The Rhetoric of Homosexual Practice

Many Protestant denominations have or recently had policies that prohibit “self‐avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained. By only prohibiting “practicing” homosexuals, proponents of these policies claim that they do not discriminate against homosexuals as a group since, technically, a homosexual can still be ordained as long as she is “non‐practicing.” In other words, a condemnation of homosexual practice is not the same as a condemnation of homosexual persons. I argue that this is not the case; the rhetoric of homosexual practice does, in fact, amount to a condemnation of gays and lesbians. It does so by conflating the two things it claims to keep separate—homosexual conduct and homosexual identity. I demonstrate this conflation by analyzing the history of this rhetoric and how it has been adjudicated in church court decisions from the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA).     

Discrimination Learning and Multiple Reversals in Young Adult and Older Monkeys Macaca arctoides

Two groups of five young adult and older stumptailed macaques (Macaca arctoides) were tested on a visual discrimination task followed by a reversal upon attainment of criterion; task and reversal were repeated until 20 reversals with the same pair of objects had been completed. Both groups required more trials to learn the first reversal than the original discrimination, with no significant difference between the groups. Older monkeys tended to show more perseverative errors on early reversals, but a striking improvement in their scores across successive blocks of reversals culminated in performances virtually indistinguishable from those of the young group by the end of testing.     

Skill Acquisition and the LISP Tutor

An analysis of student learning with the LISP tutor indicates that while LISP is complex, learning it is simple. The key to factoring out the complexity of LISP is to monitor the learning of the 500 productions in the LISP tutor which describe the programming skill. The learning of these productions follows the power-law learning curve typical of skill acquisition. There is transfer from other programming experience to the extent that this programming experience involves the same productions. Subjects appear to differ only on the general dimensions of how well they acquire the productions and how well they retain the productions. Instructional manipulations such as remediation, content of feedback, and timing of feedback are effective to the extent they give students more practice programming, and explain to students why correct solutions work.     

A specific calculating ability

We report two experiments that investigate the calculating strategy used by a low IQ savant to identify prime numbers. Hermelin and O'Connor (1990) had suggested previously that this subject may use a procedure first described by Eratosthenes to detect a prime number, namely, dividing a target number by all primes up to the square root of the target number and testing for a remainder. In the first experiment, we compare the reaction times of the savant to decide whether a number is prime with those of a control subject proficient in mathematical calculation. In addition, we measured the savant's speed of information processing using an inspection time task. We found that the reaction times of the savant, although generally faster, followed the same pattern of the control subject who reported using the Eratosthenes procedure. The savant's inspection time indicated that his speed of processing was far superior to that expected from someone of his IQ. In the second experiment, we measured the time it takes mathematics students to divide by different prime numbers and we also tested them on the prime identification task. We used their division times to simulate their performance on the prime number identification task under the assumption that they used the Eratosthenes procedure. We also simulated the reaction times that would result from a simple memory-based procedure for identifying primes. We found that the Eratosthenes simulation, in contrast to the memory simulation, provided a good fit to both the students' and the savant's reaction times. We conclude that the savant is using a complex computational algorithm to identify primes and suggest two explanations of how the apparent contradiction between his low general intelligence and his superior numerical ability might be resolved.