and let's do the poll. And again, cup and hold, cup and hold. Hold them up for a few more seconds. Okay, John? Yeah. Okay, so I counted about six or seven B's and the rest all seem to be A's. Okay? If it doesn't be easy. Okay, so there were most of them were A. Okay, so the prevent illness, negligible negative side effects and B was about seven, six or seven people and that was that it does those things but it also causes huge modern problems like autism. Okay, so the scientific answer is that vaccinations prevent disease. Okay, so that's true. And vaccinated people then go on to protect the unvaccinated. For instance, people that are immunocompromised and can't get vaccines that could die if they get a vaccine. But they're protected by herd immunity. That is, you get a vaccine and I get a vaccine and our friend who's immunocompromised is prevented from getting the disease by us not transmitting it. Okay? There is actually no evidence whatsoever. No scientific evidence that things like autism are caused by vaccines or the things that are used to preserve vaccines for transport. All right, that's the scientific evidence. Now, there's one person who's essentially responsible for the modern claim that vaccines cause autism and it was based on a study of about a dozen sick kids in a British hospital. It was done by Andrew Wakefield and it was published about just over a decade ago and it was retracted from the journal about five years ago that was originally published in because it had been so thoroughly discredited both that he had taken money to basically form a treatment that would be an alternative to vaccines or other things that he had fake data and that he had used small statistics and misinterpreted the results of the data and so forth. It was a mess. Did not have proper permissions from the patients? Oh, yeah. And he actually didn't have proper permissions from the patients who were kids so permission from the parents to conduct the study in the first place. So just every possible online you could cross and cross. He had a patent Oh, yeah. That's what I'm saying. He was going to sell if he could get the original and take it off the market legally. He had a plan he was going to get rich on it. Right. So the problem is that this claim because it got published and it got advertised widely in the public media made it into the public consciousness as being real. Even though Wakefield study is the only one that shows this link and 14 independent peer-reviewed studies with much larger samples have shown no link whatsoever between vaccines and autism. Autism does seem to be related to other factors but not to vaccines themselves. We should know that the Lancet the Lancet which is the British medical journal they said if they had known the publication of the conflict of interest financial interest that he had everything of they never published a paper he would in violation of policy he would help all of that when he sent him the paper he didn't know. So it was bad ethics and bad socket so Randy could you grab that survey? It was bad in every way. So the consequences of this this has been in the news recently this is Jenny McCarthy she's now supposed to be co-hosting The View and she is an avid follower of Wakefield and she has claimed that her son was born with autism and it was diagnosed and then she put him on a special diet and his autism went away and she claimed that vaccines caused that autism in the first place. It's impossible to know actually what her son's condition was because medical records are private and they should be but that means that you have to wonder was he just misdiagnosed or something like that there is no evidence that diet makes autism better. So for people that have actually been genuinely diagnosed with autism diet doesn't really make a difference but the problem is that she leads organizations now that go out and tell people not to vaccinate their kids and that's bad because in the news recently there's been an outbreak of as it's a pertussis here in Texas measles here in Texas that was spread by unvaccinated people okay so and these are people that consciously shows not to get vaccinated it wasn't just they didn't have access to vaccines they explicitly refused to be vaccinated for this in the first place or to vaccinate their kids right in this case they were told by a religious authority figure that they shouldn't vaccinate okay so again you just want to stop and ask wait what's the evidence for that claim and is there you know I have to weigh personal choice and other things and we'll get into different kinds of controversies in this class you have to weigh certain factors in your life but then you have to ask what's the benefit and what's the science state okay and what's the risk and what's the risk of not doing it measles is not pretty you don't just break out in little bumps I mean your skin can look you can look like an X-man character in the most severe cases and it can kill a severe case of it alright okay so there's lots more examples on the web you can go and click on this link and read through them it parts terrific content alright so let's move on to course information and requirements so we want you to be able to detect potentially fraudulent claims okay and so that's what this course is for so again welcome alright now the first thing goals alright so I've kind of said this over and over and over scientific method that is sufficient to then be able to detect all kinds of scams and frauds and deception bad science and anti-science and everything okay so paranormal phenomena free energy devices alternative medicine claims intelligent design creationism denial of human induced climate change science-based medicine denialism misuse of data statistics so if you're a business major or an advertising major there's something in here for you we've got propaganda we're going to talk about propaganda who wrote the book on it you'll love to find that out okay who wrote the book on propaganda these are all the things that are used by advertisers and businesses and whole politicians and so forth to get you to have an emotional response so that you can bypass