QuantaBox

Each month, QuantaBox sends you science and neuroscience related schwag. You can choose among various Quanta delivery schedules from Alpha, Beta and Theta depending on how much or how long you want your QuantaBox. If you don't want something in your QuantaBox send it back in the competitive antagonist box. QuantaBox, just the right key for your lock of science interests. Mention EngagedBrain and receive your first month free!

Disclaimer: This is a work of satire. In the tradition of A Prairie Home Companion, this ad, among others, will form the backbone of the underwriting and sponsorship of my podcast.

Is a Strike == a "Labor Situation" == a "Labor Disruption"? Only when they're framed the same

globeandmail.com

I've recently noticed I use a lot of parentheses in writing and I think its a side-effect of years of academic writing. Sometimes I wish I could represent parens in speech outside of talking under my breath. One place I recently noticed a lack of verbal parens where there should have been has been in the discussions of the strikes by CUPE 3903 and CUPE 3902 at York University and University of Toronto. Cheryl Regehr, Provost and Vice President of the University of Toronto, recently wrote in the Huffington Post (with a great response from a UofT graduate TA here) that teaching assistants rejected an offer of raising their hourly wage to $43.97 but forgot to add that with that increase in hourly pay their total hours changing (decreasing from 205 to 180). Without the information in that paren we can only see the TAs/contract faculty as greedy, unappreciative and spoiled brats. When you do the math the TAs suddenly don't look so greedy. Now TAs make $42.05 with a 205 hour cap for $8,620.25 while the proposed package is equal to $7,914.60, otherwise know as a $700 decrease! 

globeandmail.com

Regardless, the point the TAs/contract faculty are making is that UofT could offer $15,000 with a 1 hour cap or $60,000 with a 0.25 hour cap, or $247,355.32 (the pay of Provost Regehr) with a cap of 0.06 hours, but the problem is not the pay per hour. The problem lies in the cap of $15,000 in funding which is less than the poverty line for a single adult in Toronto. But I also suppose this $15,000 funding package is where the real problem lies. A number of people question whether a "part-time" job really deserves to be paid at a "full-time" rate, especially when the TAs are already being paid to go to school.

nationaladjunct.tumblr.com

Last week brought us National Adjunct Walkout Day and was quickly followed by these strikes highlight systemic problems in academia. Its hard to find data for attaining tenure-track positions that encompasses R1 institutions, primarily undergraduate institutions and community colleges, but the figure is likely much lower than how many want to. Although I don't have the exact figures, it seems like the number of students who think they can "go pro" and those who actually do are in line with college athletes' perception of their ability to go pro and those that actually do. Although a PhD should not only be seen as a path to working in academia, it is often the carrot used to attract students and outside academia a PhD is generally not viewed overwhelmingly positively. Broadly, the goals of Universities are to create and disseminate knowledge and that occurs through three avenues, research, teaching and engagement. Previously, I discussed some of the misperceptions of the goals of Universities and I see some of those issues creeping up in the strikes. 

1) We're training too many PhDs

Early booms in research funding drove up the need for labor to complete research grants which spiraled into the need for a large number of cheap trainees to put out ever higher and higher amounts of research in order to compete for more grants in a shrinking pot of money. Or put another way, we've created a system where tenure-track faculty, in order to be competitive for grants and tenure, need large labs of highly motivated trainees because without high output their labs can't progress.

In a similar vein, reduced funding at the federal and state(or provincial) levels increased the need for Universities to find alternate avenues of funding which led to increases in the number of students, in particular foreign students (as well as an increase in their tuition costs). This led to the increased need for more cheap instructors to teach the increased number of students. With the number of tenure track positions holding steady and an ever increasing pool of PhD graduates, with few equivalent positions outside of academia we've created an underclass of highly educated individuals with no where to turn except for part-time teaching work while holding out for a tenure-track position. 

