welcome, neighbor!

About a year ago, my research group moved our operations to a different lab. Our new space has a door that opens directly into adjoining office space. They aren't our offices, but after several weeks without seeing anyone in there, I began using the space when I needed someplace to sit and work on my laptop when I need to leave the lab to afford some privacy to participants in my experiments. I'd just let myself in through the unlocked door and sit in there at a table, leaving no trace of my presence, aside from a hand-written note introducing myself, explaining when and why I let myself in, and asking them to contact me if there was any problem at all.  I arrived one day to find the door locked for the first time. I went out through the hallway and spoke to an administration person who happened to be there. She explained that they'd just finished changing the locks on the door in response to security complaints from the "occupants," and that I'd no longer be able to use the space. The hallway door to those offices has a glass window. I check sometimes and have still never seen anyone in there.

The incident is fairly representative of my experience at this particular institution.

pondering this plague of pervasive plagiarism

My TA responsibilities recently included marking an assignment for a 2nd year research methods course.  119 students read the same paper and answered the same questions about it (e.g. What were the hypotheses?  What were the dependent and independent variables? etc.)  A significant majority plagiarized.  I was instructed to give them zeros on questions for which their answers were plagiarized, which is a fairly light penalty under the university's plagiarism standards.  Still, the net effect was that the class average was close to failing.

I mention this because I've been fascinated by student response to accusations of violations of academic integrity.  I got many emails from students who plagiarized, and there were several very common responses:

• I am very upset
• I worked very hard
• I did not plagiarize
• I did the same thing on the last assignment and got a good grade
• I don't know how else to say what the authors said

 The first two seem to reveal feelings of entitlement.  If I work hard, I deserve a good grade regardless of the quality of my work.  If I don't get what I want, that makes me upset; if I'm upset, you better fix it.  These people have a very different idea of what "higher education" is supposed to be about than I do, but I'd have a hard time saying they're wrong about what it actually is.

Denial is fascinating to me, because it was clear that most of the deniers didn't even understand what they were accused of.  They just denied as their first instinct.  I'd already sent most of them a link to a university site that explains plagiarism quite thoroughly, which they seem to have completely ignored.  Often denials were accompanied by lame "proof" of their innocence, unambiguous and perfectly preserved electronic evidence notwithstanding.  Once I directed them to the specific section of the website that dealt with their specific form of plagiarism and showed them examples of how what they did is a perfect example, they usually stopped denying and switched to other tactics.  It was especially interesting when the strategy shifted from denial to the 4th response and/or 5th response.  "I didn't plagiarize... I always plagiarize... I don't know how to do anything other than plagiarize."

It became clear while I was marking these that the standard strategy employed by most students was to find the sentences or paragraphs in the paper where the authors came closest to answering each question and just copy what the authors wrote, despite instructions to "use your own words" and despite the general warning issued to the class after the previous assignment to familiarize themselves with university plagiarism guidelines..  Some especially inept students just straight-up copy and pasted words from the paper to their assignment, but most made at least a shitty effort to paraphrase.  (Closely paraphrasing without quoting is a form of plagiarism.)  That's generally a good strategy.  Unless the person marking the assignment knows the original paper inside and out (which starts to happen when you have to mark 119 assignments about it), it is difficult to detect paraphrased plagiarism.  I did find quite a bit of it on their first assignment, but I suspect I overlooked the vast majority.  So they generally face low risk of detection for this form of cheating, and they don't have to do all the hard work of fully understanding the research and expressing ideas in their own words.

This is all consistent with what I've observed for quite a while: undergraduate students are generally terrible at writing and critical thinking, and go to great lengths to avoid both.  And I can't really blame them, because that's a fairly rational response to the incentive structures they typically face.

embracing my own agency

For most of my formative years, much of my schedule was controlled by authority figures: schools and parents. When I was first in a position to have much greater control over my own time, I squandered it. Then I got a job for a few years, and my time was controlled, my efforts directed. After quitting it, I again squandered my time. I've had a few more cycles like that. Throughout all of this I tended to think of myself as lazy, and wondered how I could fight my own laziness.

