Diary/Blog of my rather mundane academic life

I'm sure no-one is particularly interested and I might get bored myself in a couple of weeks! A couple of people have asked what I do for a living so here is a link to my work page. The idea for this particular page is that I don't know where else to put book reviews or stuff about talks I've been to and so on. Anyway .....

April 30th

Usual busy week in terms of teaching and assessment with my first years completing their Individual Differences test and my third years working on Cluster analysis and Discriminant Function Analysis - yes they hate SPSS too! For those of you that know me you might be interested to hear that I have just been promoted to Principal Teaching Fellow!

April 24th

I knew that this diary thing would never be up to date... I attended an excellent talk last week by Professor Uta Frith on models of autism and she reported some fascinating research on emotion recognition which suggests that the impairment may not be as specific as has been suggested by others. We have two more weeks before we enter exam mode here which means no teaching but a shed load of marking inside a very short timeframe. I'm still working on the DD303 CD but that will have to be put on the back burner until the exams are over.

April 10th

Another busy month, although the past couple of days have been a bit more lazy. I've just got back from the Belfast Conference where Prof. Michael Eysenck, Dr. Jackie Abel and myself gave some lectures to OU students and young people studying A level psychology. There must have been about 250 there and the sessions were really interesting with some great questions. Back to normal now as term starts again on Monday so I have a pile of marking to finish before then.

March 13th

In case you think I've done nothing for the past month it is in fact quite the opposite - I've been swamped. We have just had the Scottish Launch of National Science Week here in St. Andrews and we have had quite a packed programme. Richard Dawkins and his wife Lalla Ward were here last Thursday where they delivered a fascinating talk based on Richard's latest book "The Ancestor's Tale". The talk was fascinating and, you'll know if you have read his books, a little controversial. Yesterday we had our Discovery Science Open Day alongside my colleagues from Geography, Biology and Marine Biology, which was a great day out for all of the family. My students did an excellent job setting up experiments and demonstrations for 8 to 80 year olds. There are still quite a number of events to come this week and we have another Open Day next week. To top it all we have also had external assessors in this week evaluating our teaching which thankfully received the all clear. I could do with a week off after the stress of all that!

February 13th

First year classes on a review of statistics seemed to go well - always difficult to tell as, for some reason, people who are very vocal in the pub seem to say nothing in class. Here's a link to the Belfast Conference if you are interested. Our Open Days for potential students start next week and it's my job to give the guest lectures so I have to update them now. I know Sundays are supposed to be a day of rest but it seems to be the only day I get anything done.

February 6th

I've just come back from Dundee after running some workshops (Social Psychology, Individual Differences and Group Dynamics) at the Association for the Teaching of Psychology (Scotland) which was great. Term starts tomorrow and I have my first class at 10.00 so it has been a busy day getting stuff together - it was all in the filing cabinet, honest. National Science Week is fast approaching so I really must do some advertising here, and I also have to prepare for a talk in Belfast for the Association of Psychology Teacher's which is on April 6th at Queen's - if you'd like further info. drop me an email. I'm also thinking about running a couple of pre-summer school events for DSE212, one in Glasgow and one in London so, again, if you are interested please drop me a line.

January 23rd

The deadline is fast approaching for my application for Summer School (staff have to apply every year) and it is looking like Durham on the 16th July - like many tutors it is the highlight of my year. We have our external examiners coming in just over a week so I need to put finishing touches to our spreadsheets, assessment is definitely the worst part of the job and since we are semesterised we have to do it twice a year.

January 8th 2005

Well we are back to work and I've spent most of the past month marking my fourth and third year essays, our exams start next week so clearly that's how I'll be spending the next month too! I have to admit I haven't been doing anything intellectual other than reading a stack of books that I put on the back burner - none of them were anything to do with psychology. Everything is gearing up nicely for National Science Week here in St. Andrews with a variety of Open Days, lectures and other events I'll probably put something on the website next month in case anyone is interested.