2) What is the role of Universities and Colleges and what are students hoping to get from a college education

In Scott Walker's latest brush with education in Wisconsin we see some of the misperceptions of what college professors do. As I stated earlier the role of higher education is to create and disseminate knowledge. The triumvirate of higher education, research teaching and engagement map onto those rules with research to creation and teaching/engagement to dissemination. Across the scope of higher education we see the emphasis of creation and dissemination skewed to smaller or greater extents towards one role or the other with R1 institutions skewed towards creation and primarily undergraduate and community colleges skewed towards dissemination (with a number of institutions not fitting into this broad generalization). At large research institutions, teaching, defined narrowly as teaching a course, is generally viewed as a secondary responsibility. From the outside, that might be surprising, but when you look at how tenure is assessed (emphasis on research productivity, i.e., papers/grants) and how administration assigns instructors to courses (with over 60% of courses taught be non tenure-track faculty) we see why faculty at large research schools focus on research (which also involves teaching). 

While we recognize the value of a highly educated populace, a number of people question whether college is simply expensive job preparation. We're less than a week into the strikes at UofT and York and if you check the strike related hashtags on twitter (#WeAreUofT, #YorkUStrike, #CUPE3903, #CUPE3902) you find a mix of support from the TAs/CF and others in solidarity with a number of undergraduates either posting that they're mad about the strike and want to go to class or posting about the fun things they are doing in their "time off." Like the misperceptions of what Universities/colleges are for there are misperceptions about what students should be doing in college. If you go to college and simply attend class, take exams, write essays and work a part-time job then yes, college is simply job preparation, but in that case, probably not very good preparation. If on the other hand going to classes seem like a small part of your college experience because you're working, taking internships, participating in extracurriculars (whether its sports, music, drama, or student clubs) and challenging, stressing and growing, then college is both (excellent) job preparation and for creating a highly educated populace. 

In the end, both of these issues come down to how we as a society value higher education. Do we feel that investment in the research of colleges/universities and in the education of our populace as a whole is a worthy investment? If we don't value the research or Universities/colleges or feel that private industry will make up the difference then we should continue defunding higher education. If we think that our populace attaining higher education is not a worthy investment then we should pass the costs of attending both secondary and post-secondary onto only those who choose to attend. However, before we make those decisions we have to get everyone on the same page and understand what higher-education does and why it does it as well as agree what attending secondary and post-secondary schooling actually does for students.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of satire. In the tradition of A Prairie Home Companion, this ad, among others, will form the backbone of the underwriting and sponsorship of my podcast.

False Memory vs Constructive Memory: A case study of BW

Source

Subject BW is a 55 year old male with 12 years of education plus 18 college credits. For the past 34 years he has been employed in journalism. His case was brought to attention when his dramatic first-person story that he’s told and retold since 2003 of being in a helicopter near another helicopter that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq suddenly morphed into a different story where his helicopter was the one that was hit. In the aftermath of this change in story he was suspended from his job, with all signs that he will be fired. Previously, I showed that everyone's stories change over time, where details are changed, details are added and details are omitted (Kurczek, 2014). Everyone has heard of fishing tales where the fish gets bigger and bigger every telling, but not everyone tells their story over and over again on camera. I've since seen story after story after story about false memories and while I was impressed with the slate article (except for the blatant plugging of their book), I can't see why false memories keep being brought up.

Episodic memory, our memory for the events we experience in life is inexorably linked with episodic narrative, how we tell the stories of our memories. However, does the episodic narrative of an episodic memory constitute the entire memory? Stories are altered by the contexts that we are in including the people that we are telling our memory to (your friend versus your parent versus a research assistant) and the time (i.e. how much time you have to talk and how long its been since the experience). Is someone lying because their narrative of their memory changes in different contexts? This is not to say that contextual changes mean that instead of a helicopter in front of you getting hit be a RPG its all of a sudden your helicopter, but makes the point that our memories are inherently labile, constantly going through changes as they are disused or updated in subsequent re-experiencing. Few people's lives are documented as news anchors, politicians, and celebrities (the other cases highlighted in the slate article) so our own fibs, embellishments and misremembered events are brought to light and to shame at the same frequency. BW's downfall, as with previous politicians stems from our perceived belief that they be trustworthy, how can you trust anything someone says when one of their memories appears to be a lie? In the future we may be able to go to the tape, but for now we just have to understand that (almost) all of our memories are flawed and constructed from bits and pieces of what we perceived to be the experience and (un)motivated remembering and forgetting of the experience in the time since.