It occurs to me now that years and years of taking orders from authority figures really fucked up my ability to manage my time, and to direct my efforts towards goals of my own choosing. Whenever I had time to myself, I just wanted to do nothing, perhaps because I was accustomed to goal-directed activity being unpleasant. And it was unpleasant partially because I wasn't the one setting the goals. I suppose these repeated periods where I squandered my time were when I rejected being an agent for someone else's goals, but was incompetent at setting my own and executing on them.

Anyway, I think that slowly over the last 2 years of grad school I've started to realize that my time is my own, and that the way I spend it today is a big part of what options I'll have tomorrow. (Perhaps "realize" isn't the right term; "act like someone who understands" might be more accurate.) I'm getting better at identifying what options I want to have tomorrow, and how to direct my energies towards those long-term goals. Maybe that's just behaving like a fucking adult, but it's big progress for me, and I feel pretty good about it.

I'm more productive at work now, allocating time both to short-term (applying for funding next month, teaching responsibilities, various new student administrative things) and long-term projects (developing a plan of study for my PhD work), and doing so far more efficiently than ever before, though with plenty of room for improvement. The same is true for home life. For example, last weekend I canned 23 liters of tomato sauce with some friends, to make some delicious local produce last into the winter. These are the kinds of things I've been saying I wanted to do for years now, and now I'm actually doing them. Items on my list for the near future include homebrewing beer and submitting a paper for publication, both of which will happen in the next couple months.

I'm trying to make similar progress with personal relationships. I've had very few deeply satisfying connections with other people, and the few I've had haven't lasted very long, probably at least in part due to my own failure to maintain them. I suspect I'll be able to apply these newfound abilities in this part of life as well. We'll see how it goes.

Aside from the personal utility I'm deriving from these changes, it occurs to me that the explanation I've hypothesized -- years of taking orders from authority stunting my ability to effectively identify and pursue my own goals -- could have enormous social implications if the same dynamic has been playing out for a large population, which - I - suspect - it - has. I'll have to think more about that.

weighing the question: does it matter?

One reason I'm studying what I'm studying is that while I enjoy learning just for its own sake, it feels like masturbation if it doesn't matter. And I know that pursuing science just for its own sake can, and often does, lead to something that matters. But I like studying cooperation and conflict (as opposed to string theory or tactile perception or Russian literature) because, aside from the masturbatory feeling that it is enjoyable and interesting, it also seems to me that this shit matters. It seems clearer in my academic field than in some others (and less than some too) that my work has potential to do some good. I suppose that is a personal judgment, perhaps largely political. My hope is that as I get better at doing the science, I'll also be increasingly able to do it in a way that facilitates positive social change, if only on a tiny scale.

I hope that will be worth the valuable time and energy I'm devoting to the formal process of obtaining the proper credentials required by the gargantuan institutions where most of this kind of work is done. Grad school is good because it, at least in theory, strips education down to its best parts: there is minimal formal coursework, most of which involves small class sizes, and there is lots of independent, self-motivated investigation of topics that interest you (although personal interests have to be weighed against the interests of the people funding the research), under the guidance of experienced and knowledgable supervisors. Grad school is bad because in order to afford it, most of us have to actively participate in the formalization of the worst perversions of education: marking exams and teaching huge introductory courses to masses of students with little interest in the material.

a few life updates

Not much blogging lately, but here's a few things that are going on in my life:

• I've been spending my work hours writing my thesis, which I'll defend in mid-July. Today I spent the afternoon redoing some statistics that were a bit off, and now I'll have to rethink a section in light of the changes. This section isn't especially important to the thesis as a whole, but it is important to a direction I'd like to take in the future.
• I'll be traveling to my first academic conference and presenting a poster later this month. The poster will focus on the experiment I ran this winter. I've never been to Oregon before.
• I've had all three cats since my ex moved out, but today Hattori goes to live with her. It will be sad to lose him, but we think this is the best possible arrangement for everyone. We'll try it for a few weeks and see how it goes. One potential benefit of his absence is that Horus might be more social once he realizes he doesn't have to hide from Hattori's bullying.
• Softball season is in full, glorious, swing.
• This weekend is the Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair and Dundas Buskerfest!
• I think I'm starting to experience human emotions a few times a week. I kinda like it.

