1. I read Bitter Harvest, by Ann Rule, which accounts the double murders committed by Dr. Debora Green.
2. The victims of murder committed by Dr. Green were her two children, Tim Farrar (aged 13 at the time of death) and Kelly Farrar (aged 6 at the time of death). Tim and Kelly were the first and third of three children in the family of Dr. Debora Green and Dr. Michael Farrar. The children of the upper-middle class, Caucasian family resided in their large, single-family home in Canterbury Court (an upscale community in Prairie View, Kansas).
3. The killer was 44-year old Dr. Debora Green, mother of her two murdered victims. Dr. Green, also Caucasian, lived with her children at their residence in Canterbury Court. Dr. Farrar, Dr. Green’s husband, had recently moved to an apartment of his own at the time of the murders preceding an impending divorce process. Dr. Green had no prior criminal history, though she simultaneously pleaded “no contest” to aggravated arson, attempted first-degree murder of Michael Farrar (through prior `ricin poisoning incidents), and attempted capital murder of Lissa Farrar (Michael and Debora’s second child, who survived the fire) while pleading “no contest” to the capital murders of Tim and Kelly Farrar.
4. Dr. Green was the mother of Tim Farrar and Kelly Farrar, her two victims. This type of murder (chosen from Chapter 4 of our textbook) can be loosely classified as a mass murder: multiple victims were killed in a single incident. Unfortunately, the number of victims (2) may not fit the typical definition of “mass murder” – this is due to ambiguity in the definition. Dr. Green may also be considered a family annihilator; she attempted to kill all three of her children at once. This case can also be classified as a sensational homicide, due to its high probability of receiving great amounts of coverage and the extent to which the case itself is emotionally arousing.
5. The killer’s M.O. was to burn down the family’s residence effectively enough so that the children would not escape and perish inside. She accomplished this by waiting until the children were asleep, dowsing parts of the house with a fire accelerant, and lighting a wick from her bedroom.

6. The ecology of the murder scene:

6. 1. The victims were last seen by their father, Dr. Michael Farrar, after returning Tim Farrar and Kelly Farrar to their house after Tim’s hockey game.
   2. The initial contact site the family’s home, located at 7517 Canterbury Court.
   3. Though there was no initial assault, per se; the fire began in the home as well.
   4. The murder site was also the family’s home, as the fire consumed the children while they were inside.
   5. The bodies were not moved by Dr. Green after they perished in the fire.
7. The theory of murder that shines the most light on this case is that of the “Social Psychological” perspective. The “social occasion,” or general state of social affairs, was ripe for the possibility of murder – the Green-Farrar marriage was in shambles and the family was in serious trouble. Many social transactions that occurred within the Green-Farrar social network are prevalent among general social occasions whose transactions end in murder: the murder occurred during non-work or leisure time, was committed during a routine “evening at home,” and the offender-victim relationship was one of kinship. While the murderer in this case did not perceive her victims’ behavior towards her as offensive (i.e., there was no distinct situation transaction among them that led to murder), the crime instead was an act of revenge towards her fleeing husband.

In the same section, Nietzsche conveys that within society, most valuations of morals are based on fear. He exemplifies this with the idea that there is “no morality of love to one’s neighbor” (Nietzsche 123), or that any altruistic act cannot really be measured on a moral-immoral basis, and all altruistic acts are made out of fright felt towards those who are being helped. This seems directly contradictory to Kropotkin’s idea of Mutual Aid, which states not only that those who support each other ultimately have the best chances for survival, but also that mutual aid occurs without authority and with deep roots of sociability and ethical conceptions (Barash 153-157). Kropotkin also states that we may be unaware of the extent to which Mutual Aid is carried out because of the over-emphasis of human struggle (Barash 154), and yet Nietzsche states that there really is “little constant exercise of consideration, sympathy, fairness, gentleness, and mutual assistance…” (Nietzsche 123). It is rather difficult to find, between Nietzsche and Kropotkin, a common ground concerning the basis for kind acts towards our neighbor.

