anbanindex1517

I was looking at a new article and noticed an icon I had never seen before.  “Listen.” I’m a sucker for new things, so I clicked. And I am... quite impressed. The audio is being read by a machine, not a person, but the tone is not horribly mechanical. There are subtle things like emphasis on emphasizing words like “widespread.” It says “For example” when the actual text reads, “e.g.” By default, the program automatically scrolls through the text and highlights what it is reading. You can turn it off, though. As you can see, you can adjust the volume and reading speed. But once you adjust the speed, it goes back to the start of the article, which is frustrating. The experience is not seamless. In this article, it skipped over the authors – but it read the tabs at the top (“Full Article (pause) Figures and data (pause) References (pause) Citations,” and so on).  Another frustrating element of the experience is that the software says “parenthesis” and “end parenthesis.”  Wor...

From time to time, I hear students ask questions like, “Why don’t universities hire instructors who can speak English?” It’s usually a complaint about professors who have “foreign accents.” Hereˆs one from Quora, with some more at the bottom of the post: “ Does it make sense to hire Chinese professors in US universities when they can’t even speak basic English? ” The “basic English” comments sounds contemptuous. Okay, let’s acknowledge that everyone has an accent. And that it’s very difficult to separate complaints about accents from racist attitudes. That said, there can be obstacles to communication between a professor and students.  I once saw video of Stephen Hawking teaching – after his motor disease was fairly advanced but before he got his voice synthesizer. He could speak, but not loudly and not with full fluency.  Hawking had an assistant (maybe a graduate student?) who was familiar with how Hawking spoke who relayed what he said. Some students did not need this. Yo...

Yesterday, Texas Parks and Wildlife released a press release about Australian red-clawed crayfish ( Cherax quadricaratus ) in South Texas. What is kind of weird is that it the press release mentions “Researchers from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley” (UTRGV) but didn’t say which researchers or even which department. This morning, I get emails from people thinking I was involved, because I was the only crayfish researcher at UTRGV for a long time. Never mind that I haven’t worked there for while. I don’t know who from UTRGV had a hand in this. Dan Johnson, who knows Texas crayfish better than I do, says that this is not a new discovery. He stated that red-clawed crayfish were found in one pond nine years ago. (I am a little annoyed that I was around at the time and nobody saw fit to mention this to me. I could think of a bunch of ways I could have used that information.)  Edit : This might be a reference to this record of red-claws on iNaturalist . They have now spread t...

A perennial academic question resurfaced on Twitter yesterday: “If I’m a co-author with an ‘equal contribution’ statement, is it okay to switch the place of my name and my co-author name on my CV?” Usually, the discussion is about how swapped names might be interpreted by a potential CV reader.  The general mood in responses is usually, “Don’t do it, because some readers will see this as shenanigans.” Everyone who has read a lot of CVs from students or early career researchers knows that some people try to “puff up” their credentials.* Readers do not appreciate that.  It’s not even whether this counts as “lying.” Readers of CVs usually have a lot of CVs to assess, and it’s reasonable to be annoyed by CVs that make readers put in more mental effort recalibrating those inflated claims of accomplishments. What I want to do, though, is flip the script. I don’t want to talk about how the reader might interpret re-arranging the order of names on a paper listed in a CV.  I wa...

A lot of arguments about science, and particularly scientific publication, seem based around an underlying difference of opinion about what work is worthy.  I get the strong sense that for some researchers, running experiments is the only work that matters. Anything else is just a nuisance, a distraction, a thing that no “real scientist” would do if they weren’t forced to do so by career necessity . On search committees, it was job candidates who kept asking about how they could get out of teaching. Online, I think this attitude informs a lot of discussion around publishing and peer review.  Submitting to journals? Nuisance. For some people, science paradise would be a website that automatically pushes out protocols and data and protocols, so anyone who wanted could use the data. But no time wasted on pesky explaining work to other people. Just pure flow in data collection. Peer reviewing? That takes me away from data collection, so you better pay me to make it worth my time...

From time to time, I see people say that some group of animals have nociceptirs or "pain receptors" amd then use to to say this prooves those animals feel pain. There is a lot of subtle misuse of definitions going on there. Nociceptors are neurons tuned to tissue damage. Pain is not tissue damage. The two are related but they are not the same. Calling nociceptors “pain receptors” is like calling auditory sensory neurons “music receptors.” And then use that animals can hear to claim that animals appreciate music. Well, no. There is a difference between sensory neurons and a higher order perception or psychological state arising from those sensory signals. https://hartvig-faulkner.mdwrite.net/why-enjoy-the-ability-to-play-on-the-internet-casinos | https://contestalert.in/members/spotact76/activity/427633/ | https://telegra.ph/Play-Texas-Holdem-Poker-Poker-04-12 | https://carmine-cyclamen-w6kfl4.mystrikingly.com/blog/casino-whoring-an-operating-approach-to-exploiting...

The fall semester is underway at almost all universities now, so this is as good a time as any to give some advice to students.  Write shorter emails.I gave that away in the post title, so why am I still writing? Because I want to try to explain why I give this advice. Friends, your profs get a emails. A lot of emails. A great heaping buttload of emails. We get them from chairs, we get them from deans, we get emails from chair who are forwarding the dean’s emails, we get them from funding agencies that we have never applied to a grant from, we get them from almost every administrative office on campus, we get them from journals, and we get them from students. I don’t think it’s easy to understand how much of a professor’s life revolves around emails. It is the default mode of communication for universities. I think for many students, their typical mode of communication is through their phone, either by text or social media. Email? That’s for old people.  But a lot of professo...