Richard Weissman
Abstract: The Behavior Analyst Today and its associated online behavioral journals lost young webmaster Craig Alan Thomas to a heart attack on April 10, 2009. A sample of Craig’s behavioral remains lie preserved in the twitterverse. Journal modifications and opportunities to extend Craig’s pioneering contributions are defined. A Tweet In is scheduled.
Keywords: http://baojournals.com, http://behavior-analyst-online.org , @behaviorGirl, @behaviorologist, @betalab, @digitalWalden2, @drcathomas, @freeRADlab, #freeRADlab, @healthmanager, @labormanager, @politiciansTV, @productivityMan, @zionTalkracy 3-rat lab, aggregate interlocks, amateur revolutioneering, Behavior Analyst Online (BAO), Behavior Analyst Today (BAT), behavior-community technology, culture and species survival, cultural transmitters, behavior-health breakdown, behavioral community technology, behavioral scientists, conditional-discriminative stimuli (C|SDs), conservatives, contextual-conditional-discriminative stimuli (, C|C|SDs), counter control (CC) cybernetics, cybernetic-culture design framework, digital ecosystems, discriminative stimuli (SDs), eulogy, extraterrestrial organisms, information display tactic, interpretively extend, Jewish Zionism, labor credits, macro-contingencies, mainstream, material scientists, NASA, New World Order, online behavioral journals, paleoconservatives, rules, Planetary Cybernetics In Time Administration (PCITA), Planner-Manager System of governance, Professional Practice of Behavior Analysis, progressives, radicalism, Scientocracy, Skinner’s 4th-estate plan, Society for Data-based Solutions (SDs), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), tact, tweet, Tweet In, Twitter, twitter handle.
Upon accepting the position of layout editor for the Behavior Analyst Today and its affiliate publications, I asked the various journal editing teams to switch from email to twitter as the primary source of team communication. As an information display tactic, twitter is much closer to the continuous observation and publicly-accessible recording strategy that is the hallmark of a natural science of behavior (Johnston & Pennypacker, 1980). “The guiding strategy is to arrange for the data to present a configuration that, in the context of certain rules and conventions, accurately represents the measured natural event so that the effect produced on the interpretive behavior of researchers and their colleagues will faithfully reflect the generality of the event in question” (p. 328). Twitter date/time stamps all verbal products (tweets) and, by limiting each tweet to 140 characters, homogenizes the verbal unit. I started a twitter handle called behaviorologist and Craig started one called drcathomas on March 23, 2009.
On Friday April 10th, @behaviorGirl tweeted “Last night I had a very intense dream that made my heart fall in the pit of my stomach.” I retweeted and added “@drcathomas had a heart attack” and died. This was exactly 2 hours after Mike Weinberg emailed the journals’ email list with the “Sad News” that “founding member of the behavior analysis online journals and the Behavior Analyst Today, Craig Thomas, ha[d] passed away last evening at home of an apparent sudden heart attack. “ He was approximately 48.
Joe Cautilli was the first to recall Craig’s history in behavior analysis:
“Craig was a true advocate and a friend. He was selfless and dedicated to his clients and his family. He represented the best that one could hope for in a practitioner. He was always trying to improve the services he rendered.
“Back in the 1990s, Craig use to travel to set up programs for children with autism. I would sometimes accompany him on these trips. Once I saw a video of him trying to teach a child some words. The child hit him over and over, blood streamed down his face and he kept going. When I asked him about the session all he could say was "Man that was tough." He showed me a later tape of the kid speaking some words. This is the memory I will always have of Craig. He truly gave it his all.
“His passing is a true loss to the world. Craig was a rare person. He had a disability in his family and it moved him to be the best he could be... He was as much the advocate as the behavior analyst.
“Craig use to tease that he made meetings at ABA: because if he did not I would volunteer him for something- I have no-one left to volunteer.
“It was not just my loss, the world lost.
“Many of you know that I have spent a lot of time building the Behavior Analyst Online Organization. What you don't know is that for every hour of work I did in the public, Craig did work behind the scenes to make sure that things went well with the site and with keeping away hackers and other people who would crash it.
