After the intense amount of information covered over the past 5 lectures, I decided to take some time to talk about how to critically evaluate an article using Elder and Paul’s Eight Elements of Thought and Intellectual Standards.  In particular, our focus was on Critical Article Review (CAR) #2.  The article for CAR #2 was a 2004 draft paper by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the “black swan” (I can’t find it anymore).  Basically, the paper was a summary of Taleb’s uber-famous book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007, ISBN: 978-1400063512 ), though without any coverage of his comparison between “Mediocristan” and “Extremistan,” discussion of the “Ludic Fallacy.”

My goal for this session was to have members of student teams critique the CARs of their teammates for the purpose of (1) helping their teammates improve the quality of their CARs, and (2) having the review process itself improve the ability of the reviewer to do future CARs.  We did one round of this, followed by perhaps an over-extended talk about Black Swans and other topics.  After this discussion, I hoped the students would do another round of reviews.  Some did and some didn’t.  All-in-all, this session went ok.  I plan to do this again next year (I just learned I will be doing SRA 311 again in Fall 2009 and Spring 2010), though perhaps next time I will be a bit more structured with it.

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