Shelley Batts is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan. She studies hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, and is trying to finish that quixotic quest called 'thesis.' She lies awake at night pondering how science intersects with politics, culture, policy, money, medicine, and religion in an attempt to be more than just a niche scientist sitting in the oh-so-lovely ivory tower. Follow me and my parrot, Pepper, on our quest to finish my PhD, land a post-doc, and stay sane.
Steve Higgins is a psychology graduate student at an online university. He hopes that the three weeks and $29.95 that he is spending on his Ph.D. will get him a job at a Tier 1 research university. Do online universities have postdocs? Ok...just kidding, Steve is really a Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying high level vision. You know... stuff like scene & object perception.
While not an official contributer to 'Of Two Minds,' Shelley's sidekick is an African Grey parrot named Pepper. His heros are Irene Pepperberg, Alex, and Rachel Carson. He spends his time learning Mandarin and writing the Great American novel.
"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life." ~Rachel Carson
We love constructive comments! However, we reserve the right to delete comments that abuse this forum. Voicing your opinions is great, just be respectful.
So I'm teaching Psychology 100 this semester for the first time and part of the whole thing is that we're supposed to do certain things to get a graduate teaching certificate (which I think is the schools attempt at giving us grad students some teaching training as opposed to the norm of none). One of the requirements is to have a mid-term student and faculty evaluation and then write a little pageish thing on what it taught us. Here's mine... Hey if I have to do something I might as well make it entertaining ;)
What the midterm evaluation taught me.
1. Be specific with your language.
If you have a whole lot of foreign students who don't really understand the intricacies of your language things that you take for granted will be lost on them. If you write in your evaluation form, "Your instructor is...," They might just take you literally and write your name (the same goes for the text book title). This also made me realize that probably a full 90% of my humor is falling on deaf ears (no matter what country they are from. On the other hand if you cater to the person who only speaks basic English and can't understand the intricacies of the language the rest of the class will be bored so much so that they might decide that napping in class is a much better use of time than enjoying the lectures. I imagine that those who don't speak great English are also learning all sorts of interesting things about American culture.
2. Student evaluations are not that useful
I don't think people will actually be mean on an evaluation when they have to actually write something down as opposed to just choosing a number. Some of the comments are constructive, such as "slow down" or "more detail" but comments like "Steve is cool" or "Steve is a sharp dresser" only serves to stroke my already abnormally large ego and turn me into a raving egotistical teaching maniac who thinks his lectures and classroom/courtroom management skills are only equaled by Clarence Darrow. It would be really helpful if students could be prompted to be much more critical of me and my teaching style/skills. On the other hand one could wonder whether students really have any idea of what they actually need to do well and learn. Perhaps evaluations are not as useful for people who fool the class into thinking things by charisma alone as opposed to strict info only tutelage. Perhaps I should try to be more boring and see what happens?
3. Evaluations by an experienced instructor are ultimately more helpful than anything that can come from students.
I mean really, an experienced instructor isn't getting a grade from you and is in a different social position. It makes sense that they would be straight with you and have helpful ideas. When you dislike their comments it also makes you defend your own methods and figure out whether your own methods really make much sense to begin with. All in all I'm not sure I changed my teaching methods all that much from these rounds of evaluations - The most I'm learning about teaching is from the confused stares of the students when I try to explain the difference between two concepts that I barely understand the difference between. I think the next time around teaching and maybe even the next round of evaluations should really help me figure out what needs to improve since the things that obviously didn't work (that I totally know about) will be completely different.
According to a recent National Geographic article primates pay a lot of attention to their friends asses. But not only that, they can actually identify them based on their fabulous booties. In humans facial recognition is based on a region coined as the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) and I believe a similar region has been found in primates. There is also an area of the human cortex dedicated to processing the body, call the Extra Striate Body Area (EBA). The big question here is whether primates have a particular area of the brain dedicated to only ass processing or they are using one of these other areas for the recognition. Isabel Gauthier could possibly make a case for the face area doing the ass processing since she believes that the fusiform gyrus participates in visual processing of expert categories and I'm sure you could make a case for the primates being experts in the ass. On the other hand... perhaps Nancy Kanwisher would make a case through recognition in the EBA of the primates (do they have EBA's?). In any case - Chimps like asses even more than humans.
Anyway... here's some of the details of the study:
In a recent experiment, captive primates were able to identify photos of their acquaintances' rears and match them with the right faces. The ability suggests that the animals possess mental "whole body" representations of other chimps they know.
Each participating chimp was flashed a picture of another's bum, with visible genitals, then shown the face of the derriere's owner and another face of the same gender.
