The Best Job in the World

Or: The Best Jobs in America. This CNN.com/US Bureau of Labor Statistics info (via this lifehacker.com post) lists the top 37 jobs in America. At the top is systems engineer. But let's look a bit below that...

Coming in at number 3: college professor. Median salary: $US70,400; top pay: $US115,000. Hmm, I don't work at a college, and I'm not a professor. In the US, "college" means "university." In Canada, "college" generally means either a post-secondary diploma-granting institution, or a bachelor's degree-only community college. But still, it does specify "professor." I guess there's a lot of good that comes with tenure.

In the number 23 spot is clinical psychologist (and 24 is psychiatrist). Ooh, close, but that's not me, either. Clinical psychologists are the ones who see patients (whoops, I mean "clients") and help them with psychological disorders, as do psychiatrists. Interestingly, this listing is not for professional psychologists, which in addition to clinical psychologists also includes counseling psychologists. Anyway, let's check out the pay. Median salary: $US81,100; top pay: $US172,000. Wow, that looks pretty good! (Naturally, psychiatrists make even more--remember, they can make $500 per session in private practice.) I've heard that clinical and professional psychology programs are now the hardest to get in to--even harder than medical school. If you're planning on this as a career, you better have straight As, research experience, and probably some volunteer experience, too.

While I'm rattling off stats, here are some more psychology numbers, from an APS Observer article:

• 6% of the 1.5 million bachelor's degrees earned by students in 2006-2007 were awarded in psychology
• psychology bachelor degrees awarded rose 17.3% from 2001 to 2007
• in the academic year 2006-2007, over 90,000 bachelor's degrees were awarded in psychology
• 21,000 master's degrees were awarded in psychology
• and just over 5,000 doctoral degrees were awarded in psychology
  

(Did I mention that I love my job? I really do. I think I do have the best job in the world. It sure beats working retail.)

Why aren't you studying?

Career Transition

OK, this is just what I don't want to see in my email: information specifically directed to CAST (contract academic staff: teaching) about "career transitions." In other words: What to do when you are canned. Wow, how classy!

This document was prepared by Employee & Family Assistance Program (motto: "Healthy people, healthy workplace"), which is a part of the UofA's Human Resource Services. (The PDF document properties actually includes the name of the person who created it, but I don't want to embarrass her. That would not be classy.) It includes a lovely pastoral scene of a road stretching off far into the potential with opportunity trees providing gentle, sun-dappled prospect shade. Although I can't quite see what's off in the distance. Is it possibility? Promise?

Let's go through this document. Hmm, "Resume Writing, Interview Preparation." (I don't have a resume, I have a curriculum vitae, thank you very much. Sniff.) "Financial Consultation Service," "Career Consultation Service." Oooh, hey, lookit, "Counseling Services." I get to talk to a counselor about losing my job! That will help with my well-being! Er, but only for 3 months. (I guess after that, I will have gotten a job. Or I won't be depressed any more. Right?)

Now, to be fair (which I don't have to be, whyshouldI?), the Career Transition & Job Loss web page does have similar documents to this for other constituency groups: Career Transition Services for Support Staff, Career Transition Services for Administrative Professional Staff, Career Transition Services for Academic Staff. But somehow I doubt that anyone else got sent a blanket email distributing their career transition resources. Just contract academic staff.

Needless to say, getting this document freaked me out. A lot. Is this some sort of hint? Like showing the chicken the hatchet? Or was it a just-in-case sort of thing? Maybe HRS realizes that CAST will likely be the first choice in many departments to get cut. Despite my oft-demonstrated superior teaching skills (toot! tooting my own horn, toot!) when it comes down to money, sorry bub, you're the low man on the totem pole.

I did go and talk to some people about this. What I heard was reassuring: they don't want to get rid of me (or other contract staff in the Department), and they're trying to find other ways to save money--but, of course, nothing is guaranteed. So, I'm going to be a bit antsy until (if!?) my contract is renewed at the end of the summer. Yeah, I have to wait that long. Hey, look what's in my email. A notice that MacEwan University is hiring a lecturer in psychology. Excuse me while I go and prepare my resume...

Why aren't you studying?

The End of Term

In one of my classes this term, I finished my lectures with time to spare. In the other two, I was so far behind, I had to skip content (which I hate to do) and talk really fast (which I really hate to do).

I try to make lectures fill the time available. That's not easy when I've got a new lecture: I don't know how long it'll take exactly. Maybe students will have lots of questions, or maybe my PowerPoint slides are confusing and I have to make up for it with a lot of top-of-my-head explaining. On the other hand, it could be deadly boring, and I'll rip through it just to put an end to everyone's misery.

One thing that helps is showing videos in class--for a number of reasons. They're great buffers. Running short of time? Cut the videos. Lots of time to spare? Show them all. Of course, I'd always like to show all the videos, because I believe there's some educational value in hearing people explain their theories in her own words. Especially if they're, er, dead now. I still have fond memories of some of the interesting videos that were shown in the classes I took as an undergrad.

