Word: behaviorist
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...Lost World, Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park, a group of scientists travel to a remote island to investigate reports that live dinosaurs are once again running loose. In this excerpt, mathematician Ian Malcolm (a leftover from Jurassic Park) and animal behaviorist Sarah Harding face the consequences when two tyrannosaurs drop by their trailer-laboratory to reclaim an injured baby dinosaur that the scientists have been nursing...
...Feminist politics goes against the animal behaviorist's insight that females organize their lives around the getting of resources (food, shelter, nice things) while males organize themselves around the getting of females...
Some scientists, particularly those from the behaviorist school of psychology, take a more skeptical view. What looks like language, they say, may be simply mimicry or rote learning. One of Herman's critics, animal behaviorist Ronald Schusterman, insists that before anyone can say an animal is speaking, they had better determine whether the beast is capable of the kind of abstract thinking that forms the basis of speech. "My argument is that the language experiments have moved too fast," says Schusterman. "They have not looked at some fundamental cognitive abilities that give rise to linguistic abilities." At Long Marine Laboratory...
None of this comes as a surprise to Warren Eckstein, an animal behaviorist and radio broadcaster who produces the animal segments on television's Live with Regis & Kathie Lee. "Years ago," he says, "I wrote an article on the effects of divorce on pets. People said I was crazy. Now it's actively under research." Eckstein even attacks the conventional wisdom that dogs are gregarious and cats are aloof. "It all depends on how you treat them. Raise a kitten the way you would a puppy, and it will grow up to act like a dog." (Scientists like Bekoff insist...
...Milwaukee County welfare recipients who have been sent back to school since Republican Governor Tommy Thompson launched his Learnfare program in 1988. Learnfare is one of a spate of carrot-and-stick reforms intended to break long-term dependency on state and federal handouts. It is a bold behaviorist experiment seeking to prove that, given the right rewards and punishments, even the most underprivileged can become productive, self-reliant citizens. And if it works in Wisconsin, argues Thompson, 49, who is in his second four-year term, his plan can be the model for a radical recasting of welfare programs...