Both males and females were successful in this anatomical match game, pairing faces and posteriors with much greater frequency than chance alone--but only if the photos showed chimps they already knew.
"Many animals look at parts of the body, the voice, the hands, as separate entities and don't wholly integrate them," said study co-author Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Atlanta's Emory University.
On a related note, I know a professor who I guess I shouldn't mention by name who thinks that men have a breast related area. I'm not sure what evidence she has of this but I might be convinced.
WATERBURY, Vt. -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.
"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.
PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.
Hmm.. I'm feeling a great business plan coming on here that shouldn't cause any problems whatsoever... I'm going to be impregnating women and then artificially keep them lactating all the while confining them to cages in order to harvest their breast milk. If that doesn't work I guess I can just open up a milking center at the mall so that I can get new mothers to stop by for a few minutes while I milk them. I could even offer them.. well lets see I could probably extract less than a gallon at a time...so at current rates - maybe offer them 10 cents for their time? I'll bet I could get at least enough milk from 100 malls to maybe provide enough ice cream for 1 mall.
Does anyone want to invest in my idea? All I need... a few trucks, a few refrigerators, and a whole shit load of breast pumps.
"I guess a lot of you already know that "liberel" isn't a real word. But it sure was news to me! And now my face is as red as a mooseburger cooked up rare and painted in lipstick!" haha....
Let me first start by saying that if your doctor tells you that praying is your last hope of your loved ones survival GET A NEW DOCTOR. Now that I've said that let me show you part of this ridiculous article from CNN's medical correspondent, who is clearly in the wrong specialty of journalism (don't they have a religion or faith section?!)
Christopher was just a few days old and had a rare blood infection and fungal meningitis, a brain infection.
"I could tell in their eyes they had no hope for my son," Gorman said. "They told me to prepare for his death. They told me he might not make it through the night."
Gorman never believed the doctors. In fact, she did something she thinks annoyed these men and women of science: She prayed. She prayed all the time.
"They made me feel ridiculous for praying so much and so hard and leaving it up to God," said Gorman, who lives in Idaho Falls, Idaho. "But I told them my son not surviving was not an option."
When he was a month old, Christopher left the hospital. He's been healthy ever since, she says. He turns 3 next month.
"It was a miracle," she said. "There are just things doctors can't explain. Doctors are not in control of everything. There's stuff that happens every day that they can't explain."
A new study finds that many Americans have that same kind of faith. In the study, 57 percent of randomly surveyed adults said God's intervention could save a deathly ill family member even if physicians said treatment would be futile.
However, just under 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a helpless outcome.
The study was published last month in Archives of Surgery and is one of many to show a "faith gap" between doctors and patients.
I get a little confused by studies like this. They are always made out in the press to sound like they are actually showing a relationship between praying and miracle healing or whatever. But all that they show is that a small number of people have ridiculous beliefs about medical miracles at the hand of God. A more informative study would be to correlate these people's beliefs and their reasoning ability as well as some measure of how good doctors are that believe that miracles could cure their patients. I don't think I want my doctor praying for my dying father when instead he could be working to actually save his life.
I'm also a little confused on the reporting. If you ARE going to report something like this you might want to at least write something to the effect that miracles=woo and that a single case does not science make.
Are you concerned that you are just sleeping with waaaay too many people? Do you want to avoid getting STD's? Do your neighbors give you dirty looks in every morning when a new person comes waltzing out of your apartment? Just place this wonderful pez like condom dispenser on your nightstand table. Not only will it ensure that you have safer sex - it will ensure that you have NO sex. When your prospective partner see's it they will realize that you probably carry many many diseases that they simply do not want.
But hey... it's only 28$ I'm not sure how you can afford to NOT get one!
Alice Pawley of Sciencewomen fame is heading down to Champaign on September 27th to help me throw a millionth comment bash. We'll even buy you a round of booze and perhaps some yummy foods thanks to some wonderful financing by ScienceBlogs! We have tentatively planned on meeting at the Blind Pig or Jupiters Pizza (it's a bar too - don't worry!)
We look forward to meeting all you ScienceBlogs fans here in Champaign-Urbana. Home of.... uhh... the University of Illinois and uhh... corn?
There was a request for a Millionth Comment party here in Champaign-Urbana Illinois... I would totally be up for getting together with a bunch of like minded folk and throwing a few down.... say at the Blind Pig?
Anyone else up for meeting up for some beers? (Or Soda... or I guess even water)
Thanks to a reader, Daniel Keogh, we have a wonderful video detailing what the Imperial March from Star Wars would taste like to one particular synaesthete who has some particularly odd sensation pairings.