Despite cutting out some videos, things didn't work out this term. But I know why: not all terms are created equal. For example, Tuesday/Thursday courses can have 25 or 26 classes during a Fall or Winter term. That's a difference of 80 minutes, which is a lot of lecture. It's even worse for Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Friday classes, which can have 36, 37, or even 38 classes--creating a maximum difference of 100 minutes.

Beyond showing videos, I really don't know how else to handle this variability. Should I create more lecture material and only use it some terms? But is that fair to the students who enroll in a different term and are "deprived" of some of my wonderful lectures? Should I just rip through it all when I'm short of classes in a given term? Or should I just try and fill the minimum amount of time, and then cancel any extraneous classes? (Why am I even asking this? Believe it or not, some students do not want profs to cancel any classes--they want to get as much of the time they paid for as possible.)

I'm looking forward to Spring term because the number of classes is always reliably the same. Although the amount of time I have to lecture in Spring is actually less than a Fall or Winter course. *sigh*

Why aren't you studying?

The Importance of Sleep, Again

I've written about the importance of sleep before, but I'm lecturing on sleep in intro psych so it's on my mind again. Actually, it's on my mind a lot--every day. That's because I haven't slept through the night in over a year. (This past week has been especially hilarious: the baby has actually had a few good nights sleep-wise, but on those nights, my other daughter has woken up in the middle of the night--needing Dada to help her get back to sleep. I totally get the irony of lecturing on the importance of sleep when I'm likely the most sleep-deprived individual in the room.)

What's worse is that I've been reading a lot of really good research showing just how important it is to get a good night's sleep. The Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) has an annual meeting showcasing a huge amount of interesting work on sleep. At their meeting in June, 2009, one study in particular caught my eye (and the attention of some journalists and bloggers). It was found that sleep quality (not quantity, per se) was correlated with math scores. That is, the better your sleep, the better your scores on math exams. English scores went up, too. You don't think you can affect the quality of sleep you get? Sure you can: sleep on a regular schedule, don't pull all-nighters, and don't have a baby who wakes up every couple of hours. (OK, maybe that last one is a bit hard to do.)

Sleep also has been shown to aid memory: "Sleeping on it" may just be the best way to remember something. And in another widely reported finding, sleep quality turned out to be important for learning in general, and for learning vocabulary in particular. Ya, more gooder sleeps does to help your talking goodly-like and knowing the betterer words.

Ugh, I need a nap.

Why aren't you studying?

Baklava!

That's a picture of my baklava to the left there. To get my mind off feeling sick and miserable, I decided to make baklava. Sure, I could easily stop by Paradiso Pastries (11318 134 Avenue) on the way home. But there's just something about creating using your own hands.

I'm a fan of the blog dinner with Julie, written by a (*choke*) Calgary mom, cookbook author, radio personality, caterer, and (obviously) blogger. Coincidentally, she also made baklava recently (I made mine first). I've made a few of her recipes, but this time I just wanted to get rid of some phyllo I've had in the freezer since, well, er...since before my kids were born. It was still good, amazingly.

My recipe came from my main man, Alton Brown. I thought his recipe was interesting, using three different kinds of nuts. Instead of walnuts, though, I opted for cashews. Also, to put a Canadian spin on it, I added some maple syrup to the honey syrup. Yum!

How does this relate to psychology? Well, I am talking about the psychology of food and eating in my Advanced Perception course, and I'll be talking about hunger, eating, and weight in intro psych soon. Hmm, after eating all this baklava, maybe I go and weigh myself...

Why aren't you studying?

The Laryngitis

I'm sorry for the state of my voice this week. I know I sound like a frog with, um, a frog in its throat.

I was hit by a particularly nasty virus (picked up from my oldest daughter, via daycare or school, grr!) that decided to settle in my lungs, turning into a lower respiratory tract infection--likely pneumonia--activating my asthma, and giving me bronchitis. The result of all this was a cough that was so bad that my wife took her pillow and went to sleep in a different room. Wearing earplugs.

I started taking antibiotics for the infection, and maxed out on daily doses of inhaled steroids to open my airways. Unfortunately (I am coming to a point here, really; this isn't just about me describing my illness, honestly), one of the side effects is a hoarse voice. Or, in extreme cases, laryngitis: an inflammation of the larynx, which includes the vocal apparatus. Hence, my sounding like a goat that's eaten, um, a Smart Car. Wait, that doesn't even make sense. Did I mention I've got a fever, too? But look, you're learning all about parts of the body. Yay!

I always try my best to work through whatever illness I've got. It would be nice to put up my feet at home, and snuggle into an easy chair with a bowl of chicken soup to watch Oprah. But I don't see that as being professional. If I miss a class (or two, or three), that throws a monkey wrench into my schedule. Do I cut things out of the lecture? Do I just talk really, really fast to get through it all? Both of those are not fair to students--the paying customers. So, the show must go on.

Obviously, if my voice goes completely, I've got to give up. So complete laryngitis is one of the few things that will keep me out of the classroom. The others are explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting. Of those three, I'd pick laryngitis.

So, what do you think? Should I stay at home with Oprah, or try and croak through my lectures?

Why aren't you studying?