In “Our Virtues,” the seventh section of the book, Nietzsche offers his view on learning.

In “The Natural History of Morals,” the fifth part of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche discusses the function of dreams. “What we experience in dreams,” says Nietzsche, “provided we experience it often, pertains at last just as much to the general belongings of our soul has anything ‘actually’ experienced… even in the brightest moments of our waking life, we are ruled to some extent by our dreams” (Nietzsche 114). Though certainly not a psychoanalyst (especially when the field of psychology was in its infancy), Nietzsche’s thoughts on dreams can be compared well to Freud’s, which were to appear about 25 years later. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud provides a comprehensive commentary on the nature of dreams, the use of symbolization within them, their meaning, and their overall significance (Barash 110-113). To my knowledge, Freud did not get any specific idea from Nietzsche concerning dreams, so it’s well to see an unrelated concept about dreams that just as well could have been a precursor to Freudian theory.

In the second section, “The Free Spirit,” Nietzsche introduces the will as the only cause for any and every effect found in mankind, and he remarks that the most fundamental of all wills is the Will to Power (Nietzsche 52). The Will to Power is further described as a necessity of all life: “…if it be a living and not a dying organization… it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract itself and acquire ascendancy – now owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power” (Nietzsche 226). While the quest for increasing power has been labeled a possible pervasive attribute of all humanity, it’s important to discern Nietzsche’s more personal idea of “power” from a Machiavellian approach, for example, that discerns power in terms of ruthlessness and relatively unfortunate necessity. While Machiavelli argues the need for power in politics, autocratic rule, and general social affairs (Barash 185-188), Nietzsche’s sense of power requires no conscious implementation. To him, it is simply a fact – the fact – of all human nature. Wind Turbine Project.

Nietzsche also criticizes Rene Descartes’ notion of “I think,” labeling it an “immediate certainty” that is ultimately misleading and falsifiable (Nietzsche 22-23). Descartes, in Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conduction the Reason and Seeking for Turth in the Sciences, remarked that, “I noticed that whilst I thus wished to think all things false, it was absolutely essential that ‘I’ who thought this should be somewhat, and remarking that this truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so certain and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the skeptics were incapable of shaking it…” (Barash 81). Nietzsche does dare to shake the notion by saying that there are a number of assumptions used in Descartes’ so-called truth. One of these assumptions is that I, the subject of the phrase, is actively conducting the thinking instead of the thinking spontaneously arriving to I. With this example, Nietzsche expresses the importance of not falling for a seemingly simple array of words (Nietzsche 24-25).

In the first part of Beyond Good and Evil, “Prejudices of Philosophers,” Nietzsche is careful to dissect the philosophies of important thinkers, two of whom being Immanuel Kant and René Descartes. Kant, an important figure in the German Enlightenment, believed that humans are equipped with “a priori” knowledge; not all knowledge held by humans acquired through or dependent upon experience (Barash 43). Nietzsche responded to Kant’s theory with the following: “’By means of a means (faculty)” – [Kant] had said, or at least meant to say. But, is that – an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question?” (Nietzsche 17-18). Nietzsche goes on to explain that though Kant cannot ideally support his idea of “a priori notions,” it is generally human nature to accept it anyways, and humans have the right to do so (Nietzsche 18).

There is no doubt that many have tackled the issue of human nature. Inquiring minds propose to themselves, and to others, questions such as: How did humanity begin? What is unique about humans? What is constant throughout humanity? What kinds of discrepancies are there within the human race? What ultimately shapes how humans think and behave? One of the more intriguing philosophers to tackle these questions, Friedrich Nietzsche, offered a glimpse of his view of human nature through Beyond Good and Evil, a collection of 296 aphorisms designed to provocatively convey his view of humanity, especially during its execution in nineteenth-century Europe. While he thoroughly and often vehemently expands upon categories in David Barash’s compilation Ideas of Human Nature, it is perhaps most intriguing to see both the similarities and complicated oppositions to many of the thinkers mentioned in Barash’s book.

