Alex Browman

Congratulations!!

Edward L. Deci, 83, Dies; Found Self-Determination as a Key to Happiness

Edward L. Deci, 83, Dies; Found Self-Determination as a Key to Happiness www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/s...

From February 25, 2026: Meet Einstein. The personal tutor every student deserves. Einstein connects to your Canvas, knows your strengths and weaknesses, and guides you step by step throughout your entire educational journey.

From February 22, 2026: Meet Einstein. Einstein is an AI with a computer. He logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework — automatically.

Props to POD Network's AI in Education SIG for pointing this out... That Einstein app did a rebrand this week. First image is from the website today, second image from three days ago. Today he's a "personal tutor." Earlier this week he "watches lectures, writes essays... and submits your homework."

My deepest thanks to everyone who took a chance on me, my ideas, and my career decisions — my family, Mark (McGill), Mesmin (NU), David (BC), my HC colleagues, and so many more. I hope I can give those who feel similarly unsure of their epistemological worth the same kind of support that got me here

A bottle of Bruichladdich Octomore 15.3 scotch and its accompanying tin

When I finished my PhD, my lab gifted me a bottle of Bruichladdich Octomore scotch, the nicest bottle I'd ever owned. I nursed it for 6 years and only finished it off on my wedding day.

I now have a new one, because a recent development deserved a similar celebration: I've been awarded tenure!

what even is the fucking point

🙋‍♂️

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out.

As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.

Here's what happened:

"Canadian Word of the Year" on a red banner. Beneath the banner reads "maplewashing" and "the deceptive practice of making things look more Canadian than they actually are"

And the results are in! After carefully reviewing the results of a national poll the Board of Directors of the Society for Canadian English (SCE) has determined that this year’s Canadian Word of the Year (CWOTY), the first of its kind, will be “maplewashing.”

Bronze plaque saying "A Letter to the Future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. August 2019. 415ppm CO2"

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque:
"This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

Like, what are we doing?

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨
Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

I’m looking for a good article about people’s personal experiences deeply embracing and then eventually retreating from conspiracy theories. Suggestions?

Fifteen Years

i’m not crying you’re crying

xkcd: Fifteen Years

Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.

Total solar eclipse triggers dawn behavior in birds: Insights from acoustic recordings and community science On 8 April 2024, a total solar eclipse disrupted light-dark cycles for North American birds during the lead-up to spring reproduction. Compiling more than 10,000 community observations and artificial ...

I have to fan-girl for a minute here. My friend @rosvall-lab.bsky.social built an app to gather data on bird behavior during the 2024 solar eclipse. 10,000+ citizen scientists contributed (including my kids), and the resulting paper was published in Science today!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Toronto ER costs, visits by frequent patients reduced with new housing model | CBC News The Dunn House, a long-term housing project with easy access to healthcare, is helping 48 of Toronto's most-frequent visitors to the ER. The program has greatly reduced the number of hospital visits a...

“When Dr. Andrew Boozary and his team at Toronto's University Health Network looked deeper into the issue, they discovered that about 100 patients accounted for more than 4,500 emergency department visits in one year.”

/End

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Jane Goodall, Trailblazing Primatologist and Environmental Activist, Dead at 91 Jane Goodall, the trailblazing primatologist best known for her work studying the behavior of chimpanzees, has died at the age of 91.

Jane Goodall, the celebrated primatologist and conservationist best known for her work studying the behavior of chimpanzees, died Wednesday, Oct. 1. She was 91.

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

Wow www.bbc.com/news/article...

One week left (Sept. 15) to apply for our positions in Cognitive Psychology and Developmental Psychology. Please share widely, and happy to answer questions!

I haven't used it myself, but you might want to check out Experience Sampler, made by @spicythai.bsky.social and @page-gould.bsky.social www.experiencesampler.com

Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me? Because actually no one can do it for you, because your voice is unique among all the people on earth. Siri never petted a horse's neck. Alexa has never been ghosted by the captain of the football team. But you have lived, your heart is beating, you have suffered, and you have something important to say. It's a human's job, to use words, and whatever job you give to a machine, that part of your brain goes dark. Maybe it's worth it when it comes to remembering phone numbers and directions, but when that part of your brain that uses words goes dark, that's a vast area that's very close to your soul. Don't let some internet platform convince you that what you have to say and create isn't worthwhile. Words are the echo of your soul. Honing that echo matters.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

Turn off AI in search results. I just did this in Chrome and it works.
tenbluelinks.org#chrome-windows

The College of the Holy Cross is hiring for 2 tenure-track psychology positions: 1 in Cognitive Psychology (specifically, higher-order cognition) and 1 in Developmental Psychology. Please share widely!

Developmental job ad: apply.interfolio.com/171704

Cognitive job ad: apply.interfolio.com/171698

If you are making a syllabus at the start of this semester, you might find the generic syllabus make a helpful tool (I did not make this, I just use it every semester)

wcaleb.rice.edu/syllabusmake...

Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence - Nature Communications Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

Thrilled to share our new @NatureComms
paper: "Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence." www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵1/7

a visual illusion: what appears to be some strangely shaped pink pieces of cloth are actually the background on which several forks are laying

these are forks

Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts | PNAS Both liberals and conservatives believe that using facts in political discussions helps to foster mutual respect, but 15 studies—across multiple me...

Brings to mind this work www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...