Making Good on the Promise: High Standards For All

A discussion of the need for high standards for all students and how to achieve these standards through collaboration, self-evaluation and assessment of a student's work

The Literary Interview as Autobiography

This article examines how interviews with writers and artists operate as forms of autobiography, especially when collected and published in books. It briefly traces the history of the interview in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, alongside precursors in the earlier forms of dialogues and table talk. It argues that books of collected interviews, with examples including Frédéric Lefèvre’s Une heure avec… series (1924-33) and the Paris Review “Writers at Work” volumes, offer colloquial portraits which have distinctive qualities compared to more ‘written’ autobiographies. Avant-garde writers and artists in particular have taken to the art of the interview from the 1950s onwards with the advent of the tape recorder, in an international tradition of volumes outlined here including Richard Burgin’s Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1969), Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1971), David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon (1975-1987), Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities (1987), and J.G. Ballard’s Extreme Metaphors (2012). Chance, improvisation, and edited spontaneity emerge as attributes of the interview as a form of autobiography. Interviews, it is suggested, not only create flexible, immediate autobiographies of their subjects, but offer a dynamic mode of criticism, a space for the free play of ideas.This article was submittted to the European Jounral of Life Writing on November 27th 2015 and published on June 22nd 2016.</jats:p

Wage losses in the year after breast cancer: Extent and determinants among Canadian women

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. © The Author 2008.Background - Wage losses after breast cancer may result in considerable financial burden. Their assessment is made more urgent because more women now participate in the workforce and because breast cancer is managed using multiple treatment modalities that could lead to long work absences. We evaluated wage losses, their determinants, and the associations between wage losses and changes for the worse in the family's financial situation among Canadian women over the first 12 months after diagnosis of early breast cancer. Methods - We conducted a prospective cohort study among women with breast cancer from eight hospitals throughout the province of Quebec. Information that permitted the calculation of wage losses and information on potential determinants of wage losses were collected by three pretested telephone interviews conducted over the year following the start of treatment. Information on medical characteristics was obtained from medical records. The main outcome was the proportion of annual wages lost because of breast cancer. Multivariable analysis of variance using the general linear model was used to identify personal, medical, and employment characteristics associated with the proportion of wages lost. All statistical tests were two-sided. Results - Among 962 eligible breast cancer patients, 800 completed all three interviews. Of these, 459 had a paying job during the month before diagnosis. On average, these working women lost 27% of their projected usual annual wages (median = 19%) after compensation received had been taken into account. Multivariable analysis showed that a higher percentage of lost wages was statistically significantly associated with a lower level of education (Ptrend = .0018), living 50 km or more from the hospital where surgery was performed (P = .070), lower social support (P = .012), having invasive disease (P = .086), receipt of chemotherapy (P < .001), self-employment (P < .001), shorter tenure in the job (Ptrend < .001), and part-time work (P < .001). Conclusion - Wage losses and their effects on financial situation constitute an important adverse consequence of breast cancer in Canada.The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and Fondation de l’Université Laval

No binocular rivalry in the LGN of alert macaque monkeys

AbstractOrthogonal drifting gratings were presented binocularly to alert macaque monkeys in an attempt to find neural correlates of binocular rivalry. Gratings were centered over lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) receptive fields and the corresponding points for the opposite eye. The only task of the monkey was to fixate. We found no difference between the responses of LGN neurons under rivalrous and nonrivalrous conditions, as determined by examining the ratios of their respective power spectra. There was, however, a curious “temporal afterimage” effect in which cell responses continued to be modulated at the drift frequency of the grating for several seconds after the grating disappeared

Behavioral Detection of Electrical Microstimulation in Different Cortical Visual Areas

SummaryThe extent to which areas in the visual cerebral cortex differ in their ability to support perceptions has been the subject of considerable speculation. Experiments examining the activity of individual neurons have suggested that activity in later stages of the visual cortex is more closely linked to perception than that in earlier stages [1–9]. In contrast, results from functional imaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and lesion studies have been interpreted as showing that earlier stages are more closely coupled to perception [10–15]. We examined whether neuronal activity in early and later stages differs in its ability to support detectable signals by measuring behavioral thresholds for detecting electrical microstimulation in different cortical areas in two monkeys. By training the animals to perform a two-alternative temporal forced-choice task, we obtained criterion-free thresholds from five visual areas—V1, V2, V3A, MT, and the inferotemporal cortex. Every site tested yielded a reliable threshold. Thresholds varied little within and between visual areas, rising gradually from early to later stages. We similarly found no systematic differences in the slopes of the psychometric detection functions from different areas. These results suggest that neuronal signals of similar magnitude evoked in any part of visual cortex can generate percepts

The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium

As the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC) ends its first year, it is worth looking back to see how the experiment has worked

Nine Criteria for a Measure of Scientific Output

Scientific research produces new knowledge, technologies, and clinical treatments that can lead to enormous returns. Often, the path from basic research to new paradigms and direct impact on society takes time. Precise quantification of scientific output in the short-term is not an easy task but is critical for evaluating scientists, laboratories, departments, and institutions. While there have been attempts to quantifying scientific output, we argue that current methods are not ideal and suffer from solvable difficulties. Here we propose criteria that a metric should have to be considered a good index of scientific output. Specifically, we argue that such an index should be quantitative, based on robust data, rapidly updated and retrospective, presented with confidence intervals, normalized by number of contributors, career stage and discipline, impractical to manipulate, and focused on quality over quantity. Such an index should be validated through empirical testing. The purpose of quantitatively evaluating scientific output is not to replace careful, rigorous review by experts but rather to complement those efforts. Because it has the potential to greatly influence the efficiency of scientific research, we have a duty to reflect upon and implement novel and rigorous ways of evaluating scientific output. The criteria proposed here provide initial steps toward the systematic development and validation of a metric to evaluate scientific output