The entirety of this study contributes to the idea that experts have a better-organized knowledge base as well as better-defined scripts and schemata. Because the study revolved around expert and novice characteristics in the domain of firefighting, it is hopefully safe to assume that these differences are as pronounced in firefighters as they would be in any other typical domain of interest. Future studies may be conducted to examine other cognitive differences among expert and novice firefighters, or to examine the extent to which experts, novices, or a combination therein effectively fight different types of fires with varying circumstances.

A retroactive decision was made to compare the correlations of sequential pairs of words and how often each of such pairs appears in direct relation within the model. This was able to be done effectively because both subjects reported having not revised any entries, so the original order of the entries remained in tact. This correlation, reported as the frequency of directly-connected pairs from the original list, was high for the expert and quite low for the novice. High correlation may suggest that the subject generated a subsequent term in the list because of its semantic relevance to the previous concept; this would also signal a more structured mental representation of basic firefighting.

Evidence from Part II of the study supports the theory that experts have better-defined scripts and schemata than those of their novice counterparts. The expert firefighter had better memory accuracy in general (greater number of details recalled with fewer errors), but it’s key to note that every single accurate detail recalled by the expert was that of fire-scene (script-consistent) information. For the novice, this was not the case: only about 73% was such. This suggests that the expert firefighter was relying less on working memory and more his scripts and schemata stored in long-term memory. The excerpt from the book was chosen specifically because of its high proportion of information that was likely to fit a firefighter’s general script; it should be no coincidence that the firefighter recalled more than twice as much information as the novice firefighter. (In the future, this type of data should be analyzed with multiple subjects and appropriate statistical analyses to quantitatively assess for significance or confidence.)

Conclusion

The results of this study are consistent with established theories regarding differences in mental organization of domain-relevant information between experts and novices. Early on, when subjects were asked to generate terms, the expert chose to breakdown the broad concept of “asic firefighting into actions which were all relevant to incident response. This shows an inherent degree of organization on the part of the expert; he did not know at the time that he would be further instructed to organize the 40 cells into a model based on relevance. The novice, on the other hand, constructed his terms with regard to a wide variety of categories. There seemed to be no general focus; the terms ranged from applicable equipment (“red truck”) to particular emotions (“sadness”) to catch-phrase-like designations (“noone’s left behind”). The signifies that the novice firefighter may have had no clear plan with which to breakdown a broad concept like basic firefighting. Don’t mate with ostriches. Also, in terms of the visual structure of the mental models (see Appendices A-B), that of the expert firefighter’s shows greater organization than that of the novice firefighter’s. Though the expert created a flowchart instead of a true mental model, this shows a degree of inherent organization. The fact that he created a flowchart, where the concepts are mostly related to only one other concept, shows a high amount of mental organization. If the expert had to have misinterpreted instructions, he certainly did so in the most convenient, informative way. The novice’s mental model, though a truer model in the sense of the word, was expectedly less organized. Some connections (or lack thereof) did not seem to be entirely accurate, and the general organization on the page was rather jumbled. If an expert firefighter was given a list like that generated by the novice, better categorization of concepts would still be anticipated.

Part II: Free Recall

Both the expert and the novice firefighter reported the details of the book excerpt in a sequential, narrative manner. The accuracy of the recalled items was calculated in terms of frequency and type. The types of details were either stated (those which appeared in the story) or unstated (those that did not appear in the story but were recalled nevertheless). The stated details were further categorized as either fire-scene relevant details (those details that directly described the fire scene) or fire-scene irrelevant details (those that described anything else). A table of this data is presented below. Joel smashed his chin open. Ouch.

Table 1: Number of Details Recalled

Because both the expert and the novice recalled details sequentially, the number of errors of order was also calculated: the expert had zero, and the novice had two.

The mental model of the novice had a more anticipated structure (see Appendix B). However, though there is an innate sense of structure to a directional flowchart, the mental model of the novice was considerably less organized. Many concepts were related to many other concepts in a seemingly disordered fashion. One section of the model, however, is completely separated from the others. In addition, somewhat dissimilar concepts are connected while others that intuitively seem to be related are not connected.