Check it out:
The Professor Funk also has a whole bunch of other entertaining looking videos about other aspects of science. We give them 4 thumbs up. I never did understand why Ebert, et. al. could only ever give a single thumbs up. After all there were two people with four total thumbs. Meh whatever, not everyone can be as awesome as Shelley and I.
So... my girlfriend studies categories and concepts and her adviser wanted her to show a video for her first year project. Of course I went out to youtube and tried to find something sensible since I'm procrastinating right now on my psych 100 syllabus - and of course I found something absolutely ridiculous (hey... it IS youtube). Here is how to categorize all the Alien Species that have been wandering around the earth since our first contact with our galactic overlords at Roswell:
ScienceBlogs wants your help... and is willing to pay. Well sorta... they're giving away some ipod type goodies to some people who complete a short survey. Here's the schtick:
Dear Reader,
We launched Seed and ScienceBlogs because we believe that science can change the world and science literacy is how we get there. In the pages of our magazine we've tried to capture the ideas and issues fueling this cultural shift. Online we've aimed to foster a lively and spirited conversation about where it's all heading.
Now, we invite you to share with us directly your perspective on the state of science, and your opinion on how we can improve our own efforts to raise science literacy. The survey should take about 20 minutes to complete.
As a special "thank you" for participating you will be eligible to enter for a chance to win a suite of Apple products: an iPhone 3G, a MacBook Air and a 40GB Apple TV.
On behalf of our writers, bloggers, correspondents, designers, photographers, producers, and editors around the world, thank you for your impassioned support and for making the time to complete this survey.
Please press the "Start Survey" button to begin the survey.
Oh you crazy non-English speaking people... please please please take the extra effort and get someone like me with a dirty mind to proofread your papers. And Editors... get your mind INTO the gutter and things like this won't happen.
It all starts innocently with this perfectly normal sounding setup:
Chem. Commun., 2007, 1733 - 1735, DOI: 10.1039/b614147a
Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube-nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport properties
Dachi Yang, Guowen Meng, Shuyuan Zhang, Yufeng Hao, Xiaohong An, Qing Wei, Min Ye and Lide Zhang
Metal and semimetal nanotube-nanowire heterojunction arrays have been achieved by sequential electrochemical-deposition inside the nanochannels of anodic aluminium oxide template with a layer of Au thin enough to leave the pores open.
Neato, Eh?! This is where it all goes horribly wrong:
Uh oh... cunt. uhhh huh huuuh heh huh huh.... I think I'm going to start a Beavis and Butthead knockoff where we read science papers. Maybe Mystery Science Theater 3000 would be a better show to knock off. meh... hehe... cunt.
Sizzle follows Randy Olson as he tries to make a movie about global warming. The main characters are an outrageously stereotypical new age gay couple and the thug life camera crew who are there to supply a comic foil to both Olson and the pretty boring scientists who get interviewed about global warming. It's a very strange contrast between the fake characters (who are REALLY fake) and the scientists trying to sound professional and only talk about global warming.
The movie is billed as a mockumentary but it doesn't quite fit the bill of a mockumentary since it's about a serious topic they are trying to support yet making fun of themselves at the same time. Usually a mockumentary is making fun of the people AND the topic. The movie itself relies on cheap stereotypes and lame jokes and situations where Olson throws temper tantrums to get a laugh.
My overall impression of the movie wasn't great, but there were a number of entertaining or thought provoking scenes. I very much enjoyed the global warming denialist scientist from Honduras (I think) whose name is very long and I can't remember. He was so outrageous and ridiculous that it was hard to believe that he wasn't one of the silly characters that played the comic foil. But he was real. He was crazy looking, crazy acting, just nuts! He bragged about his publications, cigars, his ambasadorship (or something like that), and was just a riot.
Another set of scenes I enjoyed were the New Orleans clips where they talked to the common person about the effect of global warming in the wake of the horrible flooding. The people were honest and pulled at your emotions. While I enjoyed this bit of the movie it made me realize I was ultimately unsatisfied with the earlier part of the movie where the scientists gave their little schticks. I didn't really get enough data from them to know what to think about global warming. I was told what to believe and that global warming delialists are silly people so I should believe the Olson crew. But I was never convinced of what I should believe. Then again, I'm a scientist and I want data... lots and lots of data.
Anyway, Sizzle might be worth a viewing when it comes out. There are a number of interesting viewpoints and stories - even if most aspects of the movie don't ultimately work.
President Bush on Sunday defended his decision to attend next month's Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, saying that to boycott "would be an affront to the Chinese people."
Uhh yeah, wouldn't that be the point of a boycott?