Sunday 5th December

I'm not sure where the weeks go but I've been so busy marking coursework that I haven't really had a chance to update this site. I do the news page every week but I'm starting to realise that being an academic is actually rather dull. There are two bits of good news I suppose in that I managed to pull in a couple of small grants (one with Emma Flynn who wrote a chapter in the ED209 books) to do some research work and the other is that I've managed to invite Prof. Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene etc) to come and give a talk at our opening event for National Science Week in March.

Sunday, 7th November

This is it, the beginning of Reading Week so at last I get a bit of a breather. Went to an interesting talk by one of my undergraduates on the psychology of love and attraction - Tom Sharpe wrote that "Mother Nature has the propensity to make men temporarily insane simply in order to propagate the species" - although most of the research seems to suggest that women play a much more active role than men in procuring this propagation.

Sunday, 24th October

The weeks seem to be flying by and are gradually filling up with meetings and tutorials which is a pleasure but it doesn't leave a lot of time for thinking! Fortunately we have a Reading Week in a couple of weeks time so I have a stack of books I want to get through before the marking season starts.

Sunday, 17th October

We've started our Open Days for prospective students which means that I have to give a couple of talks a week to them (and sometimes their parents) which is actually a lot of fun. I'm sure you know how difficult it is to explain to people what psychology is about compared to what most people think it is about! I also spent a weekend away with my third year students up in the Highlands which (apart from summer school) was one of the highlights of my year - I must brush up my guitar skills and modernise my repertoire, Johnny B Goode is a little dated now I think.

Sunday, 10th October

Teaching has started in earnest and I have two modules running this semester - A third level course in Research Methods and Statistics and a fourth year option in Theoretical Perspectives in Psychology. Both very different courses and as you would predict the first one isn't exactly a bundle of laughs. However, my students are busying themselves designing projects and applying for ethical approval to carry them out. I've also just finished a grant proposal to look at the teaching of communication skills to medical science students, in collaboration with one of my colleagues.

Sunday, 3rd October

I got back from the London revision day which was a long day of travelling but interesting at the time. I have no idea how OU students manage to keep up their motivation when many of you are so isolated from other people to talk to about your studies. I suppose it is odd that I am surrounded by people who do the same line of work as me and we end up talking about TV and sport most of the time. A busy week again last week with lectures starting and our 300 first years to register etc., My third and fourth year courses have both started too so I've been beavering away looking for new ideas to teach the finer points of research methods and statistics as well as the theoretical course. It is strange how after ten years of teaching it is still the case that I am writing lectures the day before the class - if it wasn't for the last minute nothing would get done.

Sunday 25th September

Well, the usual hum-drum week of meeting new students and parents - actually it is a lot of fun, although probably less so for them. We also had a big meeting to look at our plans for National Science Week next year where we home to be the launch site for Scotland!

Sunday, 18th September

Had a great day yesterday in Glasgow for the revision session, lovely to see old faces and meet new people, feedback seemed very positive so I'm now also looking forward to the one in London in a couple of weeks time. First years arrive for our orientation week tomorrow and then lectures start the week after so it is going to be quite hectic.

Sunday, 29th August

Meetings, meetings, meetings ..... I'm off to Prague on Thursday for a week so I need to get organised before the resit exams. I did read an excellent book this week by two of my colleagues (Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour) which draws out the major distinctions and history of evolutionary psychology. Glasgow and London are both up and running for DSE212 revision days, still aren't enough numbers for other venues or courses as yet but I'll see what I can do.

Sunday, 22nd August

Had a great time in Stirling last Thursday and now I'm planning to take a few days off ....

Sunday, 15th August

I've spent all week advertising these revision days and organising venues so not a lot has happened to be honest. I'll be in Stirling on Thursday for a meeting with a group looking at Occupational stress that I am collaborating with so if you are there at Summer School we might bump into each other.

Sunday, 8th August

Well that is my annual fix from Summer School all over and done with. We had a fantastic week and I met some great people - intellectually stimulating and some great social chat too! It seems to fly over since it is so busy all the time but I still got a chance to catch up with old friends too and especially people that I had only met virtually via email.