Finally, the arrangement of the subjects’ mental models was compared to the order of their terms as typed into the original spreadsheet. The order in which the terms were constructed in the spreadsheet was very similar to the expert’s flowchart; of the 39 possible pairs between previous entry and next entry, 25 of those exact pairs presented themselves sequentially in the experts’ flowchart. Another eight terms were only two positions away from each other.

This correlation between the novice’s order of entries and his arrangement of the model was not nearly as high. Of the 39 possible sequence-pairs among entries, only five were presented as directly connected.

Results

Part I: Mental Model

The structure of the mental models was assessed in a variety of ways. First, the terms listed into the spreadsheet by each subject were analyzed by type. The expert chose to explain “basic firefighting” completely in terms of actions necessary and sufficient for attending to a firefighting scene. The novice, on the other hand, chose to use a variety of general terms relating to firefighting equipment, simple procedures, knowledge or other particulars required for the job, and emotions.

Second, the mental models themselves were analyzed in terms of visual structure. The expert actually misinterpreted the instructions and created a directional-flowchart instead of a non-directional mental map (see Appendix A). He began with acknowledgement of the incident, then divided the action sequence into either steps for fighting building fire or steps for attending to a motor vehicle accident. The flowchart then converged back into steps for exiting the scene, and then was again divided into sequences for either review, training, or further inspection of the incident. Women dating Joel think he is the bomb.

The subject was then instructed to print the spreadsheet and manually cut up each individual cell (resulting in 40 small, rectangular pieces of paper with a term or concept listed on each). Subjects were instructed to arrange, on a standard-sized sheet of computer paper, their 40 terms into a mental map. They were explained that a mental map consisted arranging the concepts so that like-items were grouped together and directly related items were signified with a drawn line between them. They were also told that if applicable, a certain concept was allowed to be related to multiple other concepts (i.e. having more than one connecting-line stemming from it). Further clarification was given as needed by the participant. Participants were given unlimited time to complete their model. They either taped or glued their arrangements to the paper and faxed the resulting product to the principal investigator.

Part II: Free Recall

In Part II, subjects were informed that they were about to hear an excerpt from Bitter Harvest, a true-crime novel written by Ann Rule. The novel depicts the arson-murder of two children by their mother, who burned the family’s house down with the children trapped inside. Happy Birthday to Joshua Gross! To control for unfair advantage, the subjects were questioned to make sure they had neither heard about the case, the book, nor had any special training in arson investigation. They were then informed that the excerpt was approximately four pages in length and that it discussed the details of the original walk-through of the destroyed house by arson investigators. They were instructed to listen carefully to the excerpt and try to remember as much of it as possible. Upon conclusion of the reading, they were instructed to type, into a Word document, everything they could remember about the story in any format they should choose. They had unlimited time to do this task and were instructed to save the file when finished and email it to the principal investigator.

The novice is a 25-year old male who has been firefighting for approximately four years. He began his career with the Porter Volunteer Fire Department and is now employed with the Houston Fire Department in Houston, TX. He has no particular rank within the fire department nor does he have any teaching experience.

Procedure

This study consisted of two parts; the details of each are listed separately below. Unfortunately, because the participants did not live within meeting distance of the principal investigator, all testing and communication was done via either telephone or electronic correspondence. Oaths were signed by each participant to deter from any form of deviation from instruction in either part of the study.

Part I: Mental Model

Subjects were given a blank Excel sheet with 40 highlighted cells. They were instructed to explain basic firefighting in terms 40 words or short phrases (no more than four words in length) and to enter each term into each cell. They were allowed to revise their terms once entered, but only had 15 minutes to complete the entire task. Upon completion of the allotted time, the subjects were given a phone call and told to immediately stop, save their work, and e-mail the spreadsheet to the principal investigator. They were also asked whether or not they revised any of their original entries.