It seems that vegetarians are screwed on multiple levels, they get called hippies by me AND they might be at an increased risk of dementia in old age. The study recently published in the journal Dementias and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders focused on a number of elderly Indonesians who live across a wide range of areas in Java. They discovered that people who ate tofu at least once a day (which is classified as high consumption) had a statistically higher chance of showing dementia. So what could be causing this higher rate? According to BBC News:
Soy products are rich in micronutrients called phytoestrogens, which mimic the impact of the female sex hormone oestrogen.
There is some evidence that they may protect the brains of younger and middle-aged people from damage - but their effect on the ageing brain is less clear.
The latest study suggests phytoestrogens - in high quantity - may actually heighten the risk of dementia.
Lead researcher Professor Eef Hogervorst said previous research had linked oestrogen therapy to a doubling of dementia risk in the over-65s.
She said oestrogens - and probably phytoestrogens - tended to promote growth among cells, not necessarily a good thing in the ageing brain.
Alternatively, high doses of oestrogens might promote the damage caused to cells by particles known as free radicals.
Then again all this might be wrong and you damn hippies have nothing at all to worry about, evidently formaldehyde is used in Indonesia as a preservative. Wow.. getting high while eating tofu - who woulda thunk it!
Hitachi recently announced that they would be producing a 5 TB drive in the near future (2010?). This is totally unexciting to me but what Hitchachi's Yoshiro Shiroishi said was. According to Techradar:
As for what can be stored on such disks, Hitachi's Yoshihiro Shiroishi explains, "By 2010, just two disks will suffice to provide the same storage capacity as the human brain."
In other words, a next-generation hard drive will be able to recall that trip to the seaside in 1976, but never where it left the car keys last night.
Ignoring the faulty memory comment for a moment - Where in the world did Yoshihiro come up with that capacity? How does one calculate what the human brain can store?
Several approximations to this number have already appeared in the literature based on "hardware" considerations (though in the case of the human brain perhaps the term "wetware" is more appropriate). One estimate of 10^20 bits is actually an early estimate (by Von Neumann in The Computer and the Brain) of all the neural impulses conducted in the brain during a lifetime. This number is almost certainly larger than the true answer. Another method is to estimate the total number of synapses, and then presume that each synapse can hold a few bits. Estimates of the number of synapses have been made in the range from 10^13 to 10^15, with corresponding estimates of memory capacity
This gives us an estimate much higher than Yoshihiro's... so what about estimates from traditional psychology without this neuron counting? After all having a certain number of synapses does not mean that they are even being used for 'memory' ... hell we're not even sure all the areas involved in memory. We're pretty sure about some, like the hippocampal cortex, but whether areas involved in processing physical stimuli - like motor areas for tool use, are used as part of the memory representation is up for debate (not for me... I know what I think - and gosh darnit I'm right!)
So here's the psychological estimate from the same source:
Landauer reviewed and quantitatively analyzed experiments by himself and others in which people were asked to read text, look at pictures, and hear words, short passages of music, sentences, and nonsense syllables. After delays ranging from minutes to days the subjects were tested to determine how much they had retained. The tests were quite sensitive--they did not merely ask "What do you remember?" but often used true/false or multiple choice questions, in which even a vague memory of the material would allow selection of the correct choice. Often, the differential abilities of a group that had been exposed to the material and another group that had not been exposed to the material were used. The difference in the scores between the two groups was used to estimate the amount actually remembered (to control for the number of correct answers an intelligent human could guess without ever having seen the material). Because experiments by many different experimenters were summarized and analyzed, the results of the analysis are fairly robust; they are insensitive to fine details or specific conditions of one or another experiment. Finally, the amount remembered was divided by the time allotted to memorization to determine the number of bits remembered per second.
The remarkable result of this work was that human beings remembered very nearly two bits per second under all the experimental conditions. Visual, verbal, musical, or whatever--two bits per second. Continued over a lifetime, this rate of memorization would produce somewhat over 10^9 bits, or a few hundred megabytes.
Hmm... that only comes out to: (10^9) bits = 119.20929 megabytes. We've had that for decades... So where's this number coming from. I know! I'll go to Yahoo Answers maybe they'll have the answer for me there.
I have not heard what science believes the human brain maximum capacity would be in those terms.
I do know they say (barring any cranial/brain trauma) that the brain retains pretty much all information of what it sees and hears.., storing up huge libraries of information. The problem with the majority of peoples is the recall ability. If we based this on our recall ability then computers would have us beat hands down!