Sunday 24th July

A bit of a dull week as I was away at a course on Alcohol Awareness - some pretty frightening statistics here particularly with regard to the amount of time it takes your body to get rid of alcohol before you drive the next day! For many people their average Friday night consumption probably means they shouldn't drive until Sunday I bet. Since it is summer time I'm trying to set up some research and there are two or three things on the go at the moment including some work with Emma Flynn (ED209, Book 3, Children's Minds) who has a neat little idea to extend some aspects of her work into Higher Education. It just so happens that a group at Stirling are looking at Occupational Stress and want to collaborate, so that should give me something more to think about at Summer School! I'll be heading there next Friday so if anyone is arriving early or staying over from the previous week I'm happy to meet up for a drink that evening. I'll take some CDs with me so I can post them to anyone who orders online while I'm away.

Sunday 18th July

I've just finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time which is a story written from the perspective of a young boy with Asperger's. There has been some academic debate concerning how accurate it is but to be fair I read it in one night so it is riveting if not entirely accurate!

Sunday 11th July

I'm kind of on holiday for a week from work but I am still doing some OU stuff if you want to drop me a line. I've updated some of the links on the ED209 site and am preparing (as I'm sure many of you are) for Summer School.

Sunday 4th July

This week we are hosting a Sutton Trust Summer School for young people from all over Scotland. I give the first lecture tomorrow as an Introduction to Psychology and then we cover learning disability, visual perception, social psychology, and brains: pain and pleasure. Should be a good week and hopefully will encourage the students to apply to University even if they hadn't already considered it as an option. Other than that I'm writing a talk for Summer School and planning a short holiday ....

Saturday 26th June

An excellent week with my students graduating! It's always a big thrill to see the gowns, and parents, husbands and wives, beaming faces. I managed to finish the ED209 update and have it proofread so that is going out tomorrow. I also foolishly offered to organise a reunion of past colleagues and students in August 2005 to celebrate our department's Silver Jubilee and now I wish I had kept my big mouth shut - tracking down many of these people will be a bit of a nightmare I think. On the other hand, it is astonishing how many of these people have gone on to major academic and other careers!

Sunday 20th June

Attended a fascinating talk by Prof. Brenda Smith about the challenges facing HE and putting the student first - something that I have a lot of sympathy with given that some academics make HE a bit of a mystery by using convoluted language to bamboozle people. If you are not sure what I mean take a look at The Sokal Hoax. She also extended the argument that we should have high expectations of our students and those expectations are that they should do well - whereas some academics see their role as a culling process to only allow the best to do well and others will drop by the wayside. I don't know if you watched Human Mutants last week on TV but you would have seen one of my colleagues David Feinberg describing what makes faces attractive and the concept of Optimal Outbreeding (The theory that not mating with individuals too close nor too far from the genetic centre was optimal in terms of the natural selection/rejection process. Mating with someone too close could pair up defective alleles and cause harmful mutations, while mating with someone too far from the genetic centre would break up the genetic construction from what the organism knows innately to be "safe." This fits fairly well with Moral ideas about the closest relative one should be permitted to mate with, and therefore an avoidance of incestual relationships. Several theories suggest that the immune system played a major role in this process for our ancestors.)

Sunday 13th June

Examining is now officially over so I have just about finished the update to ED209 book 3 (the 2004 edition) and should mail that out during the week at some point - if you don't have it by Friday please feel free to drop me an email. I've also just finished reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything which is excellent, if you have no background in science this is one of the best books around and also very funny! I suppose one of the beauties of being an academic is that you get paid to read books and talk to people - a bit like being a librarian but louder. Big Brother has finally gone to far and I am unable to even watch it now. My wife happens to be very keen on the football (though I'm not) so there should be plenty of opportunity for me to do other things over the next few weeks.

Sunday, 6th June

Well, thank heaven's that that week is over - one last meeting and I can get down to some proper work I'm trying to develop an online course in Critical Reasoning as well as working on a project with Prof. Steve Reicher about the BBC Programme "The Experiment" - so no, I don't get twelve weeks off now that the students have gone home! I've also been helping the Association of Teachers' of Psychology (Scotland) update their website and I need to do a bit more there.

