Cognitive psychologist interested in perception, illusions, sensorimotor control, and virtual reality.
I also blog and run workshops for early-career academics
How is the ECR training in your department? Do postdocs get support to find jobs? Do new lecturers get guidance on strategies for how to transition into their new roles?
Get in touch if you want some training like this in your department!
Look closely.
There are actually 16 circles in this image.
And once you see them, the image appears changed forever.
The wonderful coffer illusion, by Anthony Norcia
Well having covid and missing a conference sucks, but just finding out I've been promoted from senior lecturer to associate professor (reader equivalent, at my place) is a nice way to perk up!
I don't edit papers my direct trainees send me with tracked changes - I edit live in front of them in a meeting. Why?
1. forces you to find time to do it
2. makes you accountable for the quality of your edits
3. makes the edits a discussion
4. articulate why you make an edit
Pay isn't ever going back to what it was.
Pensions aren't ever going back to what they were.
So why, UK academics, do you keep working like you are making great money and taking home a final-salary pension?
Work the 37.5 hours your university pays you to work and then stop.
How many participants do we have to include in properly powered experiments? A tutorial of power analysis with reference tables
(this is easily the clearest thing I've read about calculating sample size)
Watching a Cambridge Prof yesterday musing about how hard it was to recruit quality PhD students when they worked at lower-tier institutions like UCL, and wryly wondering how they view the other 200 or so UK universities...
Teaching to 200 unmasked students? No problem, totally safe.
PhD student wants to attend a conference in Birmingham? Supervisor must confirm the essential nature of the travel in writing and keep the risk assessment to hand throughout the duration of their trip
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Excitingly, I got good news about a grant today. If you are interested in a year-long postdoc developing and testing a VR tool for children with DCD, get in touch (and tell your friends!)
The horizontal lines are actually parallel, and not at all slanted.
Look at the distance between them at the start and end of each row if you don't believe it.
Wonderful version of the cafe wall illusion, by Victoria Skye.
A short thread on some bits of free software/online solutions which have made a huge difference to my workflow as a university academic:
Please add your own to the thread
My tip to new academics - if you are told that you are not allowed to install stuff on your own machine, fight it tooth and nail from day 1. It's all made up. Don't let the dumb policy win.
Most academics' workload problems are driven by their past selves' inability to say no to exciting-sounding opportunities that actually require more work than expected at a time which clashes with fixed work responsibilities (teaching, marking, supervision etc)
I love this photo. It breaks conventional photographic rules (rule of thirds, specifically) and creates enormous tension betwen both halves of the photo, which is really exacerbated by the colour inversion. It's almost hard to look at as a real-world scene
Best email to wake up to:
"Our referees have now considered your paper and have recommended publication in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. We are pleased to accept your paper in its current form"
After a year containing rejections aplenty, I'm really happy to have found out that my SFHEA application was successful. Nice way to start the holiday!
I didn't know this! Inverted faces appear thinner than right-side-up faces. Very striking effect! Described by Peter Thompson, in the 2010 best visual illusion context