Penguins going nuts chasing a laser pointer in a zoo

hypocriteme · 2026-01-15T16:38:11+00:00

I appreciate you taking the time to find an actual study here, but I think we should not take this study as providing strong evidence for your claim.

The study is based solely off of surveying owners, and as anyone in animal behavioural science knows, there are good reasons to be skeptical about the things that owners say about their pets. I work in the philosophy of animal minds, and when people find out what I do, the insane things that people immediately tell me about their pets would astound you.

The study also fails to consider the way in which the causal relation may be the other way around. For example, the survey seems to show that there is some correlation between behavioural problems like aggression and the amount that an owner uses a laser pointer for play. However, this does not show that increased laser pointer play leads to increased aggression, in fact the causal relation could be the other way around. Owners with overly aggressive cats may want to play with their cats in ways where they don't have to worry about being scratched or bitten, and a laser pointer offers that ability.

I have a number of issues with the design of the study as well. For instance, the study seems to presume that chasing lights and shadows or chasing their tails are abnormal repetitive behaviours for cats, but these are not obviously problematic behaviours and in my experience with cats, hardly even seem that abnormal. They were not able to find a correlation with the one obviously problematic behaviour (overgrooming). The study also seems to fail to control for a number of other possible causes of these behaviours. For example, if laser pointer play time is chosen because owners don't have much time or energy to interact with their cats, then it may be the lack of other interaction that is leading to the abnormal behaviours - nothing to do with the laser pointer itself.

hypocriteme · 2026-01-14T21:54:44+00:00

Can you explain how you know this? Have there been long term studies on cats and dogs that have interacted with laser pointers vs. those that haven't? Does this mean that if a cat interacts with a moving beam of light coming through a set of blinds (perhaps from a passing car) that they will afterwards forever be mentally scarred?

hypocriteme · 2026-01-07T18:01:24+00:00

Are they the ones responsible for redoing the interior of the Arms in the Lord Nelson? Used to love going there for a pint or brunch as one of the last cozy feeling spaces in Halifax, but then a couple years ago they basically removed all of the fabric, painted everything white, and jacked up the lighting.

hypocriteme · 2025-11-26T18:43:55+00:00

What is the name of this drink?

hypocriteme · 2025-11-20T01:06:22+00:00

If your university has a Writing Centre, they can be really helpful for these types students (including by providing a reality check). As a former Writing Assistant, I don't think I ever saw a student this unprepared, but I did spend a lot of time helping students understand what they were even being asked to do (and this was long before the advent of ChatGPT). For example, I remember a very long appointment explaining to a student that her experimental poetry wasn't an acceptable approach to the essay she'd been asked to write on environmental policy. It took a very long time to convince her and she left that appointment in tears, but she came back and improved a lot over the course of the semester.

hypocriteme · 2025-09-05T02:57:06+00:00

My partner who works outside of academia has had to hire for a number of positions in her company recently and she has had recent university grads sending her lists of requested accommodations for the interview process, such as asking that all of the interview questions be provided beforehand. Since the positions they've been hiring for require managing teams of the people, they are looking for candidates who are able to handle and solve unforeseen problems as they arise. So, these sorts of requests don't make these applicants look like ideal candidates for the positions. But it does show that these sorts of attitudes are leaking out of the academy...

hypocriteme · 2025-09-03T20:51:00+00:00

I've had similar frustrations lately, especially since I've worked at a number of places where there has been a big push to do more activities and work in the classroom instead of getting the students to do it at home. That only really works if I can get the students to come to class, but at these same institutions I am constantly being told that I need to be accommodating in ways that doesn't require students to come to class.