Saturday 29th May

Ho hum, nearly at the end of marking now - and if it hadn't been for Hell's Kitchen and Big Brother I would have been finished! Examiners' meetings all week so it is difficult to get on with anything new. However, I hope to get some more multiple choice questions sorted out for the DSE212 site and maybe make a start on the other sites as well

Saturday 22nd May

Marking, marking, marking ....

Saturday 15th May

Well we start our exams on Monday so all I've been doing is marking coursework for the past fortnight, teaching I love but marking is a drag..... Having said that the work is pretty good so I'm happy with that. There have, however, been some interesting articles in the press recently and the Tony Buzan programme just over a week ago on TV was food for thought. Alongside that I have to admit I've only watched Eurovision and my wife is revving up for Big Brother - if we have been to Summer School together you'll know that I am a bit of a fan myself - it sounds like there isn't much else going on at the moment but that is what marking does to you!

Sunday 2nd May

Went to a fascinating talk on Friday by Prof. G. Rizzolatti the discoverer of "mirror neurons" (something that Ramachandran has suggested is the discovery of the 20th Century). At it's simplest level, mirror neurons fire when you perform a purposeful action i.e. reaching for some food, however, they also fire when you see someone else reaching for some food. This could suggest that they play a major role in learning, for example, imitating other people having seen them gain food or whatever. Click on the link to see Ramachandran's article.

My third years had their penultimate class on cluster and discriminant analysis this week which in theory is quite straight forward but the maths behind it and SPSS can be a bit alarming! Exams start here in a fortnight so things could be quite frantic with student questions this week but I'll keep updating the site at the weekends.

Sunday 25th April

Great couple of days in Belfast and lovely to see a Scottish contingent over there too! A couple of people asked if I had any further notes to accompany the slides and I have tried to put something together if you would like to email me. It was also a real honour to receive a little award from the Association via Prof. Gregory - in these cut-throat days of academia everything goes on your C.V. We are about to enter the exams period here at work so this week is review sesssions - which is dull for both me and my students.

Sunday 10th April

I was supposed to be taking the week off but ended up writing a practical for my first year class on Monday. This is to look at Individual differences so I thought we might investigate both personality and intelligence. It's pretty well docmented that there is a relationship between your scores on Eysenck's Extroversion/Introversion scale and task performance under low and high stress. The theory predicts that since introverts are chronically over-aroused then their performance under stressful situations should decrease as compared to under low stress situations. An easy way to test this is to have an introvert perform a task alone and then again in front of an audience (which for us introverts is stressful!). Extroverts on the other hand are chronically under-aroused so under higher stress their performance should improve. This should result in a negative correlation between Extrovert/Introvert score and change in performance. To make it more interesting we thought we might use a spatial task on computer (a bit like Tetris but in 3-D). After everyone has completed the task we can then have them all fill in a verbal skills task. The prediction is, if on somewhat shaky ground, that females should out-perform males on the verbal task whilst males outperform females on the spatial task ..... I have about 250 first year students so that should be a big enough sample to work that out!

Sunday 4th April

Peace and quiet at work although quite a few final year students have been around with questions about how to analyse their project data. There are some really interesting projects but some do highlight the problem of careful design at the beginning giving you analyse-able data! I've written my first talk for the Belfast conference and the second is gradually taking shape - although pulling together some good slides is proving difficult. Otherwise a pleasantly quiet week which has allowed me to catch up with writing references, returning library books and tidying my office, not very exciting but you know how it is.

Sunday 28th March

Thank heavens that it is now the Vacation period! Students have gone home after a week of study and submitting their lab reports. Monday had my first years looking at non-experimental approaches to doing Psychology where we talked about Surveys, Archival research, diaries, meta-analyses and ethnography - sounds like a lot to cover in just two hours but I think they got the message that we don't all have to wear white lab coats and treat people like chemicals in an experiment! My third years had their introduction to Factor Analysis and thankfully that is all we have to cover since mathematically it is quite complicated! There were some interesting articles in the journals this week including fMRI scans of people watching a movie which is a bit of a departure from the usual static images that are presented. I can't say that the results were astounding but they do suggest that there are good correlates between brain activity across participants and particularly aspects of the material that they are viewing - not exactly unexpected but still a new approach. The BPS magazine, The Psychologist, has an interesting article on Social Constructionist views of masculinity and there is a bit of a critique there.

