The correction for attenuation due to measurement error (CAME) has received many historical criticisms, most of which can be traced to the limited ability to use CAME inferentially. Past attempts to determine confidence intervals for CAME are summarized and their limitations discussed. The author suggests that inference requires confidence sets that demarcate those population parameters likely to have produced an obtained value--rather than indicating the samples likely to be produced by a given population--and that most researchers tend to confuse these 2 types of confidence sets. Three different Monte-Carlo methods are presented, each offering a different way of examining confidence sets under the new conceptualization. Exploring the implications of these approaches for CAME suggests potential consequences for other statistics.

As Ecological Psychology pushes into new areas, success will be made easier by a rediscovery its theoretical history, in particular the "New Realism", lead in part by E. B. Holt. Three New Realists tenants seem particularly relevant: (1) we experience reality, (2) relations are real, and (3) things are what you see when you see those things. Though the two groups differ in terms of their conception of perception, and what can be perceived, their conceptions are related in very insightful ways. Further, the comparison reemphasizes the extent of unique empirical claims ecological psychologists make, and grounds those claims within a larger framework for psychology as a whole. This makes obvious the need for further work on the mathematics of invariants, the physiological mechanisms of information extraction, and the behaviors of perception.

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Piaget proposed that understanding permanency, understanding occlusion events, and forming mental representations were synonymous; however, accumulating evidence indicates that those concepts are not unified in development. Infants reach for endarkened objects at younger ages than for occluded objects, and infants' looking patterns suggest that they expect occluded objects to reappear at younger ages than they reach for them. We reaffirm the latter finding in 5- to 6-month-olds and find similar responses to faded objects, but we fail to find that pattern in response to endarkened objects. This suggests that looking behavior and reaching behavior are both sensitive to method of disappearance, but with opposite effects. Current cognition-oriented (i.e. representation-oriented) explanations of looking behavior cannot easily accommodate these results; neither can perceptual-preference explanations, nor the traditional ecological reinterpretations of object permanence. A revised ecological hypothesis, invoking affordance learning, suggests how these differences could arise developmentally.

The purpose of this paper is to identify an important area for librarians to positively impact student retention. Design/methodology/approach This programmatic and conceptual piece describes how embedding librarians into the growing enterprise of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) lays a framework for a context in which libraries and librarians directly contribute to the retention of undergraduate students. Findings Librarians are capable of directly contributing to the retention of students. While their efforts, it is contended, contribute routinely and to the actual retention of students, it is difficult for their efforts to register in the assessment of retention used by administrators. This discrepancy can be solved if librarians play a more explicit (and quantifiable) role in retaining students. Research limitations/implications UREs are a growing, but generally untapped trend for librarians; however, because UREs generally correlate with academic success and student retention, they offer librarians a useful entry point to contribute to the academic mission of colleges and universities, and in a measurable way. Practical implications Embedded librarianship poses a number of hurdles for its practitioners; however, it also has the potential for libraries and librarians to become more explicitly connected to overall institutional goals and strengthen their positions in the academy more broadly. Social implications Improving the scientific literacy of undergraduate students and aiding them on their path toward graduation is meaningfully enhanced through the embedding of librarians into the college curriculum. Originality/value Systematically embedding librarians into UREs is not strongly represented in the literature.