The Survey, Volume 30, Number 3, Apr 19, 1913 — John Shaqi
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 3, Apr 19, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 3, Apr 19, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
Iowa claims to have in her “removal law” the best recall of all. This
law makes it the duty of the attorney general, or, if he fails, of the
governor or any six citizens, to take steps in the courts for the
summary removal of any officer of a town, city or county who neglects to
enforce any law.
EDUCATION
THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SCIENCE
If a man about town should drop into the Harvard psychological
laboratory and see an operator in rough clothes slowly turning a small
crank and calling off disconnected letters of the alphabet while a
changing panorama of squares and digits passed by beneath a glass plate,
he might think that this was the university’s day off and that here was
a new game for the amusement of the employes. But if he should ask
“What’s the ante?” and want to sit in, he would soon discover his
mistake. He would learn that he was looking at one of the few
experiments yet contrived for picking the right man for the right job.
He might even be told that this was one of the wee beginnings of a new
science which, by systematically placing the psychological experiment at
the service of education and industry, may some day prevent the tragic
waste of misfit starts in life and go far toward solving the problem of
vocational guidance for the schools. The observer would probably be
warned, however, against construing what he saw as any endorsement of
the social desirability of guiding children into this vocation or that.
The device of the changing panorama is designed to test a man’s fitness
to be a motorman on an electric street car. Worked out under the
direction of Prof. Hugo Munsterberg,[5] it is calculated to discover
powers of attention, discrimination and adjustment with respect to
rapidly moving objects, some going at different rates of speed parallel
to the line of vision, others crossing it from side to side. While
Professor Munsterberg undertook to transplant the activity of the
motorman into laboratory processes, he did not try to reproduce a
miniature of the exact conditions under which the motorman works. As the
crank is turned, a series of cards slips by under a glass plate, each
card having two heavy lines down its center to represent a street car
track. Along the sides of this track, between it and the curbstone at
the edge of the card, are scattered various digits which have
arbitrarily fixed movements, like the pieces on a chess board, though
not so complex. The job of the person being tested is to pick out, as
the cards slip by, the precise points on the track which are threatened
by the moveable digits in the street. Some of these numbers represent
pedestrians, some horses and some automobiles.
Footnote 5:
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, by Hugo Munsterberg. Houghton,
Mifflin Co. 320 pp. Price $1.50: by mail of THE SURVEY $1.62.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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