Category Practice

Students appear to use a different kind of thinking when they create original patterns following rules they create (Grabowski, Damasio, & Damasio, 1998). Activities that engage students in building categories can start as early as preschool. Building category practice can be done with a bag of mixed buttons. After first modeling the procedure, you can have students work on their own or in pairs to sketch the categories they discover. Th is would also work as a language arts learning cente...

 Bayes and Richard Price on Predictions

Bayes’s much more famous work, “An Essay toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,”24 was not published until after his death, when it was brought to the Royal Society’s attention in 1763 by a friend of his named Richard Price. It concerned how we formulate probabilistic beliefs about the world when we encounter new data. Price, in framing Bayes’s essay, gives the example of a person who emerges into the world (perhaps he is Adam, or perhaps he came from Plato’s cave) ...