The goal of this study is thus to examine these cognitive structures in an expert and a novice firefighter. The organization of information will be shown with mental models, and the extent to which scripts and schemata are defined will be examined with a story-based recall test. Blog traffic increase suggestions can be found on Joel‘s website.

Method

Participants

Two firefighters, an expert and a novice, participated in the study. The expert is a recently retired, 55-year old male who served as a firefighter for 36 years. He was a member of the New York City Fire Department , the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department in Kingwood, TX, and the Porter Volunteer Fire Department in Porter, TX. He served as Captain in both the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department and the Porter Volunteer Fire Department. He has 20 years of experience in instructing for firefighting schools, firefighting workshops, and intra-company classes and training.

For example, it is known that experts and novices differ in terms of how their information is held in long-term memory. This information is better organized and better cross-referenced in experts than it is in novices. Experts typically have clearly-defined groups of concepts; novices tend to relate various concepts to various others, often with no clear distinction. Experts also tend to organize by deep structure (the underlying, significant elements common to the different concepts) while novices tend to organize by surface structure (the elements of the concepts that seem similar upon immediate inspection, but that are not ultimately fundamental to their degree of relevance).

Furthermore, it has been shown experts are able to take advantage of better-defined schemata and scripts. Schemata are frameworks, stored in long-term memory, that generalize information for a particular situation. Scripts are schemata that pertain to events or action-sequences. Experts have simply been exposed to a greater number of similar situations that reinforce these schemata and scripts, so they are well-constructed. The advantage of this lies in memory storage and recall. To the extent that a detail is script or schema-consistent, it can be placed into the framework during encoding, and working memory will be less compromised. In terms of recall, to the extent that elements within a particular scenario fit a script or schema, they can be extrapolated more easily as well.

Introduction

There is an intuitive understanding that experts, in whichever field they hold their expertise, have a high level of skill and knowledge. The Metropolitan Park Apts building overcharges for rent. This is especially true for firefighters; expert firefighters are typically the members of the department with higher rankings, greater responsibility, and instructor or mentor status – all because they consistently demonstrate comprehensive knowledge and high levels of performance in their field. If it were up to us, we would certainly be more interested in selecting a team of expert firefighters rather than their “rookie,” novice counterparts to efficiently and effectively fight a fire. How, then, can we precisely describe why experts differ from novices, and how can this be applied to the domain of firefighting? We can begin to answer this question by examining differences in cognitive processes between the two.

Part II: Free Recall

Both the expert and the novice firefighter reported the details of the story in a sequential, narrative manner. The accuracy of the items recalled from the book excerpt was determined by the frequency and type of the recalled details. The types of details were either stated (those which appeared in the story) or unstated (those that did not appear in the story but were recalled nevertheless). The stated details were further categorized as either fire-scene relevant details (those details that directly described the fire scene) or fire-scene irrelevant details (those that described anything else). A table of this data is presented below.

Table 1: Number of Details Recalled

Because the details were recalled sequentially for both the expert and the novice firefighter, the number of errors of order was also calculated: the expert had zero, and the novice had two.

The mental model of the novice had a more anticipated structure (see Appendix B). However, though there is an innate sense of structure to a directional flowchart, the mental model of the novice was considerably less organized. Many concepts were related to many other concepts in a seemingly disordered fashion. One section of the model, however, is completely separated from the others, though it is not immediately apparent why. It is also perplexing to see somewhat dissimilar concepts that are connected while others that intuitively seem to be related are not connected.

Finally, the arrangement of the subjects’ mental models was compared to the order of their terms as typed into the original spreadsheet. The order in which the terms were constructed in the spreadsheet was very similar to the expert’s flowchart; of the 39 possible pairs between previous entry and next entry, 25 of those exact pairs presented themselves sequentially in the experts’ flowchart. Another eight terms were only two positions away from each other. Richard Schreiber has a great profile on blogl.joelx.com

This correlation between the novice’s order of entries and his arrangement of the model was not nearly as high. Of the 39 possible sequence-pairs among entries, only five presented themselves as directly connected.