your brain and we want to teach you to detect it stop and think okay your writing is going to improve in this class I would wager that the majority of you have never actually written a research paper where you have to go and read primary papers the statements made about the quality of the data and the conclusions on the data this is a hard process you should come and talk to us as early as you can about what's expected we have examples of good papers you should look at those so we'll start giving the information out about how you can access that as we go forward etiquette just a few notes be on time to class I know that's not always possible for everybody if you have class changes but please understand that we give the attendance at 11 a.m. sharp if you're late that gives you less time to work on the quiz and if you miss the quiz entirely you get a zero for the quiz but we will count your attendance and I'll come to the attendance policy in a moment in class please turn off your mobile device ringer alert alarm if you have somewhere more important to be go be there okay understand as you'll see from the absence policy but that if you're looking for that call to come through just stay out let the learning environment be you know preserved for everybody else computers are a fine modern tool for doing things like taking notes and participating in ongoing course activities but if you're using them to Facebook to tweet to Instagram to Vine to Snapchat or anything else then if we spot that and we will walk around and look you and your computer have just volunteered to help us look up information for the rest of the class Wikipedia and Googling for us and the rest of the class you've been warned alright again if you have something more interesting to do go do it come here to participate in class no casual conversation during class even after you finish your quiz this happens a lot if you think you're being quiet enough you're not it's not that bigger classroom I know it's hard to hear in the back but trust me everyone hears you and we want you okay great there's a lot more detail on the web but the basic idea is that attendance and participation in class is 5% I'll come back to attendance in a moment homework assignments there are six of these still for the semester okay and abstracts you have to write two abstracts one for each of your proposed research papers those count a total of 10% and we drop the lowest reading quizzes these are given every day in class at the beginning of class at 11am sharp the cumulative 10% we drop the lowest one book report one and two this is you sorry book review so this is actually reviewing a book or a magazine article or something there's a whole list of things you can choose from we want you to review it as if you're writing a New York Times book review about this thing okay those are each 10% you then have a 7 page research paper and a 15 page research paper now the first paper is due around midterm I'd strongly recommend you do the 15 page paper first so that you don't then have a 15 page paper to write at the end of the semester when you are busy you say that again I strongly recommend that you write the 15 page paper first so that you don't have a 15 page paper to write at the end of the semester there's another reason for that the 15 page paper is 20% of your grade and you get to rewrite the midterm paper for a better grade wouldn't you rather rewrite the big paper in the middle that's worth more than the tiny paper in the middle that's worth less it's up to you okay you know your schedule is better than we do but I'm just trying to make you be a wise consumer here alright final exam in this room in December the date should be posted on the syllabus 20% of the grade okay and that will be a survey across all the things we cover in the class you should mention one detail about reading quizzes since normally if you have a homework assignment that's due on Fridays try to find it so your homework will come in on Friday right so there is no reading assignment for Friday because you're doing homework so on Friday we'll do something else that will look like the reading quizzes but it's whole or opinion it's meant to take attendance yeah it should define it as here so Fridays when homework are due you won't have a reading quiz on that Friday okay there may be an exception but it will be in the syllabus so we have again we have this website so if it's not already printed out it's evolving we have basically the lectures up to about fall break are determined all right extra credit we don't give it don't ask that's our first rule our second rule if we choose to give it and it's our prerogative it's offered as an equal opportunity extra credit to everybody in the classroom these are rare now I'm going to alter this deal a little bit this semester you have these flashcards you have them keep them love them bring them to class more polls this is very helpful for us okay so we can do a little rapid response teaching as we go here so the way we will enforce you loving these things and taking care of them like a newborn chick is that we'll give you extra credit occasionally we'll ask you to paperclip the cards to the reading quiz so keep the paperclip you got it's free on the physics department all right you can contact Fred Oleis and thank him for that you get one point extra credit on the quiz worth two points that's 50% now attendance attendance is a part of your final grade it's checked by these attendance quizzes or reading quizzes basically you show up you put your name on the quiz you attend it okay if you leave lecture after taking the quiz we have eyes four of them actually and we'll notice and we get to learn your names fairly quickly in this class Anthony and so as a result of that what's going to happen is we're going to see you leave before the end of class if you have something you need to get to let us know let us know you might leave early that day maybe whatever you need to leave okay talk to us we prefer information over a lack of information because we have to interpret a lack of information and we're not going to interpret it nicely right you're allowed