“I will miss him dearly.”
Mike Weinberg remembered:
“As I have mentioned to some of you, I knew Craig for 22 years, back in the Pennhurst Plaintiff Class days in the 1980s when he was an advocate in Montgo. Co., PA and I was a behavior consultant for many of those coming out of Pennhurst and going to CLAs. He and I met back in those days and were not always in agreement, but he was always an avid advocate for their rights or which he deserves our respect and a great deal of credit for fighting that uphill battle when many in the field of behavior analysis were not yet "enlightened."
“I will miss his friendship and unique style, as well as all he did to make the BAO journals happen at personal expense both financially and in terms of time.”
And Jack Apsche lamented: “I am so sorry that Craig checked out so damn early! What a wonderful person, whom I really cared for and admired.”
The first consequences of Craig’s death were practical. As layout editor, I could no longer rely on Craig to post the issues I laid out. Access to his server was halted. Nearly 5 months later, we are only now resuming our posting schedule. The archive of behavioral journals that had been hosted at http://www.behavior-analyst-online.org/ would no longer be continuous with the new journal issues. We are in the process of migrating the archives to the new site at http://baojournals.com where the new issues are being posted.
But the ultimate affect could be far more retarding at the level of cybernetic (i.e., self-correcting) cultural design. My eulogy for Craig was that “[o]f all the BAT journalists, … [he] was the only one that waded out to tweet me during these first few weeks of our projects. That was Craig.” Craig was a pioneer in advancing the hybrid root of behavior analysis and behaviorology (the compounding of a natural science of behavior with the design materials enabled by communications (initially, analog-telephone) technology) and its potential to meet “[t]he ultimate challenge: Prove B. F. Skinner wrong” (Chance, 2007).
In 1982, Skinner spoke at the University of Florida on “Why are we not acting to save the world?” There he laid out his pessimistic prediction that yesteryear’s contingency traps would lock us into a pattern of aggregate interlocks that would have, as their ultimate consequence, the demise of our cultures and species. That the deferred consequences of agency behavior would select agents that acted for the ceremonial survival of their agency at the expense of the long-term survival of our future and that we, the controlees of those agencies, would be even more compromised by the exigencies of adaptation to salary and police-avoidance contingencies. He proposed a last ditch culture-rescue operation that he failed to re-use when he published the article 5 years late (Skinner, 1987). His solution strategy used 3 actor classes: Material Scientists, Behavioral Scientists, and Cultural Transmitters.
1. Material scientists (physicists, chemist, and their ilk) would measure and project the effects of malignant cultural trends on the material environment and its associated affect scenarios.
2. Behavioral scientists & practioners (i.e., experimental analysts of behavior, interpretive extenders to socio-cultural realms (e.g., political scientists, historians, economists, anthropologists, military strategists, religious scholars, etc.)) would analyze and evaluate the generic and systemic classes of environmental control enabling and enhancing current trends (analysis) followed by the project-managed activities of design, creation, and testing of contingencies that enabled and enhanced behavior with less disastrous outcomes.
3. Finally, teacher’s and writer’s (digital pamphleteers in the current vernacular) would generate, propagate, and transmit the resulting analyses and design components in preparation for developing, implementing, and fine-tuning a cybernetic-culture design system that shaped aggregate behavior toward sustainable consequences.
A Society for Data-based Solutions (SDs) was inspired by the effects of Skinner’s speech on verbal behavior. A digital Walden Two was suggested to provide an online approximation of Skinner’s utopian strategy (replete with behavior managers and a labor-credit system of reinforcement contingency arrangement). The s-d-s acronym was used because it specified the class of control (discriminative stimuli) it was designed to technologize (occasions for reinforced responding) and, like other discriminative stimuli, used motivational-associative operations from an earlier history (Students for a Democratic Society) in which a minority attempted ad-hoc counter control in resistance to malignant aversive and ceremonial macro-contingencies. They acted as amateur revolutioneers.