Saturday 20th March

Busy week this week with my first years learning how to use the chi-squared test. It's always hard to think of good examples so I had each class choose their favourite genre of TV (e.g. Soap operas, Drama, Comedy or Sport) and then calculated the chi-squared to show that there are significant differences compared to chance for their preferences. The obvious extension of this is to use the chi-squared test of independence to show that if we compare these choices by males and females a pattern should emerge that shows their preference may be depedent on that. I try to explain how TV advertisers might use these data to target their products at particular groups.

My second years are currently covering Language and we had a big debate about how language might have evolved. Maybe from starting out with grunts and those grunts gradually becoming more specific for particular objects or actions, or maybe we developed in via some kind of "prosody" e.g. mimicking the sing-song nature of other species and then these become more highly specialised. We also discussed what it is that constitutes a "language" and I suggested the D309 approach i.e. Symbolic, Arbitrary, Semantic, Shared and Intentional. Some definitions of language e.g. Hockett, require that it is spoken but that seems to me to be false given that we are happy to accept Sign Language etc., as a true language.

My third years, heaven bless them, had to struggle with a problem concerning the use of loglinear analysis which is essentially an extension of chi-squared but, as ever, with SPSS it takes on an added complication!

Tuesday, 16th March

I think I've missed the point of "blogging", you aren't interested one jot in what I do day-to-day since it probably isn't that different to what you do in many respects. I guess if anything you are interested in musings on psychology - and that's what I'm supposed to do for a living of course. I was listening to the radio last week and someone said that Sir Isaac Newton published the book "Optics" 300 years ago last week, a few years later (well quite a few actually) the poet Keats described the book as destroying the romance of the rainbow. Newton had demonstrated that light shone through a prism split into the colours of the rainbow and for Keats that removed some of the poetry of life itself. Personally I don't think it does remove the poetry I think that it explains the magic, as children or even when we are just in that right mood we recognise that the world can be a magical place (at least in the sense that we don't really understand the phenomena we see) and that is the elegance and beauty of science.

I just happen to be also reading (and I know you think this is a bit sad, but I'm not very well-read so I try to read something sensible at the same time as reading something for pleasure) "The Picture of Dorian Gray". I'm finding it a bit hard work, and irritating at points, but Oscar Wilde says "He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us ..." and then goes on to say "It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions ..". This whole bit struck me as being something you'd be unlikely to hear from an author like Oscar Wilde but for me that is what psychology should be about.

You might also have read in the Newspapers at the weekend about the Prof. who has worked out the probability that God exists .... if not check out the science news/in the media section.

Saturday 13th March

Interesting talk yesterday on whale-songs, nothing to do with psychology as far as I can make out but the organiser has interests in animal communication. However, big day today with our National Science Week Open day, 40 of my third year students have set up experiments etc., for the general public and we have had over 100 people through the doors. A great success given that in some years we have been lucky to get twenty people. Check your local newspapers for similar events!

Saturday 28th February

Two days on strike and I have still done none of the things on my to do list. Managed to set up some meetings with publishers for next week but still haven't written the book review I was supposed to do or my talks. There was a piece of good timing in last weekend's papers for my Regression class with my first years when a Stats Prof at UCL published a formula that is supposed to predict the right age at which to get married M=1/e(X-Y) + Y where Y is 16 (the age you should start looking for a partner), X is the age at which you will give up looking, and e is the natural logarithm 2.718. He predicts that most men will get an age around 32 whereas women around 27 - actually I think it is not completely serious science but it gave my students a laugh and fitted nicely with the lecture. My third years are preparing experiments for our National Science Week Open Day (13th March, Parliament Hall, St. Andrews) and that is coming along nicely.

