We all like to think we have a handle on what’s real — it’s natural. However, with the pervasive nature of opinion media broadcasting 24/7 on television and now on the internet, it can sometimes be hard to get a handle on the situation. This is compounded by the echo chambers of our social media …
Category Archives: Cognitive Science
Language and dimensionality: The movie “Arrival”
I watched the film Arrival last night. It was an interesting exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has two versions: Linguistic Relativity — claims that language shapes and colours our worldview (i.e. if you don’t have a nuanced set of words for different types of snow, you are less likely to see the different varieties …
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My beautiful trip to DC
Last weekend, I traveled to Washington, DC, one of my favourite cities in the world. It was a bit of a working vacation for me, since I have been going quite hard, with research and teaching. I arrived on Saturday morning, flying on Jetblue out of Buffalo. It was a funny flight, because I was …
How I became an academic: from tenure until the present
During the last month, I have been recounting the story of how I became an academic. In this, the final blog entry in this series, I discuss what it was like settling into the reality of becoming a middle-career academic and learning to savour life a little. During the last two years before tenure, I …
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Co-organised LACUS Conference.
Last week I organised a conference called LACUS – Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States. I love event planning. I love hosting people. I love throwing parties and cooking for people. So, last year, I agreed, with my colleague Dr Michael Kliffer from the Department of French, to host the Annual Meeting of …
Public Relations and the Social Media Revolution
Mass broadcasting systems permitted the marketing revolution of the 50s and 60s. Now, the social media revolution is opening up the same radical possibilities for public relations. PR is the business of building relationships, in Canada that means preferably symmetrical relationships between an organization and its various publics. In the past, it was very hard …
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Video: Public Relations and Edward T. Bernays
Public relations was born out of idealism, elitism and a desire to perfect democracy. The founder of the field, Edward T. Bernays, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He created the field and named it on a whim. This video, produced in the United Kingdom and called The Century of the Self, while quite critical …
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We remember what we hear and feel, not what people say.
I have always believed that humans have feelings and that these feelings impact our reasoning. Current trends in neuroscience seem to be bearing this belief out. For me, my thinking about emotional cognition started during a philosophy seminar in which we discussed René Descartes notion that cognition is purely rational. Cogito ergo sum. He also …
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COMM-Lab: Communication Metrics Laboratory is LAUNCHED!
Today, we launched the COMM-Lab: Communication Metrics Laboratory, of which I am the founder and co-director with my colleague, Dr. Philip Savage. COMM-Lab was created because of a dearth of empirical and evidence-based research on communication studies in Canada. Many scholars, practitioners and MPs have told Philip and me that more data is needed to …
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