Today is 2 years since I moved to Canada. I love it here.

plans

Ah, yes. I am heading to Guelph next year. Sad to leave McMaster, but excited about the next step. I'm working on writing up my thesis for the next few weeks, and will defend it on July 19.

fish and future

Students in my animal behavior lab class this semester are doing some experiments using fish, so I've been trying to keep 120 guppies alive for them. They all lived 3 days on my watch, but today I found 4 dead ones. They were all the same kind of fish, and the others of that type are looking pretty unhealthy, so I'm betting I'll lose more over the weekend. The deaths are frustrating, but aside from that, I'm finding fish-keeping to be a surprisingly enjoyable endeavor. There's something soothing about sitting and watching them swim around, listening to the water run through the filter.

In other news, I received word that I will be accepted to the Psychology PhD program at the University of Guelph, to work with this guy, so that instantly becomes my leading option for next year. There's really only one competitor, and I'm still waiting to hear from them.

I'm due to defend my Master's degree this summer. I can probably work out a way to stay here for my PhD, but I'm also trying to line up other options. I've applied to the University of Guelph, which is just down the road from here. I'm also submitting an application this week to the University of British Columbia, which is a long way from here. If I'm accepted at one or both of those places, I'll have a tough decision to make.

union

My union of teaching assistants has been on strike for over a week now. I've withheld my labor, and put in 5 days of picket duty, each 4 hour shifts, for which I was paid $10/hour from union funds, which partially offset my lost teaching wages. Picketing has been a memorable and exhausting experience. I wonder if I've been fighting for nothing though.

I suspect the union will cave and accept a bad contract from the University, which is a shame, because I think it will hurt the quality of education here in the long run, and it will make it even harder for grad students to pay their bills without debt financing. Ideally we'd have a huge turnout and a decisive rejection of the offer, which would put tremendous pressure on the administration to come back with a better deal that includes protection for TAs from tuition increases, better benefits, and limitations on class sizes. More likely, in my estimation, is that the offer will be accepted with less than half of the union bothering to vote. Results will be announced later today; maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

I do want to get back to work soon though. I genuinely like many of my TA duties (with marking exams as the primary exception), and picketing is distracting me from my research. But if the strike continues, I'll most likely be back out on the lines...

Margo

My co-supervisor died last Thursday. She was a wonderful person and a brilliant scientist. I've written about deaths of friends and family on here before, but I feel like I have very little to say this time, despite the loss being quite severe. I'll miss her.

various stufffffffffff

So I'll get back to my series about evolution and morality eventually. Class has been over for several weeks, but the appendicitis derailed me and now I've got a big report due on Friday May 15. My experiment is over; now I have a crapload of data to analyze to include in that report. Softball has started back up too, which is fun. But I'm very busy.

I'm fairly thoroughly immersed in this whole grad school scene, and I feel very isolated from almost everything I was a part of before I came here. I don't have television, don't read mainstream publications often, and rarely talk to Americans about political issues. Hell I don't even watch sports any more. I'm really in my own world. When I occasionally get a glimpse of the real world, I find it very difficult to process. It makes me realize how all-encompassing the American propaganda barrage really is. Unplugging from that really clears your head, but after a while brief re-exposure to it is quite shocking. I don't know how to describe it. Reality-based reality is so different.

Notes on Morality and Evolution: Intro

I TAed a Behavioral Ecology course this semester, and a couple weeks ago I gave a 45 minute presentation to the class. I was asked to present about my research, but since I didn't have any decent data from my experiment yet, I decided to just present on topic related to my research that is somewhat relevant to the course. I'm going to make a series of blog posts based on my presentation.

So, here you go.

Intro.

This picture was chosen by the course professor to be on the front page of the course website. It is a great choice because it is such a dramatic illustration of an animal behavior that seems puzzling but can be explained quite well. The course covers parental favoritism and sibling rivalry, and students learn that these phenomena are widespread in the animal kingdom and that there are piles of data showing how these behaviors are explained by evolutionary theories.