Sunday 22nd February, 2004

Last week was a busy week for the website and for work! 9 D309 CDs/PDFs, 11 DSE212's, 6 ED209's and 7 D317's. My third year stats class are coming to grips with Multiple Regression using SPSS and I'm still trying to finish writing a course in Critical Reasoning to be delivered online to our first years. Next week I have some first year stats classes looking at Correlation and Regression, a Teaching and Assessment Committee meeting and a couple of days on strike ...... I guess I'll take this time to prepare my talks for the Belfast conference coming up in April! I also have to send out flyers/invitations to our National Science Week Open Day on 13th March in St. Andrews.

Friday 20th February, 2004.

Guest lecture by Professor Steve Reicher: The Experiment - revisiting Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Study.

Steve, and his colleague Alex Haslam at Exeter Uni., were approached by the BBC to see if they were interested in recreating Zimbardo's classic study. However, they weren't interested in a replication as they felt that the original study was flawed on a number of grounds: (1) it was not a study of group power and tyranny more a study of obedience (i.e. Zimbardo "caused" many things to happen) (2) the 'prisoners' did not automatically become victims, (3) groups are not mindless and irrational. There is, of course, very little published, peer-reviewed information available on Zimbardo's study but it has been accepted as a crucial, albeit unethical study in group processes. Steve's work, over the years, as often been primarily concerned with point (3), the notion that groups are mindless and irrational comes from Le Bon's classic work whereas Steve says that groups are instead often about resistance. Steve's work has been hugely influential, not just theoretically, but also in practical applications. For example, he collaborates closely with the police to look at riot situations and crowd control at football matches. The Experiment was televised on the BBC in 2002 and involved14 volunteers (500 applied) being divided into matched-groups to act the roles of prisoners and warders in a BBC set. Crucially a whole range of measures were regularly taken (behavioural, physiological and psychometric) to monitor the participants' reactions to the environment and events. Full details are still available at the BBC website.

Review of Fuster: Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition

The book itself is way-beyond the requirements of the OU courses at present - and indeed most undergraduate courses

The author, Joaquin Fuster, discovered a group of neurons in prefrontal cortex which appear to act like "working memory" and one of our central problems has been to work out how cognitive processes map on to the brain's circuits. Fuster views the brain as a neural network involving parallel distributed processing. The essential currency of cognition is the "cognit" - an item of knowledge that is stored in a network - and each node of the cortical neural network stores yet more elementary representations that make up a cognit. Not all cognits are equal, symbols for example are presented in high ranking cognits, themselves produced by the convergence of cognits from lower levels. In other words, the essential transactions underlying cognition involve the activation of different networks, arranged in hierarchies, that represent the building blocks of cognition - Fuster proposes an isomorphism between the processes and the structures of the mind and of the cerebral cortex. PDP networks have of course been widely used in cognitive psychology. These artificial networks have multiple layers, learn associatively, provide a complete output from incomplete input data, and show 'graceful' degradation in the face of partial damage. These are all presented as being satisfyingly brain-like.

In truth though, the performance of artificial neural networks is fragile in real-world environments. They seem ill-suited to represent Fuster's cognits, because the nodes of the networks usually represent functions with continuous values and their outputs combine with those of all the other nodes to compute the output of the network. The nodes do not represent discrete bits that can simply be composed into well-defined higher order constructs. Indeed, artificial neural networks can approximate any arbitrary non-linear function without resorting to extensive hierarchies, yet hierarchies seem to be a fundamental organising principle in brains. Artificial neural networds also scale notoriously badly, so most successful simulations have usually used networks with substantially fewer than 1000 'neurons' in contrast to the 100, 000 neurons contained in each cubic millimetre of neocortex. How we learn effectively and stably with such large networks is a mystery. Most models propose simple feedforward networks, which do not capture the essential recurrence and local processing of the neocortical circuits, nor do they capture the temporal aspect of processing, which is a feature of perception and action.

These are though exciting ideas and it seems that our current knowledge of the dynamic interaction of groups of neurons and the weighting attached to their output may lead us to that greater understanding of how cognitive processes really do map on to physiological circuits.