Which brings me to this conclusion (although drifting from the primary subject a bit)..., whether a person believes in a God creator or just nature at work.., it would seem to suggest the information is in the old cranial system for a reason. I choose to believe for purposes after this life.
Memory is a very complex system. Its even being considered that some element of memory is stored in the body. Just one point in case among many others is the woman who received a heart transplant.., who never smoked in her life and led an otherwise very conservative life..., had urges to smoke, knew how to ride a motorcycle (something she never did before) and wanted to hang around Biker Bars... and some other quite strange changes in her character.
Eventually they found out the heart donor was a biker. This is a true story.., so whether science acknowledges it or not - I say proof of body-memory is in the pudding.., err..., well.., the heart anyway.
=^)
Ugh... clearly not.
Can someone direct me to something closer to what the hell Yoshi is talking about?
And you know... it's about the software anyway (for creating AI) - not the hardware. The hardware is the easy part.
My Conclusion: Yoshi needs to clarify what he's talking about because I think he's blatantly wrong and the idea of capacity as a meaningful thing when talking about the brain is a mistake.
According to a new survey the USA has highest level of illegal cocaine and cannabis use in the world. Thank goodness the War for Drugs is working so well! Ohh... wait... that's the war ON drugs and it's supposed to protect us from ourselves and our nasty drug habits. Well anyway.. here's the details on the study:
A survey of 17 countries has found that despite its punitive drug policies the United States has the highest levels of illegal cocaine and cannabis use. The study, by Louisa Degenhardt (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) and colleagues, is based on the World Health Organization's Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) and is published in this week's PLoS Medicine.
The authors found that 16.2% of people in the United States had used cocaine in their lifetime, a level much higher than any other country surveyed (the second highest level of cocaine use was in New Zealand, where 4.3% of people reported having used cocaine). Cannabis use was
highest in the US (42.4%), followed by New Zealand (41.9%).
In the Americas, Europe, Japan, and New Zealand, alcohol had been used by the vast majority of survey participants, compared to smaller proportions in the Middle East, Africa, and China.
The survey found differences in both legal and illegal drug use among different socioeconomic groups. For example, males were more likely than females to have used all drug types; younger adults were more likely than older adults to have used all drugs examined; and higher income was related to drug use of all kinds. Marital status was found to be related to tobacco, cannabis, and cocaine use, but not alcohol use (the never married and previously married having higher odds of lifetime cocaine and cannabis use than the currently married; tobacco use is more likely in people who have been previously married while less likely among the never married).
Drug use "does not appear to be simply related to drug policy," say the authors, "since countries with more stringent policies towards illegal drug use did not have lower levels of such drug use than countries with more liberal policies." In the Netherlands, for example, which has more liberal policies than the US, 1.9% of people reported cocaine use and 19.8% reported cannabis use.
Data on drug use were available from 54,068 survey participants in 17 countries. The 17 countries were determined by the availability of research collaborators and on funding for the survey. Trained lay interviewers carried out face-to-face interviews (except in France where the interviews were done over the telephone) using a standardized, structured diagnostic interview for psychiatric conditions and drug use. Participants were asked if they had ever used alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, or cocaine.
The study's main limitations are that only 17 countries were surveyed, within these countries there were different rates of participation, and it is unclear whether people accurately report
their drug use when interviewed. Nevertheless, the findings present comprehensive data on the patterns of drug use from national samples representing all regions of the world.
So the take home messages... people in the U.S. have a bunch of disposable income for drugs and we really f'n love cocaine! Although (I should really look at the article directly), it doesn't look like they check out the countries in which the cocaine was produced. I'd be curious to see a survey on a wider variety of countries.
And finally... the most important take home message: Drug Policy has NOTHING to do with drug use. We can put users, dealers, producers, cousins of uncles of friends of users, their dogs, cats, guinea pigs, or the lint under their couches in jail or to death and it will have no effect on whether people use drugs or not. Education however... just maybe that will help. Oh.. that and taxation - Heavy heavy taxation. After all tobacco use has gone drastically down in the last decade with more education and higher drug prices.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
While not an official contributer to 'Of Two Minds,' Shelley's sidekick is an African Grey parrot named Pepper. His heros are Irene Pepperberg, Alex, and Rachel Carson. He spends his time learning Mandarin and writing the Great American novel.
So I'm teaching Psychology 100 this semester for the first time and part of the whole thing is that we're supposed to do certain things to get a graduate teaching certificate (which I think is the schools attempt at giving us grad students some teaching training as opposed to the norm of none). One of the requirements is to have a mid-term student and faculty evaluation and then write a little pageish thing on what it taught us. Here's mine... Hey if I have to do something I might as well make it entertaining ;)
