It's called "proxy" Seano, and now I'm not surprised they told you to go away, I'm getting the same feeling and I've never met you.

What you don't seem to realise is that it's in the university's interests to have you graduate. They get paid for it. There are ways of getting mistakes resolved, however you don't seem to know any of them.

Never mind, at least you know better than any of 'em eh? And I know how old you claim to be.

A performing arts student would have graduated by now.

It's staggering how so many people who have either never gone to university (and often so proud of it) or have dropped out have so many opinions on how they should be run and what should be done with them.

So Bugsy, you believe it quite acceptible for unis to teach science students incorrect use of computer equipment? If you had at least acknowledged this rather obvious error, it might have added to your cred', but I suppose by your avoidance that you don't want to know because you have no answer.

Back to this year's stuff up, I knew the vc wouldn't waste time between golf games to bother writing all those letters, but call it what you like, someone wrote it under a false name, no reference to 'FOR: Kerry O. Cox'. The style was personal letter, addressed to 'Dear Sean' signed 'Yours sincerely,'. I call it fraud, but if not been wrong, no problem. Unfortunately, as you might open your eyes and see, it WAS wrong.

First I did on receiving the letter was call Joondalup admin. Excuse: "It's because you haven't selected your units yet." even though I had enrolled full-time. So I got online and chose units. I called back and asked if they could send out the correct letter. Centrelink would never grant Austudy for a part-time course.

"We can't. Go to admin in person for that." So I did, three times over two weeks, took a number and waited almost an hour each time. Then had to go to classes. No service. Too many international students in the queues.

Eventually, March 3rd, I wrote the timetable off the online system by hand on ECU notepad and submitted that with my Austudy application. I also took the original incorrect letter into centrelink to verify the authenticity. That was when centrelink got confused, and put my Austudy application for a full-time four-year double degree on hold until March 30. As you know, the fin' penalty deadline was March 31st. When centrelink still hadn't made a decision on March 30 I had to withdraw from the semester. What stopped ECU from simply mailing me the correct enrolment details to make up for THEIR first mistake?

Answer that one, Bugsy.

Teach science students incorrect use of computer equipment? Don’t be so dramatic Seano, you were in a first-year psychology class. I’m pretty sure your problems were psychological and not electronic.

On your timing problem, I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt, but since you have made such a big deal of it, I will try and explain something to you. You haven’t really provided many details though. From my reading, Stroop’s original study was timed to one fifth of a second, i.e. 200ms using a stopwatch. This limit of precision is merely the minimum error rate, i.e. the result +/- 200ms. In your case the minimum individual error would have been +/- 55ms, the smallest timing speed of the clock. This does not invalidate any of the results however and should not return any sort of “random numbers”. The “original” 10ms precision that you mentioned they demanded must have been from one of the 700+ later studies that reproduced and confirmed it. It seems more likely to me that they asked you to average the results down to two decimal places and that you think this cannot be done. But it can if you average the results and put in your estimated standard error (ie +/- SE).

I am curious how you can calculate two sets of data using two different timings from the same set of results, when you claim that the results were random numbers. I am even more curious as to how this 10ms timing data “proved Stroops wrong”, because it would not have mattered what the limit of precision was; it should return the same result on an ANOVA, since the average of replications would return a far greater error than the limit of precision.

It all sounds like an externalising BS story to me.

As for your other problem, it sounds like you have more problems than a mistake on a letter. One would be prioritising: surely getting official confirmation of full-time enrolment to gain subsequent funding would have taken priority over one or two of your classes?

Thanks for addressing the problem as well as the usual mistaken derogatory assumptions. At least now we can overcome this minor issue, very costly for me in 1997. You're one step beyond psycho school that year - you questioned something.

Regarding timing, a simple example is amateur running events: 100m, 400m. What if your digital stopwatch has no seconds. Just minutes and hours. Understand how the expected results for 100m events maybe ALL zero minutes, the 400m, a few front-runners return zero minutes, most amateurs returning race-times of one minute? Those race-times to the second might be range from 55s to 65s or only 10 seconds between fastest and slowest. Welcome to the digital era, where we can't guesstimate that nearest halfway mark on the precision like we might have with analogue sorts of timing devices or yardsticks etc.

In the Stroop trials, reaction times of subjects were critical, so working to a precision that the standard hardware was unable to provide, caused (by random chance) five-fold amplification of some times, where a calculated difference of only 10ms during an Intel clock tick resulted in a timed difference of 55ms.

I hope that helps you understand how incorrect use of computers can provide some fantastic data, even proving something so well known as the Stroop Effect wrong. That was why I thought it worth making the effort to recalculate the data by the right precision, because otherwise, we'd have looked like a sorry bunch of illiterate first year students who could see this word 'red' and still want to paint it black.

---o0o---

As for the other matter, my answer is NO, and can you please answer the question I asked you yesterday? Why were they too lazy to send out the correct confirmation of enrolment letter? Waiting on the tech-guy to come and put more paper in the printer? Run out of stamps or envelopes?

Seano, your argument and example would only hold true if the reaction times for both the control and the “interference” groups of data were less than 55ms. But they aren’t. Human reaction times are greater than the level of precision that the clock could measure, about at least three times longer for the average person, in fact. And that’s absolute reaction times, even if they were faster than that, Stroop’s interference effect is so clear it is easily measured with the precision of a 1930s stopwatch. That is, the differences between the average times of the interference experiment and the control are so large that an 18Hz computer chip would not be able to screw with them. The variability between replicates is likely to be much larger than the error introduced by the limit of precision.

You still haven’t explained how you “corrected” your data to return contradictory results, but even without looking your report, I can tell that it is very likely you did something majorly wrong, but just won’t accept that. It’s clear you have been nursing this sob story for quite a while now, but I think it’s time to let it go.

As to your other question about getting the correct enrolment letter, they already told you to visit them in person, which it seems you failed to do. You can blame it on foreign students, lack of service or thinking that attending class was more important or whatever you like. But in the end there is only one person to blame. Man up.

Well, now this thread is way off topic and I don't have anything else to say on-topic, so maybe we should leave it there.

Bugsy, if you'd accept the two examples I provided, based on reality, without 'likely' or 'doubt' but just plain truth, we could get back on-topic.

My response to the article's suggestion to lower university standards even further by increasing student intakes during economic recessions, was that it adds to the problem, only resulting in 50% premiums in labour costs for the same intellectual quality of personnel. Quite clear in that incorrect letter someone wrote as pretend VC, then refused to correct, leading to this entire year wasted for myself.

Three hours waiting for resolution that should never have been necessary to start, and could've been resolved for the price of a postage stamp, again no fault of international students, but incompetence of admin staff at the scene, like those in Joondalup who made the original mistake. Economic recessions aren't overcome by more incompetence. There's plenty of that already.

It happened, to me, in real life, this year. Whether it was formally-qualified fools, or the hubris that goes with it, we don't need more. I hope they can get their act together for 2010.

Lastly, on the Stroop experiment mistake, I believe I mentioned that results returned at 10ms were random because the precision used was less than 20% of the digital timing device. As it happened, that's how our group experiment happened by chance to prove Stroop wrong. Evaluating the same data at the correct precision, that random sample of 200 students DID respond to written word meaning before the ink colour, but you must think in hexadecimal to understand this, not decimal.

Again, unqualified staff on campus will perpetuate those wrongs as I found in 1997 and again in 2009. First with scientific error, and then with poor, stubborn, thoughtless administration. I'm not surprised that you consider it best to skip classes to wait in queues, but that's just another example of the poor standards of education in this country today. Why bother attending lectures if you're not going to learn anything?