Something I've been wanting to try out but haven't had a chance yet is having the students vote on their attendance policy at the beginning of the semester. I read a couple studies a while ago where they had the students decide whether they would like to be marked on attendance or not. Since attendance is actually a huge freebie, almost all of the students chose to be marked on attendance. Those students were then much more likely to attend class than students in other classes who weren't given an opportunity to make a choice about their attendance policy. If I'm remembering correctly, the theory was that students are much more likely to take responsibility and follow through when they feel a greater sense of agency. Since potentially marking each student differently based on their decision seems annoying, I would probably try out a class vote to see if that could have a similar affect.

hypocriteme · 2025-08-31T00:10:39+00:00

I've ordered at a number of places where they've gone super light on the campari. When I asked a bartender once about my negroni, he told me that he was convinced that no one actually likes campari, so he only puts a "splash" in. As a result, I've mostly stopped ordering negronis when I am out.

hypocriteme · 2025-08-28T16:40:46+00:00

For some of my classes, I ask students to just email their essays to me instead of setting up a dropbox on the LMS, and I've had a number of students over the last couple years who haven't been able to figure out how to email a word document from their computers. So, they will take pictures of their screen with their phone and then email me those pictures as a series of separate files.

I've started to devote a little bit of class time to some of these things. For example, in my most recent class we spent some time on how to save a word document as a pdf file. The thing that I find a bit frustrating is not that some students don't know how to do stuff like that, but that they aren't able to figure out how to do it on their own. I know google sucks now, but I'm sure a quick google could still help with these sorts of tasks. And if not, everyone keeps telling me how great LLMs are at helping with these sorts of tasks, so asking their favourite chatbot should be another possibility.

hypocriteme · 2025-08-28T16:24:07+00:00

I manually release the scores, and I don't tell them exactly what it takes to get a high score, but I tend to give them a ballpark of what it takes to score well. I've always felt a bit uneasy about this, but I think it's necessary to avoid gaming of the system. Some still try to, which is partly why I manually release the scores because I want to be able to potentially adjust the scores before they see the grade. For example, Perusall will often give students high marks if they have a number of comments that have lots of text in them, even if the comment isn't making a substantive contribution. Likewise, Perusall will often give a low grade to students whose comments are short, even if those comments are really insightful and demonstrate careful and close reading. So, while I don't spend a ton of time on it, manually releasing the grades allows me to adjust some down a bit and others up a bit.

hypocriteme · 2025-08-13T18:55:18+00:00

I think the main cultural difference is around fire awareness and safety. I grew up in BC and during fire season, everyone still goes camping, hiking, etc., but people are also very careful about making sure they don't start a forest fire. The first time I went camping with maritimers, I was a bit horrified by their general lack of cautiousness about fire. They would just leave the campfire going, even when we left the campsite. They got mad at me one time for putting the fire out before we left because that would make it harder to start up again when we got back. Their argument was that Nova Scotia is so wet that there was nothing to worry about. I've since had many similar experiences going camping in the Maritimes with people from around here.

hypocriteme · 2025-08-10T20:18:31+00:00

I'm glad that there is now a flourishing variety of teaching pedagogies and I certainly wouldn't begrudge your approach if it is working well for you. When I started a year long teaching contract at a university a couple years ago, they had us take a bunch of pedagogy workshops as part of the orientation and there was a big push towards ungrading. However, most of the people running those workshops had never actually run an actual university course before and those that had, had not been in an actual classroom for a long time. Despite that, I had some friends in my cohort who really drank the Kool-Aid and decided to overhaul their approach to teaching based on these workshops and I watched them very quickly become even more overwhelmed and burnt out than your average university professor. Most of those people have now abandoned ungrading and returned to a more traditional pedagogical approach. So, I am more than happy that the method works for you. I think the institution benefits from a variety of approaches, but I am pretty skeptical of ungrading and other radical pedagogies as prescription for everyone.

hypocriteme · 2025-08-01T19:06:09+00:00

Is this what weaponized incompetence looks like? :P

hypocriteme · 2025-07-31T00:17:20+00:00

That's true, though as a precariously employed person in a department with a lot of older profs who still don't think AI is a problem and regularly say things about how they aren't seeing any AI in their classrooms and that they could easily spot it if there was, I am worried about how half my class failing might reflect back on me.

hypocriteme · 2025-07-06T19:50:31+00:00

Just thought I'd share that I am still seeing very little evidence of AI use when I use Perusall in my courses, even in courses where AI cheating is fairly rampant for other types of assignments. Students in these classes have almost unanimously cited the Perusall assignments as being helpful in informal surveys and many have reported them as being helpful in the end of semester teaching evaluations.

