Random Quote
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
---- Charlemagne
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
---- Isaac Asimov
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
---- Edward Abbey
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
---- Doug Larson
Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
---- Kin Hubbard
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg
Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.
---- Author Unknown
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
---- Franklin D. Roosevelt
As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.
---- Mary Roninette Kowal
The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
---- Sheik Abd-al-Kadir
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
---- Malcom Forbes
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee
The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.
---- Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, 1995
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
This may be the most interesting blog theme I've ever seen. http://eflgeek.com/index.php Definitely in my top 5 at least.
---- Steve Dembo
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
---- Terry Pratchett
Observers Paradox
While reading for the latest research methods essay I found to concepts to be very similar: the Hawthorne Effect and the Observers Paradox. The Hawthorne Effect is when subjects are “so pleased at being included in a study that the results of the investigation are more closely related to this pleasure than to anything that actually occurs in the research.”1 Now clearly this is not the same as the Observers Paradox, which is the fact that being observed or recorded changes the behavior of the subjects.
I do feel that they are very related and may be synonymous in certain situations, however I am unable to find any original sources on the observers paradox. It is not difficult to find secondary sources or secondary quotes (Labov cited in yada yada yada) but what I would really like is to read some original Labov or at least a source that gives a more indepth explanation.
One last thing while googling for observers paradox I opened a pdf that is really a book (263 pgs) that someone may be interested in. Apologizing in British English - I saved it to my hard drive and will look later.
1Brown, J. D. (1988). Understanding Research in Second Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Sep 21, 2004 at 11:00 PM
general_linguistic_study | Research_Methods |




