Evolution is a basic, biological process

Unless someone can tie the discussion about consciousness into the main topic, a new thread should be opened for it.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

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Well I wandered down to the physics department and asked a couple of profs (actual profs not the title that you yanks seem to hand out left,right and centre)

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Um, what exactly do you mean by this?Why does most of the rest of the world send their best and brightest to University in the US if we hand out a lot of meaningless titles?

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If one sits on a hill above the factory and watches raw materials go in one side and cars come out the other, one can try to figure out what is going on inside. On the other hand, if we had some way of detecting what is going on inside the factory, perhaps with a very sensitive magnetometer which could show us where the steel goes, we could begin to trace the fabrication paths in the factory and begin to understand how autos are made

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Sitting on the hill is the behavioral approach. We place subjects in a situation, watch their behavior and try figure out why they do what the do.

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On the other hand, the sensitive magnetometer is analogous to FMRI. Using this technique, we can match our behavioral observations with the map of brain activity provided by FMRI, which shows which area(s) of the brain is/are active when the behavior occurs and begin to learn in detail how the brain works.

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You'd think that would be how it works, wouldn't you? Just knowing that area X of the brain is active during task Z doesn't tell you anything, really, except in a very broad sense, like a surgeon not wanting to muck up the part of the brain that deals with speech, for instance.If you want to map functions to areas, you first have to know what those functions are through behavioral research.There are times that behavior may not change but activity in the brain might/does, (like the same task performed by young and old subjects utilize different brain areas) which is a concept that my husband thinks is not fully appreciated by many in the field. This is a place where FMRI would be valuable on its own.Right now, however, the biggest benefit of FMRI is that it is an additional convergent line of evidence for behavioral research. Indeed, one emergent problem with the attraction many have to doing FMRI work is that they do not have a good grounding in the behavioral research. The result is that they cannot properly interpret the brain activity because they don't understand what is required at a cognitive level to do a task.Jim tells me that this problem is getting better nowadays, mainly because more behavioral researchers are getting into FMRI work. MR machines used to be available pretty much only to MD's, and a lot of that initial research was pretty poor quality because MD's don't generally have the background that allows them to understand congnition.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 01-10-2005 11:05 AM

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One thing the article doen't point out is that the FMRI machine "sees" glucose and glucose is "burned" during mental activity, so the amount of mental activity is proprtional to the amount of glucose being "burned"

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Small correction...You are thinking about PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans WRT glucose, and the PET scanner actually "sees" the radioactivity in the radioactive glucose solution the subject was injected with before the scan.If you are an Intro Psych student, FMRI measures blood flow.If you are an Engineering or Physics student, FMRI measures changes in blood flow via changes in the magnetic properties of hemoglobin due to blood oxygenation.(My thanks to my husband for this information.)

What he means should be quite clear. In America the title 'Professor' is often given to any teaching academic. An assistant professor only needs a PhD and is the entry level position in North America (or so Wikipedia informs me). The equivalent in the UK would be a Lecturer, or possibly a junior lecturer. After that going up the ranks of 'professorship' is simply career advancement.In the UK being a professor is usually tied to a specific 'Chair' and chairs must be available or created for a position to be taken up. So a professor in the UK is generally considered to be one of the top people in a particular field, at least nationally.I first came across this when an American student kept calling one of our professors 'Doctor', with the given reason being that many 'professors' in the states did not in fact have doctorates.TTFN,WK

Admin issued a topic drift alert back in message 181.My impression - Schraf is covering some interesting stuff, and it is getting lost in topic it doesn't belong in.I strongly suggest Schraf plug this material into a new topic. I guess it could go directly to the "Coffee House", unless she thinks it better in another forum.Maybe it's time to close this topic down, but I'll leave it open.Adminnemooseus

It's not mean as much as a slight as you would think. The term prof. has a certain meaning in the UK.If we say "I asked a prof." then we mean that we asked a Professor. However for reasons I don't quite understand you use terms such as associates professors, assistant professors for various posts. I'm not saying that a british professor is "better" than an american professor (a person of equal academic standing of a british prof.) but that the word seems to be so imprecise in the states that the term could mean any number of people in any number of roles.It a clarity matter rather rather than a academic pissing competition.This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 01-10-2005 11:36 AM