P.S. How does one become a quoted expert, do you have to write a book or something? Considering that my dissertation included a chapter on narrative and memory and how narratives change over time in healthy individuals and individuals with amnesia, I think I may have been of service in this case. I guess this blog will have to do for now

VTA Marketing

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Disclaimer: This is a work of satire. In the tradition of A Prairie Home Companion, this ad, among others, will form the backbone of the underwriting and sponsorship of my podcast.

Buffet Attitudes: Everyone's a special snowflake

The recent measles outbreak has highlighted the emerging trend of picking and choosing what you want to believe or what you trust. In teaching the scientific method, one of the first tenets that is taught is skepticism and questioning everything, but it looks like we've taken that a little too far. I first came to the thought of buffet attitudes through my experience with craft beer. In my view, the rise of craft beer (along with unique tastes in other aspects of life, like food, music, etc) is closely linked to our teachings to young children in the late 80s and early 90s, that everyone is special (thanks Barney and Southpark!). Politicians are somewhat dumbfounded by millennial behavior as their beliefs appear to be more liberal (particularly in social issues), yet are more likely to call themselves politically independent. Likewise, millennials are less likely to be religiously affiliated than previous generations (in some areas of religion this has previously been termed Cafeteria Christianity). Common across these trends is the "buffet attitudes" where younger adults are picking and choosing what they want and what they like rather than buying into beliefs or attitudes wholesale. In terms of cognitive biases, "buffet attitudes" may be called cherry picking, figuratively referring to selectively choosing points that affirm their beliefs and refute beliefs they don't hold while ignoring those that don't support their beliefs.

However, contrary to this trend toward special "snowflakness" is the pull towards wanting to be categorized in as part of a group. As Invisibilia recently discussed, when given a chance we'll often jump into one category or another and once in that category fiercely defend it (see the The Robbers Cave; Sherif, 1954; 1961 for some of my favorite social psychology experiments on group affiliation). A recent study in PLoS found that when your social identity (the group you feel you belong to) is threatened by scientific findings, you may come to devalue the findings. More broadly this speaks to a trend in science denialism (here and here).

This begs the question, how do we as scientists move to educate the general public on decisive issues? Putting out research in pay-walled journals doesn't seem to work and neither does trying to communicate that work through traditional public outlets such as radio, magazine or newspapers. Individual blogs, like this one, may have a readership that can be counted on one hand and all of these previously mentioned outlets assume that by simply putting information out there, the public will be able to parse it. We already know from the anti-vaccine movement that just putting research out there won't work (especially when one study that supports a particular position is completely fabricated). Science is built on multiple investigations from many different perspectives, theories and motivations and with the evidence summing to provide evidence that certain ideas are incorrect and other ideas are not incorrect as of yet. Because of the sea of publications each year,  it is almost impossible to wade through the evidence and form an informed conclusion about almost any issue, especially when the most accessible avenues for researching scientific issues does so through false equivalencies and "controversies." It seems like many of the problems with science communication stem from issues with how the methods of science is taught. Humans carry out science and humans are messy creatures with their own thoughts, beliefs, wishes, desires and needs. We present science as this noble and true venture that is without influence or problems instead of the complex and sometimes chaotic enterprise that it is.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of satire. In the tradition of A Prairie Home Companion, this ad, among others, will form the backbone of the underwriting and sponsorship of my podcast.