Anatomy of a Lecture: Part 3

So far, I’ve talked about deciding on a new lecture topic, and the prep work that went into it. This time, I’ve got a collection of links to websites on synesthesia. I know I promised a “ridiculous” number of links, but these aren’t all the resources I used; I’m not going to link you to scientific journal articles, and, er, I can’t link to an actual book. Still, there’s lots of good stuff out there (and it’s not overly technical).

Tests: Think you’ve got synesthesia? Take one of these tests and find out for sure (the first one is a “real” test, the others are not so hot).

• The Synesthesia Battery is David Eagleman’s rigorous, standardized test of synesthesia
• Synaesthesia Toolkit from Multisense Synaesthesia Research lab, directed by Prof. Julia Simner at the University of Sussex
  
• Synesthesia tests has a number of different, um, synesthesia tests (unfortunately, it’s in poorly translated English)
• Synesthesia Test assesses your grapheme → colour synesthesia (but if you simply click on the same colour over and over though, it hilariously thinks you have synesthesia!)

Simulations: If you don’t have synesthesia, it may be hard to imagine what it must be like. Here are some simulations of it.

• animator Samantha Moore's video An Eyeful of Sound  represents her visual experience of sounds, in collaboration with Dr Jamie Ward
• a sort-of simulation of grapheme → colour synesthesia: type letters and watch them change colours
• a strange Java applet that turns visual images into sound, called The vOICe
• here’s a musical sketch pad that turns your drawings into sound
• experience sound generated from watercolour paintings by an artist
• the Music Animation Machine lets you turn any piece of music into a coloured visual display

Documentaries: Here are the best documentaries I’ve found--some from TV, some web-based. If you come across a particularly good video, send it my way.

• I think the best one so far was produced by the BBC series Horizon, called “Derek Tastes of Earwax” (love that title). It also aired in the US as “When Senses Collide” and “When Senses Overlap” (available on YouTube)
• ResearchChannel has another good one, called Red Mondays and Gemstone Jalapeños: The Synesthetic World (available on YouTube). BoingBoing has an abridged version as well (available on YouTube).
• Another Discovery Channel show, One Step Beyond, has a brief video on synesthesia that features interviews with David Eagleman and noted synesthete Sean Day (available on HowStuffWorks).
• The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast has an episode on Synesthesia
  

Magazine articles: (sorry)

• Everyday fantasia: The world of synesthesia from the APA Monitor
• “Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes” by V.S. Ramachandran and E. M. Hubbard in Scientific American
• Do you see what they see? from Discover Magazine
• The Most Beautiful Painting You’ve Ever Heard from SEED magazine

Books/book authors:

• Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia - on Richard Cytowic’s website
• Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia - on David Eagleman’s website
• The Frog Who Croaked Blue: Synesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses - by Jamie Ward
  (related animations are on YouTube)
• Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant - by Daniel Tammet
• Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens by Patricia Lynne Duffy is an older book

Organizations:

• Canadian Synesthesia Association
• American Synesthesia Association
• UK Synaesthesia Association

Websites by/for/about synesthetes: Sometimes, it’s best to hear what synesthesia is like first-hand, from those who experience it.

• Sean Day’s Synesthesia website
• The Synesthesia Tree
  
• r/Synesthesia Reddit
• otherthings.com
• Synaesthesia.com
• sensequence

Other good stuff: These links don't fit into any other category, but are worth a look.

• the Wikipedia article on synesthesia is actually pretty good--honestly (so is the page on synesthesia in art)
• the Scholarpedia article on synesthesia is also quite good
• and then there’s the synesthesia article at The Psychology Wiki
• Go Cognitive has a series of interview videos with researcher Jamie Ward
• Scientific American answers the question, What is synesthesia?
• Ramachandran and Hubbard answer some questions about synesthesia
• Ramachandran’s Reith Lecture on BBC radio, titled “Purple numbers and sharp cheese”
• Ramachandran’s TED lecture includes some of his work on synesthesia
• Crossing Sensory Boundaries from Wired Science discusses synesthesia and binding

Research groups/researchers: If you want more hard-core knowledge, you can find lots of peer-reviewed research articles here.

• Educational Neuroscience Lab -- Ed Hubbard's lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Eagleman Lab -- at Stanford University
• David Eagleman -- personal website
• Synaesthesia Research -- at University of Sussex (Jamie Ward)

Qualia: “Qualia” is the term used by philosophers to mean our internal subjective experience--you know, do you “see” red like I “see” red? Synesthesia has been called “qualia becoming deranged.” If philosophy is your thing, here's some more about qualia in general.

• until Scholarpedia's article on qualia is ready, you might as well start at Wikipedia
• here's a very brief introduction
• now, here's a whole website devoted to qualia: The Qualia Manifesto
• finally, here's a really long paper on the qualia of colour experience

And if that isn’t enough for you, Crétien van Campen has collection of over 50 synesthesia websites, and a bibliography of Synesthesia in Art and Science that's over 50 pages long. Is that ridiculous enough for you?

Why aren't you studying?

(12/31/2023: Links updated)