Now on ScienceBlogs: Charles Darwin February 12, 1809 - April 19, 1882
Two neuroscience bloggers team up for one chimeric blog, and world domination of course.
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.
The Omnibrain 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, he is really a Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology 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
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July 1, 2009
Category: Psychology • Vision
I'm teaching about opponent processes in color vision today and thought I'd share one of my favorite examples. This is how you use the human visual system to turn a black and white photo into color. Try it out:
Posted by The Omnibrain at 11:29 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 16, 2009
Category: Psychology
I'm in the middle of my qualification exams and ran across this interesting paper:
Liu, Z Kersten, D Knill, DC Dissociating stimulus information from internal representation--a case study in object recognition. Vision research. 1999; 39(3): 603-12.
However, I'm very confused about them calling the figure on the left an object. This is a collection of objects in 3D space - making it a scene. I'm not sure that this nullifies their model - but this is not object recognition.
People should really start using ideal observer analysis with scene perception...
Posted by The Omnibrain at 4:34 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 30, 2009
Category: Health • Psychology
I think it's a bit like terrorism. It scares the shit out of you but there's next to zero chance it will actually happen to you. Seriously... you have a much much higher chance of choking on a twinky (even if you've never eaten one) than catching the swine flu and dying or being or even seeing a terrorist attack. Talk about a great case of the Availability Heuristic...
Here's a demo for you to try out (I use this to teach Psych 100). The correct answers are below the fold.
Which is the more common cause of death in the USA?
1.
A) Asthma
B) Meningitis
2.
A) Breast Cancer
B) Stomach Cancer
3.
A) Lung Cancer
B) Motor Vehicle Accidents
4.
A)Influenza (the flu)
B) Stomach Ulcer
Posted by The Omnibrain at 2:42 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category:
Go here to tell with 100% accuracy.
Posted by The Omnibrain at 2:34 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 1, 2009
Category: Academia • Psychology
Jason, a graduate student at USC, shot me an email asking for more information about my blogging experiment and I thought I'd post some of the things I sent back to him. Totally unpolished and stream of consciousness but here it is...
Hi Jason,This is really the first time around that I've tried the blogging thing. I've been thinking about doing it for a while but having 2 classes with 50 people in each meant a blog would be a bit unwieldy. If there are that many people in the class a discussion board is a much better choice (like on blackboard or something). If you have under 20 people or so it becomes more manageable. The most straight forward way to do the blogging is to create a post each week (or at some other interval) and then that's it. You then need to hope that students comment on each others posts or actually require them to do so (which now that I'm writing this I realize I should have done that). I'm actually a bit unhappy about this style since it isn't really collaborative and that's a big benefit of the blog. Something you might consider is having some portion of the class write posts and the other portion comment on them - and then switch it around the next time. This would work particularly well for a larger class. With my 3 honors students it wouldn't be that great.
As far as their instructions for posts they were just told to pick a peer reviewed journal article and start by summarizing it and then criticizing it in some way (alternative explanations, better experiments, etc.). This didn't always happen though since they don't have a great idea of what a good peer reviewed journal is. Next time I would have more oversight into what they are posting about to make sure its quality science. On the other hand they have written about some interesting things. I also have them doing something different for a couple posts and you can see that assignment here:
Now that you have each explored a number of aspects of each of your topics I have some more specific things for you to do for the next couple posts.For your next post would like each of you to find a popular press article about a journal article that you are interested in and read both the press article as well as the primary source. You should give a general summary and then discuss what the press article gets right & wrong (or misrepresents). For the primary article find something that the press article has missed that you think is important and discuss it.
If you have problems finding something checkout The New Yorker, the NYTimes science section, LATimes, Salon, The Atlantic, anything by Malcolm Gladwell or Oliver Sacks (though they usually write about more than 1 article). I'm also here if you need any help.
For the post after that I would like each of you to attempt to write a short popular press article about another cool journal article (preferably one that doesn't have something already written about it). Try to find something 'sexy' (well at last as sexy as science can be). This doesn't have to be any longer than your usual posts.
Finally, for your last post of the semester (Friday April 24th - or really anytime during that following weekend) I would like you to write a summary post of what you've learned (overarching themes, as well as specifics). It would also be great if you'd offer any suggestions as to what would have been a more valuable experience for this James Scholar project.
Posted by The Omnibrain at 12:51 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category:
Ok ok.. how about 'Using science to kill the fewest people while seeking world domination'... hmm... maybe not that either, how about 'Using science to protect our way of life'
There we go!
Now that you know what we're talking about you can check out a podcast that I'm particularly interested in called Armed With Science.
Here's the schtick:
Research and Applications for the Modern Military, is a weekly webcast that discusses various applications of science and technology to military operations, and the cutting-edge scientific research and development sponsored by various defense offices. We will be interviewing scientists, administrators, and operators to educate and inform our listeners about the importance of science and advanced technology to the modern military.
I always consider the usefulness of my research in the real world and what I keep coming back to is military applications... I feel a bit guilty for that. Maybe this podcast will convince me otherwise.
Posted by The Omnibrain at 12:28 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 31, 2009
Category: Academia • Popular Culture • Psychology
I'm currently teaching Introduction to Psychology which has a number of university honors students who are required to do extra work in a certain number of their courses each semester in order to get 'honors credit.' The University leaves it up to me as to what they students should do to get this credit. I decided, along with my students, to let them explore the psychological literature through blogging. Each week they pick a relevant piece of literature (in this case - aggression, attractiveness, and political psychology) and write a short blog post about it.
I've found the blog to be a very wonderful way of getting students to explore the literature. It gets them writing as much as the standard end of the semester term paper as well as allowing a constant communication between me and the blog poster as well as the other honors students. This is great - both peer review and guidance by me. It allows students to both explore the literature broadly (which is perfect for psych 100), it also allows me to offer guidance in both the literature they are looking for as well as their thought processes. There are clearly areas that I would have to work on in the future - perhaps integrating the rest of the class into the commenting or offering credit for posting, even if they aren't honors students. I would also like to have more interaction between the different honors students - maybe even in person. This has most definitely been an experiment that I've given very few guidelines for the students on. In the future I'll create more specific guidelines after I do a complete review of how this semester went.
One guilty pleasure of mine though with this blogging thing is that it is less perceived time spent (both for me and the students) since it is split across many weeks as well as the opportunity to do the blogging anytime and anyplace.
If you are interested in reading some of the posts of my students I would very much encourage you to head on over to thoughtsonpsychology.blogspot.com and do some reading and even better...commenting!
I would also appreciate any comments you have on the value of this kind of writing vs. straight up term paper writing as well as comments on how to make this better in the future.
Here's some highlights of the student writing:
Posted by The Omnibrain at 2:12 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 20, 2009
Category: Academia • Humor • Popular Culture • Sex, Drugs, & Rock and Roll • Travel
Funny!
From Jimmy Fallon:
Last night, Michael Showalter (from Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, The State, your dreams) made a cameo on the show. He and our head writer, A.D. Miles, played a couple of Columbia grad students on spring break. Things got pretty scandalous!
Really funny... but totally off base. It's more like Girls Gone Wild... I promise!
-via everyday scientist-
Posted by The Omnibrain at 1:44 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Popular Culture
Straight from XKCD...
I had this exact same reaction.
Now that we're on the topic. I don't like federal money going to pay bonuses but seriously... this money was promised long ago and it's already been given out. Using the tax code to take it back? Wow this is seriously a real cluster @#$!
Posted by The Omnibrain at 1:34 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