I think it is interesting that this picture should even seem so dramatic to us. After all, if this behavior is so common, and makes such good sense in light of well established scientific theory, why should it be so surprising to us?

I think that it is because of our moral sense that the image is so powerful. We feel bad for the little bird getting squashed by his mother. It seems unfair. And if we were to see a pictures of a human mother doing the equivalent to her child, we'd probably make a moral judgment about her.

So, this series of blog posts is about morality, specifically from an evolutionary perspective. Morality is a broad topic, and a difficult one to define, despite most of us feeling like we have a pretty clear understanding of what it is. I'm not going to attempt to thoroughly cover the subject; instead I'll be breaking morality down into components or looking at certain facets of morality. By components I mean things like I mentioned in regards to the baby bird: feelings of fairness, empathy, and moral judgment. A facet of morality to keep in mind is that our moral sense seems to push us to act in service to others, as opposed to our own "selfish" interests. Another is that moral rules and judgments often feel absolute, an observation that I'll expound upon in the next post.

I'll discuss 4 pieces of research in 3 future posts, that will look something like this:

1) Why did morality evolve?
A model of stability-dependent cooperation.

2) Phylogeny and the Origins of Fairness.
Fairness in monkeys?

3) How do we study morality in psychology labs?
i. Economic games in the lab: Dictator games with manipulation of information.
ii. Proximate factors: audience effects.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

barely here

Haven't had much inclination to attend to this blog lately. My attention has been elsewhere.

• I noticed today that the NCAA tournament is starting this week, and apparently Maryland made it in as a 10 seed. I haven't paid any attention to college basketball at all, and have no plans to start. This will be another year where I don't even fill out a bracket.
• I started an experiment recently, and so far the results seem to be very weird. From what I can tell, nothing is turning out like we expected, and some things are going the exact opposite way. Science is weird.
  
• It is weird mostly being around the kinds of people who uncritically support Democrats after a lifetime of mostly being around the kinds of people who uncritically support Republicans. People around here love Obama and love to belittle people who supported Bush or McCain or Palin. My blood-drenched tyrant is better than your blood-drenched tyrant!
• A week from tomorrow I have to give a presentation to 200 students in a 3rd year behavioral ecology class about morality. I ought to be working on that.
• Friday and Saturday were the psychology graduate program's annual recruitment weekend. That means it must have been a year since the last recruitment weekend where I showed up without knowing why I had been invited and somehow talked my way into a lab that wasn't supposed to be accepting any more students. I'm still quite pleased with how things have worked out for me.
  

my job this semester

The class I TAed last semester was amazing. I wish I had taken something like it as an undergrad.

This semester I'm TAing a behavioral ecology course:

Behavioural Ecology is a field devoted to understanding animal behaviour in terms of evolution and ecology. In this course, we will study the behaviour of animals, why such behaviour evolves and how behaviour may enable animals to adapt to their environments. As a field, behavioural ecology emerged from a synthesis of many scientific disciplines including ethology, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, zoology and population genetics. Note, this course is NOT centrally concerned with Homo sapiens, and will take a comparative approach to the study of
animal behaviour.

I would have loved this course as an undergrad too, but I stayed away from biology because I hated dissecting things. I haven't taken a biology course since my freshman year of high school, 1994-1995. I don't remember evolution being covered in that course, and there certainly wasn't any cool analysis of behavior. The stuff worth learning managed to elude me for a long time, but I found it eventually.

Pictures I like.

This picture was taken at The Phoenix, the graduate student pub on campus at McMaster.



It includes the following noteworthy storylines:

• David (2nd from left), a friend from Ohio, and Bailey (middle), my sister, came up to visit for...
  
• It was taken November 27, 2008, which was American Thanksgiving, and 2 days before my 28th birthday.
• It includes Dan's asymmetrical beard (far left), one of the more amusing results of a decision among the men in my class not to shave for a few months.
• It includes Kira's recent short haircut (2nd from right).
• It was taken by Leo, a visiting grad student from Brazil, who I really ought to have some pictures with.
• It is the only picture I've seen from a very fun night that featured a much larger crowd, including my supervisors, who I really ought to have some pictures with.