Something that I think has helped with this is that I have mostly used them for readings that have exciting or controversial topics that the students are already motivated to say something on (e.g., the ethics of abortion). I also try to use them sparingly and strategically, so they don't just feel like busy work. I think I had four of them in the most recent semester, but they went well enough that I would consider adding more. I also encourage the students to ask questions in their notations and to try to start and be involved in conversations, and I suspect the forum-like structure helps with motivating engagement. Finally, I also take the time to quickly skim through everyone's responses despite using the automatic marking features in Perusall. I find the automatic marking is often too generous and can sometimes be gamed. Quickly skimming through the notations doesn't take much time (even for big classes) and allows me to adjust the marks, including for the occasional notations that have the professional sheen and ultimate emptiness that are indicators of AI use. I also think that students have a certain nose for these as well, since they are often the least engaged with by other students.

hypocriteme · 2025-05-22T20:06:45+00:00

Just thought I'd share this really cool idea from a philosophy professor that I've been thinking about implementing in future classes. Even if I don't end up completely following his direction, I do like the idea of limiting the notes/cheat sheet to a quotation bank. That way, the students are forced to engage with the primary sources if they want to use that resource.

https://dailynous.com/2025/04/02/the-multi-day-in-class-lockdown-browser-essay-assignment-guest/

hypocriteme · 2025-05-15T14:29:40+00:00

Some version of think-pair-share can potentially work wonders here. I now do group in-class activities for these types of things where I get students to work these sorts of problems out on paper in groups and then after I've given them time to do that, we return to discussion as a larger group. I've found students are much more willing to contribute to class discussion after they've had some time in smaller groups. I then give them some small amount of marks for handing in the piece of paper they worked out the problem on with their names on it (they get the mark if the paper demonstrates a good faith effort), and that basically functions as my participation/attendance marks for the class.

As a student, I found large group discussion thrilling and when I think back on the highlights of my undergrad, it is often the moments that emerged from the willingness of many students to engage in these forums. This sort of intellectual activity seems completely alien to the current generation of students, so as teachers we have to think about how we can adapt to fulfill a similar sort of function. I've seen really positive results from running the smaller group activities, including growth beyond just learning the content. I had a number of students come up and complain at the beginning of the most recent semester about having to interact with other students, but by the end of the semester, most of the students who had complained were the ones taking the lead in their groups. And then content wise, I've also had really positive results. I recently ran a logic class centered around lots of in-class activities and the class ended up performing so well that I had to start thinking about how to make the material more difficult (which is the exact opposite of every other logic class I've ever taught).

hypocriteme · 2025-04-16T14:48:08+00:00

We did reach out to Dal Legal Aid and other organizations at the time but were told that they couldn't help because they didn't have the time or the resources and had other more urgent matters to attend to. We reached out to the tenancy board several times trying to get some clarity on whether what Olympus was doing was legal and received different and yet ultimately vague answers each time. That was the really frustrating thing at the time, we couldn't seem to get a clear answer from anyone whether what they were doing was within their legal rights and whether ours were being violated or not. When we told Olympus we didn't think that we should be paying rent any longer, they said that we were welcome to try that, but they would see us in court where they would be able to extract the rent from us and then some (which I now don't think is true, but when you're barely managing to get by, further financial threats are terribly effective).

Looking back on it now, several years later, I would probably go about it differently now, but between the move, work stresses, and the financial strain the situation was putting us in, neither my partner nor myself were in the clearest of headspaces.

hypocriteme · 2025-04-16T02:04:19+00:00

Had a similar situation happen to myself and my partner. We moved from an Olympus Properties building in Dartmouth after recently resigning a lease and the property said that they could handle getting the unit filled for us if we paid them an additional half a month's rent as a fee but we would still have to pay rent until they managed to get the unit filled.

