D-4

During today's class we had one of the most entertaining lecturers I've ever seen. Dr. Malott brought in his long-time friend (and co-founder of the Association for Behavior Analysis) Gerry Mertens, who gave a 45-minute magic show which completely blew my mind. I mean, I'm tellin' ya, it was crazy. For example, he had one of my cohort members pick from a group of letters, each with a corresponding letter. So, the result was that she picked "D", which corresponded to the number 4. Then, he showed us the want-ads in today's Kalamazoo Gazette. Guess what it read? "You will pick D-4!" Seriously, how amazing is that?

The point? If I processed his thoughts right, he was lecturing on the importance of scientific explanations for seemingly "psychic" or "magical" phenomena. There's an answer for everything... of course, Mr. Mertens...

Ahh, I loved it. Anyway, Matt Grix and I finished up our final data collection session for Van Houten's cross walk study. Hopefully the Department of Transportation won't ask for more research, and that we're done crossing streets for seemingly endless amounts of time. If I were to make a guess at the final results, I'd say that our "raised hand" condition stops cars about 40% of the time (just standing there and waiting for cars to stop causes approximately 15% of cars to yield). Decent results, no doubt. Publishable? We'll see what JABA has to say.