Jackie Caplan-Auerbach

Assistant Professor in Cognitive Psychology, Tenure-Track Position The Department of Psychology at Western Washington University seeks applicants for a tenure track Assistant Professor position with expertise in applied cognitive psychology to begin September 16, 2026. This is an assistant professor position in applied cognitive psychology. The position is open with respect to area of expertise. Possible applied topics in cognitive psychology might include, but are not limited to: culture and cognition, memory, human-computer interaction, eyewitness memory, learning and education, aging, embodied cognition, social cognition, and judgment and decision-making concerning current social issues. We are seeking candidates who have experience with equitable and inclusive teaching, mentorship, and research practices and share a strong commitment to promoting the success of students from historically underrepresented groups. The candidate will have teaching experience commensurate with their career level. They will be required to teach courses at the undergraduate level in cognitive psychology and research methods and statistics. The candidate should also be prepared to teach a cognitive course in a master’s level program. Responsibilities also include establishing and maintaining an active research program that involves undergraduate and graduate students, as well as service activities as appropriate. Review of files will begin on February 18th, 2026. More information at: https://hr.wwu.edu/careers-faculty?job=502873

Assistant Professor in Cognitive Psychology, Tenure-Track Position at Western Washington University.

This is an assistant professor position in applied cognitive psychology.

Short 🧵 about this position. 1/?

Here is the link with details and for applying: hr.wwu.edu/careers-facu...

One armed goon loses his shit at an observer who's backing up, and then several more armed goons tackle the observer to the ground, and then even more armed goons form a protective shield around the armed goons handcuffing the observer for hurting an armed goon's feelings.

This can't be "reformed"

A pit bull mix sleeps in a sunny spot, his head supported by a small speaker.

Timeline cleanse. The sun is warm, but Titan's head is very heavy.

Anyone want to rate this translation, as requested?

ICE has now carried out two summary executions of innocent people in the streets of an American city.

If you work for ICE, there's no denying that's the mission you're supporting now. You don't get to claim in one year or ten or twenty that you didn't know what ICE was doing. You're complicit.

ICE is a paramilitary that summarily executes people who dare to protest against them. That is who they are. They cannot be reformed. Everyone who works for them at this point must face consequences.

The absolute best part of being an educator and scientist is the students I get to mentor. How proud I am of @infrasound.bsky.social who took an undergraduate project and turned it into a scientific career. ❤️

Fabulous thread on aurora generation and forecasting! Check it out and if you're in an affected area, look up in the skies tonight!

I can't believe I'm posting this video - but we actually have to have a conversation about the real world implications of America going to war over Greenland.

Let me walk you through it. It doesn't turn out well for us.

Amber Glenn wearing her gold medal after winning the US National Championship Women’s Singles Competition. She is dressed in a black short sequined gown and proudly holding a progress pride flag behind her. There is a gaggle of photographers in front of her.

Things are grim right now but as a reminder of who we are and why we fight, this is the US Women’s figuring skating champion.

It guess I thought it would be obvious, but this is intended to be (a) a simple model and (b) a bit of social-media based education (based on the first day of a quarter-long undergraduate seismology class). Of course there is oversimplification.

This one is on a motor, so stress is continuous and smooth. Unfortunately it means we can't easily stop the system after a quake, which is what I usually do to give students time to measure the slip. Hence the video--allows them to measure after the fact.

Oh, there's a lot that I skimmed over here, so yes to the need for more detail. Appreciate this, though!

Great point and important correction. Thank you!

Of course! If you need a higher resolution video let me know.

Anyhow, I just love my little multi-brick model, and I love how similar it is to these finite fault models of REAL QUAKES. The brick system was built for me by one of my students years ago and I wanted to share, particularly with those of you who teach about earthquakes.

We don't know how much each spring is stretched. We don't know how much friction is holding things in place. These are not measurable parameters. We just know that small quakes are common and large quakes are rare.

Ultimately, we have to just wait to see what the Earth does.

But slowly, over time, those springs will stretch again. Sometimes--actually most of the time--we'll get small slip events. Small earthquakes. But they can also fail in a big way.

You can imagine little spring between those rectangles. Some are really stretched out after that quake, while others were stretched before and have now released a lot of that elastic energy.

Note that the size of those "bricks" is a function of the model. Some models break the fault into much, much smaller blocks. Ultimately it's a continuous slab of rock, not discrete blocks. But the more chunks you use, the more complex and computationally intensive the model.

Each chunk of the model (the rectangles on the fault plane) are like bricks in the video. Some, shown in red, moved a LOT (more than 15 m, or 50 ft!). Other "bricks" moved a much smaller amount--only a few ft. The whole thing took over two minutes to finish slipping.

A map showing southern Chile, with a colored grid overlying the plate. The figure shows how much each part of the grid--representing the Nazca plate--moved during the 2010 Maule earthquake. Some squares on the grid moved a lot while others only moved a little.

This figure shows such a model for the 2010 M8.8 Maule (Chile) earthquake (fig. from USGS). The gridded area is the portion of the Nazca plate that moved in that event. You can see that it is broken up into chunks for the model.

Here's the cool part. We see something very much like this in what are called "finite fault models".

In short, we can't predict when the earthquake will happen. And we can't predict how big it will be.

You might notice that the small quakes are pretty common. And they're not always the bricks closest to the front--sometimes bricks near the back slip. It's hard, in fact it's impossible, to predict which bricks will fail, when they will fail, and whether they'll push others to slip too.

You can see that the springs stretch to different degrees: some part of the plate store more elastic energy (mostly near the source of stress). Sometimes only a single brick slips: that's a small quake. Other times, the whole thing moves. That's a much bigger event.

Back to my video. The plate is represented by all of those bricks. Elastic energy can be stored between them, so sometimes part of the plate moves, and sometimes lots of it does (in practice, you never get an entire plate moving, but my model is too small to show that).

This means that part of the plate can be deformed without the whole thing bending. And part can slip without hauling the whole plate behind it.

The reason this doesn't happen is that rocks (or plates, if you prefer) are themselves elastic. They store elastic energy within their molecular bonds. There aren't really springs between chunks of rigid rock--the whole thing is full of springs.

A map showing the Pacific plate, extending across the entire Pacific ocean. Arrows show that it is moving towards Japan and away from California.

I show my students that model too...it's great and it's a classic. But it also made them think that the brick represented the entire plate. They thus didn't understand why an earthquake in Japan wouldn't cause plate motion in California too--after all, both boundaries include the Pacific plate.