A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Most of us have heard of this admonition, and it applies directly to engineering education. It turns out that people who know just a little about a subject greatly overestimate their understanding and abilities. "The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills" [5].

Across 6 studies we investigated the development of overconfidence among beginners. In 4 of the studies, participants completed multicue probabilistic learning tasks (e.g., learning to diagnose "zombie diseases" from physical symptoms). Although beginners did not start out overconfident in their judgments, they rapidly surged to a "beginner's bubble" of overconfidence. This bubble was traced to exuberant and error-filled theorizing about how to approach the task formed after just a few learning experiences...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the 20th century's most prominent and consequential legal decision on constitutionally guaranteed rights against compelled self-incrimination, the Supreme Court of the United States mandated the delivery of specific warnings to persons facing custodial interrogation. Owing in large part to popularization of these warnings by the entertainment media, many citizens can recite at least some of their Miranda rights in rote fashion; however, recent and emerging research provides compelling evidence of persistent Miranda misconceptions and fallacies among criminal suspects and the lay public...

INTRODUCTION: Many of the known risk factors associated with low birth weight (LBW) infants, such as socio-economic status, ethnicity, genetic makeup, and obstetric history, are not within a woman's immediate control. However, there are many things that a woman can do to improve her chances of having a normal healthy child. Lifestyle behaviours, such as cigarette smoking, nutrition and the use of alcohol, play an important role in determining the growth of the foetus. There is a high rate of low birth weight infants born to women living and working on the farms in the Western Cape...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Core epistemological questions-questions about what we know, how we know it, and when we are justified in saying we know it-have a long and deep history. The US Supreme Court broached the subject in the 1993 decision Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc, with references to Hempel, Popper, and other scholars. We comment here on the articles of Rothman and Greenland, who are scientists, and Haack, who is a philosopher. Their views suggest that questions of causation are neither as simple nor as difficult as many scientists and philosophers have made them...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This paper examines the impact of 'low' levels of maternal education on the proximate determinants of child mortality using data from the 1992/93 Indian National Family Health Survey. Twenty-two outcomes are investigated, representing child mortality and morbidity, illness management, service utilization and health behaviours. Maternal education is a significant correlate of each of the outcomes, and even low levels of education increase child survival prospects and health-related behaviours, except for neonatal mortality and the effective management of diarrhoea...

Snowboarding has become one of the premier alpine sports. The past decade has seen the popularity of snowboarding increase dramatically and the recent Winter Olympic Games at Salt Lake City, USA, showcased the strong visual appeal of the sport and the youth-oriented lifestyle and culture that accompanies it. The injury profile of the sport has also undergone change along with technological advances in boot and binding systems and the changing demographics of the sports participants. Central to the development of injury-prevention strategies is knowledge of the profile of injuries that occur, understanding those who are at particular risk and, if possible, the biomechanical factors involved in each injury type...

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to improve understanding of the relationship between carers' existing knowledge about dementia, their coping style and psychological morbidity. METHOD: Fifty carers and patients attending day services were recruited. Carers were given questionnaires to assess knowledge of dementia, preferred coping style, anxiety, depression and strain. RESULTS: The results indicated that carers who demonstrated more knowledge about the biomedical aspects of dementia were more anxious (p < 0...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

In most social cognition research participants are presented with unattributed information about unfamiliar stimulus persons. However, in the real world it is more common for people to learn about others through social communication and to know something about those with whom they communicate. Such issues are explored in relation to spontaneous trait transference, a phenomenon in which communicators are perceived as having traits that they merely describe in others. Three studies show that even familiar communicators became associated with, and attributed, the traits implied by their remarks...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.