Previously, the Australian Research Council (ARC) expressly forbade use of grant funds to pay publication charges. This prevented many of us from publishing in open-access journals, as they generally charge a fee. Fortunately, the newly-revised funding rules change that, and instead strongly encourage open access, via journals and via depositing one’s research in an institutional repository. Hooray!

Time is harder for humans to understand than is space. Our visual systems abound with machinery for processing extensions of space. A continuum of locations are processed in parallel, their spatial relations apprehended without cognitive effort. But for the most part, the mind represents time poorly. Our perception experience is of a very short duration- the specious present.

Applicants to the lab postdoc / advanced RA position wanna know what they’d be in for if they took the job. Below are some recent conference abstracts from the lab, along the lines of the funded project. In Multiple Object Tracking, At High Speeds One May Only Be Able To Track A Single Target—Even If No Crowding Occurs Alex Holcombe, Wei-Ying Chen

Bianca Hewes is a high-school English teacher and educational technology enthusiast that I was fortunate to connect with. She’s tried a lot of different websites in her search for tools to increase student engagement and improve instruction. With our evidencecharting site, she saw some potential to push her students towards writing better essays.

We invite applications for a research fellowship/postdoctoral research fellowship working with Dr. Alex Holcombe in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. The research area is visual psychophysics, and the project involves the perception and attentive tracking of moving objects. One line of experiments will investigate the limits on judging the spatial relationship of moving objects.

Quodlibet is an obscure word that originally referred to a medieval event that included a debate. I haven’t been able to find much information about it, but here is a brief description from Graham (2007): I’m interested in this because I rue the lack of debates in modern science. Perhaps it’s only an accident of history that real debates aren’t happening much nowadays.

A new article in the New York Times regarding the allegations against Marc Hauser illustrate how difficult it is to determine whether one is guilty of scientific fraud. A main problem is that record-keeping standards are so lax. This is another reason why open science is important. Open science involves releasing original data and analyses, which is much easier if you have been keeping good records along the way.

This is open-access week. Most already know they should be publishing in open-access journals and/or self-archiving their papers. But moving science towards open access has been… slow. I was going to write that things have been moving at a glacial pace, thinking that would be an exaggeration; but nowadays I worry the world’s glaciers may be moving/melting fast enough to be gone before open access is the norm.

Richard Feynman, in his 1974 cargo-cult science commencement address: Unfortunately, the average scientific journal article doesn’t follow this principle. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the average article is just a sales job, but the emphasis is really on giving the information that favors the author’s theory.

When a scientific article is published, ideally the data behind the reported results should be made available. Anyone should be able to scrutinize the basis of scientific claims. While this has long been the ideal, it has rarely been practiced. But this has been changing, and momentum is building to actually require the posting of data in circumstances where it’s feasible.

I have argued before that scientists must do more to make available the original data behind their articles. Any scientific claim should ideally be verifiable, via scrutiny of the original evidence. Currently, the vast majority of scientists never share their data.