six six unexcused absences six over the entire semester six unexcused absences I can't say that enough six as of the seventh course and here's why the data tells us that the more classes you miss the worse you do the faster you move to failing in the course you're going to fail anyway if you miss seven classes so we're just enforcing that behavior numerically okay no pleading no whining no butts excused absences do not count as part of your six unexcused so if you have a sporting event a religious exception whatever bring the paperwork to us in advance of the absence so that we know not to ding you for that okay again talk to us a university sanctioned sponsored activity yes university sanctioned sponsored activity excused so if you are as I like to say if you happen to be a member of the SMU squirrel chasing team and you're having a competition and it's fierce with UT this year I mean squirrel chasing has never been ever copied for us and just make sure we get it that guy wants to talk yeah I know okay yeah so why don't we hand out these attendance quizzes and I'll just go on here there's short and easy stuff this is the astrology oh sorry astrology okay so let's talk about that so we are going to have a trained astrologer it's like a family friend of Dr. Scalises or something like that yeah sister in law okay she's going to do an astrological reading so here you need to invent a code number okay oh this is the code name sorry code name okay so use your code name on this we don't want you to use any information that might be used to look you up on something like Facebook or Google and then get personal information about you that can be folded into the astrological reading we want those to be done using only the information astrologers claim that they need and that is your birth information okay so fill that out in I don't know a few weeks or something like that we'll get readings back for each one of you we'll get 25 of these things for 64 and then we'll go through those in class and we'll see how accurate they are okay one more thing this is going to be when you finish the astrology basic data right and here you're going to need a code number this is different from a code name it is four digits up to four digits four digits and don't use any part of your driver's license number your SS make up something neat nothing personally identifiable no birthday no bank account credit card number nothing there's a reason for this we post grade summaries online on the website and this number is what we're going to use because the university really doesn't want to use anything else it must be a random number that you invent right this is approved and if you don't have a license on the on the website or it'll be at the top with a blank and you can't pick at which is yours right so non personally identifiable four digit random number memorize it write it down in your notebook someplace you're going to need that for a whole class so write that number down okay so while that's going on let me just talk about plagiarism plagiarism well last semester we had gone 19 consecutive semesters with at least one instance of plagiarism in each semester that we detected and we've gotten very good because surprise surprise the teachers who teach you how to detect scams, lies and frauds are very good at detecting scams, lies and frauds not perfect you can test us if you'd like but we're from any source any interpretation of something from any source and you don't cite the source theft plagiarism using sentences figures, tables, ideas without citing the source plagiarism we minimally reward such misbehavior with an f in the course minimally reward plagiarism with an f in the course and then as a bonus cherry on top of that cake of crap we additionally reward such behavior two of those on file you go before the academic council and they are the honors council and they're way meaner than us and we will file on every case every provable case if we have evidence it goes okay so don't do it because then you're just making evidence for us alright so please if you're struggling if you're struggling and you're tempted to cheat come and talk to us wipe that thought from your mind and talk to us alright one other thing don't shuffle we will say early on and that's about taking a paper from somebody else we have had cases where a student has gotten a paper from this course from a prior student in the class a year or two earlier and turned it in just by changing the name on the paper the service we use to text this including drafts and in case you're not familiar with the honor code which it should be the person who supplied the paper will also be filed on for an honor violation if they're still alive if they're still alive but if they're not we'll detect you and you'll get screwed and that's all that really matters the key is while you're here to protect yourself and I mean protect yourself from an honor violation don't let people never never give anybody a machine readable copy of your work never give a thumb drive never email do not let anybody else ever have a copy of a file of a paper you've written that's for your own protection because if that person takes it you have no control over what they're going to do with it and in many cases the reason they want it is they're behind on the assignment they've got to turn it in tomorrow and they'll just change the name on the paper and hand it in and then you are on the line as well and it doesn't take much for the software to raise red flags for us that's for your own protection in addition we've had papers that people have handed in that when confronted the student confessed because they got the paper from a paper mill so we're not stupid we know how to read and we know from your work what your level of potential is let's say and if we see you over exceeding that that's a statistical outlier you'll learn about those and we ding like a bell that really sets off red flags for us so go ahead you can try but there's no guarantee that we won't detect it I just recommend you come and talk to us our doors are open talk to us hand those down and you're free we'll see you on Wednesday