More update
Feb. 15th, 2006 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashnistrikeRight now, I'm supposed to be doing the write-up of the aging work. But I don't want to. I mean, I really don't want to. I always get bogged down in the sloggy part of the literature review. It'll pass; in the mean time, here's sort of a random update of what I'm doing. Or what I'm supposed to be doing.
The undergrads are really awesome this semester. Yesterday was the wrap-up of evolutionary psychology, and we got into a discussion of whether natural selection has any continuing effect on human biology. My favorite student (yes, I've got one) started talking about memetic evolution as a replacement--only he hadn't ever bumped into the concept of memes before; he'd come up with it on his own. Now mind, I'm pretty clear in my belief that you can't get away from natural selection, even if your species spends a lot of time being a selecting influence on everything else. But the conversations get a lot more interesting when they disagree with me. I never enjoyed teaching before I came here. Then again, at Stony Brook I tried to start a discussion on animal testing, and couldn't get anyone in a class of 50 to start an argument.
I had a Brown Bag talk yesterday. At most psych departments, this is a longstanding tradition, in which every professor and sometimes the grad students takes a weekly turn at getting up and telling everyone what they've been working on. Apparently they've never been able to get one off the ground here, so I'm giving it a try. Our first one went well, and we had a full conference room. Mine only had about 7 people; apparently we had some trouble getting the word out. Still, I got a lot of good feedback, and a fun informal discussion. I also got to use, as my central example of a non-credible source, a Weekly World News headline announcing that Dick Cheney Is A Robot. My old advisor somehow got through my head the idea that academic talks are a form of performance art. I persist in believing that this is a Good Thing. Obviously my colleagues agree, since I got here in the first place with a job talk that started by talking about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.
The rest of this month continues to be meetings, with a sprinkling of presentations, followed by meetings. I've got to convince the human subjects board that I'm not about to lock my participants up in an oubliette. I've got to explain to the interdisciplinary nanotech group why, even though it's not hard to get people's opinions on something that doesn't exist, it's hard to get opinions that mesh with the ones people will hold when the thing does exist. And there's a full faculty meeting that just promises to be hysterical fun, or not. Though, in an effort to increase attendance, we have been promised that the university president will not give a speech. Outside of work, this weekend Nameseeker and I have that SF society party that we promised to host, because we were crazy. I'm looking forward to it, because, well, I'm crazy.
Oh, and about fifty years ago, a guy named Clark Hull theorized that long strings of goal-oriented behaviors were learned by what he called fractional antedating goal responses (Hull kind of got off on creating terminology). What this means is that, if you are learning that a certain sequence of behavior results in having dinner ready, first you associate putting the food on the plate with eating, then you associate having the food in the oven with putting it on the plate, then you associate prepping the roast with having it in the oven, and so on all the way back to the grocery store. The behavior always occurs forwards (unless your name is Billy Pilgrim), but the mental representation starts with the reward and works backwards. Anyway, he wouldn't have used my example--he would have talked about a rat associating the final corridor of a maze with the cheese, then associating the previous turn with that corridor, and so on back to the start of the maze. And today, the New York Times reports neuropsychological findings showing that he was right. Since Hull never got a chance to directly test his theory, this is pretty cool. For definitions of cool that involve being a learning theory geek, at least.
The undergrads are really awesome this semester. Yesterday was the wrap-up of evolutionary psychology, and we got into a discussion of whether natural selection has any continuing effect on human biology. My favorite student (yes, I've got one) started talking about memetic evolution as a replacement--only he hadn't ever bumped into the concept of memes before; he'd come up with it on his own. Now mind, I'm pretty clear in my belief that you can't get away from natural selection, even if your species spends a lot of time being a selecting influence on everything else. But the conversations get a lot more interesting when they disagree with me. I never enjoyed teaching before I came here. Then again, at Stony Brook I tried to start a discussion on animal testing, and couldn't get anyone in a class of 50 to start an argument.
I had a Brown Bag talk yesterday. At most psych departments, this is a longstanding tradition, in which every professor and sometimes the grad students takes a weekly turn at getting up and telling everyone what they've been working on. Apparently they've never been able to get one off the ground here, so I'm giving it a try. Our first one went well, and we had a full conference room. Mine only had about 7 people; apparently we had some trouble getting the word out. Still, I got a lot of good feedback, and a fun informal discussion. I also got to use, as my central example of a non-credible source, a Weekly World News headline announcing that Dick Cheney Is A Robot. My old advisor somehow got through my head the idea that academic talks are a form of performance art. I persist in believing that this is a Good Thing. Obviously my colleagues agree, since I got here in the first place with a job talk that started by talking about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.
The rest of this month continues to be meetings, with a sprinkling of presentations, followed by meetings. I've got to convince the human subjects board that I'm not about to lock my participants up in an oubliette. I've got to explain to the interdisciplinary nanotech group why, even though it's not hard to get people's opinions on something that doesn't exist, it's hard to get opinions that mesh with the ones people will hold when the thing does exist. And there's a full faculty meeting that just promises to be hysterical fun, or not. Though, in an effort to increase attendance, we have been promised that the university president will not give a speech. Outside of work, this weekend Nameseeker and I have that SF society party that we promised to host, because we were crazy. I'm looking forward to it, because, well, I'm crazy.
Oh, and about fifty years ago, a guy named Clark Hull theorized that long strings of goal-oriented behaviors were learned by what he called fractional antedating goal responses (Hull kind of got off on creating terminology). What this means is that, if you are learning that a certain sequence of behavior results in having dinner ready, first you associate putting the food on the plate with eating, then you associate having the food in the oven with putting it on the plate, then you associate prepping the roast with having it in the oven, and so on all the way back to the grocery store. The behavior always occurs forwards (unless your name is Billy Pilgrim), but the mental representation starts with the reward and works backwards. Anyway, he wouldn't have used my example--he would have talked about a rat associating the final corridor of a maze with the cheese, then associating the previous turn with that corridor, and so on back to the start of the maze. And today, the New York Times reports neuropsychological findings showing that he was right. Since Hull never got a chance to directly test his theory, this is pretty cool. For definitions of cool that involve being a learning theory geek, at least.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 02:14 am (UTC)I always viewed my lectyres as this as well.
entertaining news on the vindication of Hull. In grad school I studied animal learning and motivation with an old guy who was one of Hull's students. weeee!
no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 04:33 am (UTC)