With the natural science of behavior spawning 1 ad for a university position every 5 years, I packed up my cumulative recorders and endeavored to succeed in the professional practice of behavior analysis as a behavior specialist consultant. I did not succeed. Unlike the laboratory where when I had a question, I would design an experiment to ask my animals, I was suddenly facing the scenario in which my “animals” were coming to me for answers and they weren’t radical behaviorists!
Eventually, I gave it up. Ben Barnett had been a friend in graduate school and a later member of the SDs. In 2005, he was good enough to hire me as an information architect at Media Bureau Professional Services. As I learned about Use Case writing, I came to see how the technological work flows in software-systems development could be harnessed for enabling and enhancing social environments. The Walden 2 Scientocracy could be built if we could only overcome the babbling silos of enthrenched ceremonial positions. The exciting software engineering idea of Service Oriented Architecture popular in the e-government domains of website applications development could be joined with the appropriate-behavior technology movement (Fawcette) and we might give Skinner back his cajones. We started with the notion of a free rat lab and created a freeRADlab designed to generate free-operant radicalism in media-laboratory spaces.
Twitter accounts were created. In addition to the Behaviorologist handle, Ben and I created PoliticiansTV, digitalWalden2 with healthManager, laborManager, productivityMan, and zionTalkracy as managers. Digital Walden Two would occasion workers to earn labor credits from these manages which would soon become aggregated applications created by People Over Time. Health, labor, and productivity referred to behavior good for the self-person, other/s, and physical environment. Ziontalkracy was behavior for the good of culture-species survival. It worked with PoliticiansTV and behaviorologist to tact and interpretively extend socio-cultural processes and phenomena bearing on ultimate human and cultural survival by evaluating indicators of the true context. By context I mean the class of stimulus control specified by Sidman’s concept of the 5-term contingency. The successive terms are (1) reinforcement, (2) response, (3) discriminative stimulus (SD), (4) conditional discriminative stimulus (rule selectors), and (5) contextual conditional discriminative cue. Several alternative context control class classifiers inductively emerged in our research: (1) mainstream: (a) progressives, (b) conservatives, (2) New World Order globalists (paleo-conservatives’ nemesis), (3) extraterestial organisms, and (4) Jewish Zionism. PoliticiansTV was designed as a feeder for all of these. ZionTalkracy took up the fourth but it did so as hybrid extension of the Scientocracy specified in Walden Two’s planner-manager system of government.
Skinner’s 4th estate plan wasn’t working. The scientists, scholars, teachers, and reporters were not collaborating on planetary cybernetics. The time is now to create a 21st century extension of NASA: a Planetary Cybernetics In Time Administration (PCITA) through social media and an experimental analysis of our behavior in real time. Every Monday and Wednesday, from 9 pm to 12 am, the freeRADlab hosts a Tweet In from which it aims to reinforce the creation by individuals of cultural analytic investigations and behavior-technology solutions on line. Like so much that preceded it, Craig was an early pioneer of that future and his behavior health breakdown lost us his future possibilities.
Chance, P. (2007). The Ultimate Challenge: Prove B. F. Skinner Wrong. Behavior Analyst, 30(2), 153-160.
Fawcett, S. B. Mathews, R. M. & Fletcher, R. K. (1980). Some promising dimensions for behavioral community technology. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 13, 505-518. http://seab.envmed.rochester.edu/abstracts/jabaabstracts/13/%2013-505.htm
Johnston, J. M., and Pennypacker, H. S. (1980). Strategies and Tactics of Human Behavioral Research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Skinner, B. F. (1982). Why are we not acting to save the world? Speech to the campus of the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Skinner, B. F. (Skinner, B. F. (1987). Why we are not acting to save the world. In B. F. Skinner, Upon further reflection (pp. 1-14). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/bsi/article/viewFile/117/149
Contact information:
Richard Weissman, Ph.D., BCBA
Media Bureau & the freeRADlab
338 Brown Street
Philadelphia, PA 19123
Phone 215-592-1242
E-mails: reinforcers@mediabureau.com, reinforcers@gmail.com.
The link to this mindmap is 
