The article postulates that people have two kinds of mindsets: growth or fixed. People with the growth mindset view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are “set” as either good or bad. The issue is that the good ones believe they don’t have to work hard, and the bad ones believe that working hard won’t change anything.

The Effort effect

Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions—why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use.

She continued to do so as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, collaborating with then-graduate student Carol Diener to have children “think out loud” as they faced problem-solving tasks, some too difficult for them. The big surprise: some of the children who put forth lots of effort didn’t make attributions at all. These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’”

…

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.) The model was nearly complete (see diagram).

Technorati Tags: mind, research

Delight at Government’s decision to reopen Onehunga line:

Finance Minister Michael Cullen announced yesterday that the 3.5km branch line between Penrose and Onehunga – opened in 1873 but abandoned by regular passenger trains 34 years ago – would be reinstated for around $10 million.The Auckland Regional Transport Authority expects that a new station at a site yet to be determined, and extra trains for more than 500,000 passengers a year, will cost it another $3 million to $5 million.

Trains leaving Onehunga every half an hour from 2009 should give passengers a run of little more than 20 minutes into central Auckland, compared with bus trips sometimes three times longer.

Given reopening the train line is only 10 million and some of the roading projects are several billion dollars it struck me as incredibly short-sighted to ignore this project. Especially with 500,000 potential trips per years and Onehunga designated as a growth node.

Technorati Tags: onehunga, train

From GANB.

Quite a cool art project, but it also gives a vision of a future digital version: bringing new meaning to a game like Civ4.

Technorati Tags: future, art

Also, I setup a Feedburner account and created two feed trackers for my posts and comments. However, I had some issues with the redirection magic in htaccess. So getting that fully functional is something else for a future todo list action. Feedburner saves me the bother of parsing my apache log file, although there are some Wordpess stats plugins I could consider as well.

At the moment I’m using a licensed version of Kerio. WhenI stop traveling I’ll do an install and run a test.

You have an extremely good understanding of beginner, intermediate, and
advanced level commonly confused English words, getting at least 75% of
each of these three levels’ questions correct. This is an exceptional score. Remember, these are commonly confused English words, which means most people don’t use them properly. You got an extremely respectable score.

Thank you so much for taking my test. I hope you enjoyed it!

For the complete Answer Key, visit: http://shortredhead78.blogspot.com/.

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