Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, the speakers' review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior—hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. The speakers close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Trevor Pinch is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. Pinch has a degree in Physics from the Imperial College London and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bath. He taught sociology at the University of York before moving to the USA. Together with Wiebe Bijker, he started the movement known as Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) within the sociology of science. He is the coeditor of How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology (MIT Press, 2003) and the coauthor of Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer and other books. He is a significant contributor to the study of Sound culture, and his books include a major study of Robert Moog. This talk addresses the topic of digital music through a two year ethnographic study of the users of the website ACIDplanet.com. ACIDplanet.com is a website where musicians can upload and download their own musical creations. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Ivanova is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Alberta. She completed a M.Sc in mathematics and astronomy at Saint-Petersburg State University, then was an astrophysics graduate student at the University of Oxford. Ivanova has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, and most recently is the ninth recipient of the Beatrice D. Tremaine Postdoctoral Fellowship, given by the CITA council for outstanding research by a postdoctoral researcher. Her research on interacting compact binaries, and in particular on studies of neutron stars in globular clusters, lead to a significant advance in our understanding of neutron star formation channels, as well as provided the link between the theory and observations for millisecond pulsars and low-mass X-ray binaries both in our and distant galaxies. Of particular interest to Ivanova are stellar and high energy astrophysics, stellar populations, stellar dynamics, and hydrodynamics. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Alumni Weekend, this lecture explores basic mysteries such as "What are electricity and magnetism?", "How can atoms exist?" and "What are space and time?" has led to computers, wireless communication, MP3 players, lasers, medical imaging -- indeed, virtually every "high tech" device on the planet. Join Dr. Epp in a celebration of the immense power of theoretical physics to transform our world for the betterment of humanity, and learn how current theoretical explorations may hold potential for even more fantastic innovations in the future.