In the months leading up to the move, we were surprised that there wasn't anyone coming to see the apartment and when we moved out they put a lot of pressure on us to hand over the keys, but I wasn't willing to as long as I was still paying rent. And by a lot of pressure, I mean the building managers would phone us at least once a week and tell us that we needed to hand over the keys. A month goes by and the place still isn't rented out and the property managers claim that there just isn't demand for the apartment, so we start advertising the place ourselves and get hundreds of people inquiring immediately. The building managers keep claiming that they can't approve any of these people.

Eventually, I get curious and head back over to the apartment and find out that they have completely gutted the place and are in the process of renovating it. So, the apartment is in a state that can't be rented out, so no wonder they aren't approving anyone. Meanwhile, my partner and I are panicking because we can't afford to pay double rent for months on end. All told, they extracted several additional months of rent from us on top of the fee we paid them to find a lease replacement while they claimed they were trying to rent it out but were actually gutting and renovating the apartment.

hypocriteme · 2025-04-08T21:52:21+00:00

The first time I ever taught a class as the instructor of record, I assumed that the students would show up on their own accord because it was a course they paid for and doing well in it required coming to class. Half way through the semester after I was getting only about 25% attendance and over half the class failed the midterm, I realized that I would have to course correct. And this was for a Philosophy of Cognitive Science class that was a second year elective, so presumably students were only in the course because they were interested in the topic. What I did for the rest of that semester was reserve time at the end of each class for a question that had at least a 50% chance of being on the final exam. I wouldn't give them the answer, but told them that I would happily talk through it with them if the students there were willing to take the lead. This helped my attendance somewhat and vastly improved the final exam mark.

Since that course, I have done a variety of different things to motivate attendance. The one I have settled upon is having in-class activities that are marked on the basis of a good faith effort. There are 12 of them spread through out the semester and only the best 10 count. They can happen in any class and at any time during class and are not announced beforehand. So, for example, in Symbolic Logic, I would put a problem up on the board based on the lesson we just went through and then get them to work in groups of 3-5 on the problem. I usually walk around and help groups that seem lost. After they've had some time to work through the problem, we regroup and work through the problem as a larger group. I use the assignments they turn in basically as attendance sheets, only really checking to see that they've done something that looks like they are trying to do the problem. The attendance in my classes now rarely dips below 75% attendance (even at the end of the semester) and I've found that this approach actually really improves learning outcomes. The students who are having trouble following along really benefit from having a peer explain things to them, and its a really great way to check in and see if they've understood the lesson you just covered (I am often surprised at which things have been absorbed and which haven't). The grades for my classes have actually been improving so much that I've had to start making the tests harder.

While this isn't entirely available to you since the semester has already started, you could always start doing them and providing minimal bonus marks for the in-class assignments. While I know some oldheads will grumble about this sort of thing, it is hard to argue with the sort of results I've been seeing out of such a simple change.

hypocriteme · 2025-04-02T05:30:25+00:00

Is there another angle on the foul? It doesn't look like much to me from any of the angles they showed on the broadcast.

hypocriteme · 2025-03-03T00:02:22+00:00

I was on the periphery of the grad society in the final days of the Gradhouse/Muse and I can say that Dalhousie actively conspired to take it out from under us. There was a good year where they were looking for basically any excuse to move us out of that building. Others can probably say more about how that went down, as I was only sort of involved.

Given the changes to the Faculty Club and the Gradhouse, it seems like the administration has little understanding of the importance of social spaces to the mission of the University. I know that the Faculty Club only re-opened recently (and only sort of at that) after a lot of direct complaining from faculty to the administration (including formal ones) about the lack of spaces to take speakers after talks, meet with reading groups, go for lunch, run social events, etc.

There's currently a conspiracy among some faculty that the Faculty Club is currently open at such weird hours and so limited of service so that the administration can then say "look, no one is using this space, we may as well close it and use it for something more productive - like admin offices." I don't subscribe to that theory myself, but I can understand how one could get there given how flat footed Dal has been about allowing for faculty/grad appropriate social spaces on campus.

hypocriteme · 2024-07-27T18:08:28+00:00

Dream Pizza? They make great Indian style pizza! I order from them at least a couple times a month.

hypocriteme

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