I've never been to a university in the US where assistant and associate professors didn't have at the bare minimum Masters degrees in their field, or where associate professor was not a tenured position.We're not just hiring janitors and calling them "assistant professors" around here. Those are ranks, a seniority structure that begins at assistant and rises through full professor, possibly terminating at something like "professor emeritus" or other ranks. No, it's pretty much restricted to permanent or semi-permanent faculty engaged in teaching or research, with proper accredation in their fields. In other words it means the same thing as it does in your country.

Unless things have changed dramatically since I was in school, only the lower ranks of colleges have teachers without doctorates, and they're not called professors. If this American student had attended Middlesex Community College or Daniel Webster College or the like (hopefully the names are indicative of these institution's lack of prestige and high academic standards), then many of his teachers probably didn't have doctorates, and it is unlikely that he called them professors.But if he went to any respected academic institution, and not just MIT and Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and Michigan and Harvard and Princeton and Yale and Cal-Tech and so forth, but also the University of Massachusetts and Lehigh and Texas A&M and the University of California and on and on, then he had professors with PhD's. This is probably true of at least the top couple hundred colleges and universities in the US.The more prestigious the university, the more stringent the requirements upon professors to engage in research and publish in the journals, from which derives the old saw, "publish or perish". Professors without PhD's would never be hired into any college or university with research aspirations, because a PhD is how one demonstrates his potential for carrying out original research.--Percy

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I've never been to a university in the US where assistant and associate professors didn't have at the bare minimum Masters degrees in their field, or where associate professor was not a tenured position.

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But you've sort of made my point for me - All I'm saying is that Professor has a very specific association in the UK, one that is broader in the states. It's not a academic piss competition - from your own words - if someone says that they have talked to a prof - then that could mean someone at the start of their career with a masters or someone at the top of their field after 40 years. ALL I am saying is that to a brit that the term has a very specific meaning.

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No, it's pretty much restricted to permanent or semi-permanent faculty engaged in teaching or research, with proper accredation in their fields. In other words it means the same thing as it does in your country.

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No not really - your description would cover researcher,Teaching assistant, Research assistant, Lecturer A, Lecturer B, Senior Lecturer, research fellow,reader and many others. Those people all have slightly different roles and that why we use those different titles. None of those people would be described as a professor automatically.This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 01-10-2005 12:01 AMThis message has been edited by Charles Knight, 01-10-2005 12:07 AMThis message has been edited by Charles Knight, 01-10-2005 12:07 AM

Just so I can make sure my kids never apply to any institutions that hire people without PhD's into professorial positions, what were these universities? --Percy

It's getting hard to do here but many of the people giving lectures don't have a PhD or even a masters. I don't know what it's like in the states but teaching is something to be endured in betweeen trying to do your research (unless you are not research active and just lecture).I wouldn't bore you with the details but the UK is heading towards "teaching" universities and "research" univerisities.This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 01-10-2005 12:21 AM

At a 4 year university in the states, if you teach and do not have a PH.D, you are called a "lecturer." These are temporary positions. A master's is required.

What is a "4 year university"?

I don't know that they make the same hiring decisions now as they did in the past; my dad is a full professor and division chair at the University of Minnesota in Morris (regarded as one of the country's finest public liberal arts colleges); he holds no more than master's degrees in (I think) broadcasting, costuming, and technical theatre. He's pretty sure that they wouldn't have hired him today, but when he was hired lo these many years ago, there weren't too many people with Ph.D's in his fields.I'm sure that at least a few of the professors at Gustavus Adolphus College did not possess doctorates in their field, but I can't think of any full professors offhand.Given the intense committment and study it takes to even recieve a masters, I don't see this as indiscriminate. While any given field may be flooded with Ph.D's nowadays, this hasn't always been the case in many fields.