Here are other pictures I like.


Hanging with the bride (Kate... on the left), the night before her wedding. Canton, Ohio. October, 2007.


Last day over there: (left to right) Paolo, Ate Lady, Jakob, Ram, JJ, and Jam. Calamba, Laguna, Philippines. November, 2006.


Kira and I, in top shape clearly. Annapolis, MD. Christmas, 2006.


Left to right: Sarah, Dave, Phil's ass, Phil, Phil's hair, Zsaz, Kira. Ada, Ohio. May, 2008.



Left to right: Katsu, Hattori, Horus. Ada, Ohio. March, 2008.

Teacher leave them kids alone

I have to read and grade/mark* about 250 short essays by Wednesday. I've never assigned grades/marks to people before. From the few I've glanced over, it is going to be ugly.

* - In Canada you don't "take" a test, you "write" a test, and then you receive a "mark" instead of a grade.

Distractions

Explaining his exasperated voicing of a desire to shut down his blog, Dennis Perrin writes:

This fucking election is killing my mind and stomping my soul. American political reality is as bad as I've ever seen it, and I suspect we haven't reached bottom yet. Maybe we never will. Maybe we're destined to float down the shit stream indefinitely, splashing, sinking, swallowing mouthfuls of sewage. Hard to tell. All I know is that I'm sick of the rancid taste, and would much prefer a healthier diet, or at least something with a fresh lemon scent.

I kind of feel the same way, and I'm not evening watching TV coverage (don't even have TV) or reading mainstream news. I read 2 articles in an Ohio newspaper this weekend and nearly went crazy. Everything said by politicians is full of lies, and all coverage of political events is full of lies. It is truly disgusting, and it kills my mind and stomps my soul.

In one hour my first class starts, an undergrad course that I'm TAing, Evolution and Human Behavior (here's the syllabus if you're interested). I'm taking two class as a student, Contemporary Problems in Psychology and a Statistics course, which start next week. I kind of hope that maybe I'll just tune out the entire worthless world for a semester and just focus on study and research. I doubt it will happen but it is kind of a nice idea.

Back-to-school

The weather here has been rather cool the last few days, with highs in the low 70s and chilly evenings dipping into the low 50s or lower. It is starting to feel like fall, which still triggers back-to-school feelings for me despite it being 7 years since fall actually meant that I was starting classes. But this year I am, and I'm excited. The undergrad course I'm TAing, Evolution and Human Behavior, starts one week from tonight, and I think my classes start the week after that. I've been filling out all the forms and all that administrative bullshit while peeking ahead at some of the things I'll be reading.

I didn't believe I was done with school when I graduated in 2002, but I wouldn't have guessed at the time that my next class would be in 2008 in a psychology department in Canada. Funny how things happen, eh?

"Evolutionary" Psychology? Why bother?

In an imporant sense, there is no such thing as 'evolutionary psychology' because there is no such thing as non-evolutionary psychology (after all, scientific psychologists cannot be 'creationists'). Evolutionary psychology is likely to be a temporary discipline, which will exist only as long as it is needed. As psychologists of all stripes come to make explicit their currently implicit hypotheses about human nature, past selection pressures and environments of evolutionary adaptiveness, evolutionary psychology will wither away as a distinct field and all psychology will be 'evolutionary' - for precisely the same reason that all biology is evolutionary. Psychology is, after all, a branch of biology.

Salmon C & Symons D (2001). Warrior lovers: erotic fiction, evolution and female sexuality. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

While I don't go so far as to predict the future, the theory here seems right to me. I usually feel a little silly when I say I'm going to study evolutionary psychology for exactly that reason - all psychology should be evolutionary. I want to study human behavior, and I expect that study to be informed by and compatible with evolutionary theory, as all study of human behavior should be.

In a somewhat related note, I'll continue using this "grad school?" tag despite "grad school." or grad school" being more appropriate now.