Lab Update

Our last paper (collaboration with J-M Beaulieu lab) just got published today in the last issue on the role of serotonin in depression ("The neurobiology of depression – revisiting the serotonin hypothesis. I. Cellular and molecular mechanisms") of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. And the paper is an EXIS Open Choice (i.e., in open access) ! It is there.

Lab Update : FENS Forum 2012

The FENS Forum 2012 (Federation of European Neuroscience Societies) just finished few days ago. This year it was in Barcelona, Spain (a pretty pleasant location to have a meeting). It went very well, and I was surprisingly happy to see that there were more and more posters on virtual settings. We had a lot of excellent exchanges, and I come back with a lot of new ideas ! We just need more students (places always available in the lab for good candidates). Here are some of the pictures of the event :

8th FENS Forum

 Barcelona, or how hard it is to work as a scientist ...

Catherine Lortie (graduate student in the lab) in front of her poster about human-machine interactions. Speficically, judgment of humanness of a robot by a human from computer mediated interactions (work published in PLoS ONE). 

A nice crowd in front of the poster of Dr. Anna Lomanowska (postdoctoral fellow in the lab) about the spatial distribution of avatars in the virtual environment of Second Life (work published in Computers in Human Behavior).

7500 participants, 4400 posters ... lots of people

Lab Update: 8th FENS Forum

The 8th FENS Forum will take place between July 14th and July 18th in Barcelona, Spain. The FENS meeting is a good time to see a lot of people and to network. If you are interested to say hello, here are the schedule of the two posters of the lab that we will be presenting there :

CL Lortie, MJ Guitton
Optimization of language-based human-computer interactions: Judgment of the humanness of an interlocutor is in the Eye of the Beholder
Session Name: Language
Sunday, 15 July, 2012
Session Time: 11h15-13h15
Poster Board Number: F47

AM Lomanowska, MJ Guitton
Inhabiting Virtual Worlds: Social Determinants of Interindividual Spatial Distribution
Session name: Human Cognition and Behaviour III
Monday, 16 July, 2012
Session time: 11h15-12h15
Poster Board Number: F61

Also, as you can see in the Publication section of the blog, we are having a few more papers accepted or in press ... As soon as they will be fully published, I will update the information and add the pdf !

Lab Update

Marie-Ève presented some of her results on how deaf people use blogs to communicate in the 14th edition of the "Journée Recherche" of the Faculty of Medicine of Laval University. She even got interviewed by one of the campus web-journalists (see here for her interview, in French) !

And here is a picture of the event :

Marie-Ève in front of her poster, Quebec City, QC

Comment: Increasing tuition in Quebec universities

Yesterday I went to hairdresser (yes, such things happen ...). The radio was playing, and at one time an add caught my attention: it was an add from the Government of Quebec claiming how much they were doing things to make education available for all.

That was kind of stricking, in the present context where the extremely unpopular planed increase of tuition led thousands of students to go in the streets, and the even more unpopular "Special Law 78" challenged democracy by forbidind the aforementioned students to do so.

I am not discussing here the scholar fees increase per se, there are numerous reasons which led people to think to do that. Some are goods, some are less, and alternative solutions may have emerged too. What is true, is that with the crisis, the grants pipelines are getting dry. This situation of crisis also encouraged funding organisms (which are themselves funded by the government, hence, when no money in the public treasure, there is no money in the funding agencies) to promote strongly  industry-oriented type of research, with half-half funding (half from private companies, half from public funding agencies), in fact resulting in an utilization of public research resources to "boost" country-specific industrial innovation potential. Once more, I am not criticizing that. It is a political choice, and I understand that the population (via the decisions of their elected delegates) want to use public money to boost the competitiveness of local industries. However, it has effects on universities.

In such context, Universities have to secure other sources of funding if they want to keep alive an independent research agenda. That is particularly true for some fields of knowledge traditionally difficult to fund (somehow, research on Arthurian literature gets a bit less funding than, let's say, cancer research). And sorry, there are no so many way to increase funding of a university: or you get more from government, or you get more from charities and fund raising campaigns (unlikely in situation of economical crisis), or you increase tuition. An accessory question is, however, how would universities use this new money. Would they use it to keep non-profitable (economically speaking) field of knowledge, or would it be used to develop and secure "fashionable" (and usually highly productive) research fields ? That is another question, I am digressing ...

Anyway, this increase of tuition could well result in an increase of the quality of the teaching (by having more money to recruit "star scientists" or to keep the best teachers), and could contribute to position back Quebec universities among the best world universities ... But in no case it would contribute to increase the access of university education to all ! Students usually have no money, and while reasonable grants are available for biomedical and other scientific students (ranging easily from 15,000 Canadian dollar a year for some NSERC grants to up to 60,000 (!) a year for the Banting grant ... which is in my opinion way too much, better to give 3 grants of 20,000 than one huge grant of 60,000, especially given that this grant failed to attract the best non-Canadian students due to the evaluation criteria ... another digression), students in humanities can hardly dream to get a grant of 2,000 to 5,000 Canadian dollar ... meaning, in no way enough to survive during long graduate studies.

Again, I am not critizing here the decisions made by the Government of Quebec, elections are coming soon, population will judge. Just, all this story (including the add in the radio) was a perfect example of very bad move in term of communication ...

Comment

Thank to those who answered the previous post ! I got few emails (pitty that people were to shy to leave a comment, it would be interesting for others I think, but anyway, thank you for the feedback). I am working on that at the moment, hopefully something will come out next year !

Question to the Readers

Dear Readers, I am re-writting something I wrote some time ago ... I am developping some courses on cyberpsychology, virtual anthropology, and so on, and I would like your feedback. What do you think should be absolutely include in such course ? What, as a student in this field, as a user of these new spaces, would you think should be absolutely included there ? Comments are more than welcome ! If you are too shy to post a comment, just drop me an email ! (see "Contact us" for the email address)

Thank you in advance !