title: There's no place like home: Is our preference for familiar surroundings a bias?

authors: Weijers, Dan M.

abstract: Drawing on experimental and traditional philosophical methods, several researchers have argued that our judgments about the relative value of different lives are often affected by status quo bias. Status quo bias – the irrational overvaluing of the status quo – appears to make our comparative judgments of our current life with different, and especially radically different, kinds of lives unhelpful. If true, this finding has significant implications for philosophy in several areas, including wellbeing, moral theory, and any value-based theorising about home. In this presentation, I will present the results of experiments on different versions of Nozick’s experience machine scenario. The different versions of the scenario were designed to tease out what it is that we value about the status quo, enabling me to establish whether our high valuing of home is more to do with our personal relationships, familiarity with our surroundings, or fear of the unknown. The experiments included gathering individual characteristics of participants, so that many possibly confounding factors could be analysed. The main message from the results is that for many people, going home means going to where the people they love are.

text: There's no place like home: Is our preference for familiar surroundings a bias? Drawing on experimental and traditional philosophical methods, several researchers have argued that our judgments about the relative value of different lives are often affected by status quo bias. Status quo bias – the irrational overvaluing of the status quo – appears to make our comparative judgments of our current life with different, and especially radically different, kinds of lives unhelpful. If true, this finding has significant implications for philosophy in several areas, including wellbeing, moral theory, and any value-based theorising about home. In this presentation, I will present the results of experiments on different versions of Nozick’s experience machine scenario. The different versions of the scenario were designed to tease out what it is that we value about the status quo, enabling me to establish whether our high valuing of home is more to do with our personal relationships, familiarity with our surroundings, or fear of the unknown. The experiments included gathering individual characteristics of participants, so that many possibly confounding factors could be analysed. The main message from the results is that for many people, going home means going to where the people they love are.

year: 2019

title: Local and regional influences over soil microbial metacommunities in the Transantarctic Mountains

authors: Sokol, Eric R.

subjects: Science & Technology

abstract: The metacommunity concept provides a useful framework to assess the influence of local and regional controls over diversity patterns. Culture‐independent studies of soil microbial communities in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of East Antarctica (77° S) have shown that bacterial diversity is related to soil geochemical gradients, while studies targeting edaphic cyanobacteria have linked local diversity patterns to dispersal‐based processes. In this study, we increased the spatial extent of observed soil microbial communities to cover the Beardmore Glacier region in the central Transantarctic Mountains (84° S). We used community profiling techniques to characterize diversity patterns for bacteria and the cyanobacterial subcomponent of the microbial community. Diversity partitioning was used to calculate beta diversity and estimate among‐site dissimilarity in the metacommunity. We then used variation partitioning to assess the relationship between beta diversity and environmental and spatial gradients. We found that dominant groups in the soil bacterial metacommunity were influenced by gradients in pH and soil moisture at the Transantarctic scale (800 km). Conversely, beta diversity for the cyanobacterial component of the edaphic microbial metacommunity was decoupled from these environmental gradients, and was more related to spatial filters, suggesting that wind‐driven dispersal dynamics created cyanobacterial biogeography at a local scale (<3 km).

text: Local and regional influences over soil microbial metacommunities in the Transantarctic Mountains The metacommunity concept provides a useful framework to assess the influence of local and regional controls over diversity patterns. Culture‐independent studies of soil microbial communities in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of East Antarctica (77° S) have shown that bacterial diversity is related to soil geochemical gradients, while studies targeting edaphic cyanobacteria have linked local diversity patterns to dispersal‐based processes. In this study, we increased the spatial extent of observed soil microbial communities to cover the Beardmore Glacier region in the central Transantarctic Mountains (84° S). We used community profiling techniques to characterize diversity patterns for bacteria and the cyanobacterial subcomponent of the microbial community. Diversity partitioning was used to calculate beta diversity and estimate among‐site dissimilarity in the metacommunity. We then used variation partitioning to assess the relationship between beta diversity and environmental and spatial gradients. We found that dominant groups in the soil bacterial metacommunity were influenced by gradients in pH and soil moisture at the Transantarctic scale (800 km). Conversely, beta diversity for the cyanobacterial component of the edaphic microbial metacommunity was decoupled from these environmental gradients, and was more related to spatial filters, suggesting that wind‐driven dispersal dynamics created cyanobacterial biogeography at a local scale (<3 km).

year: 2013

title: Holding a mirror to society? Sociodemographic diversity within clinical psychology training programmes across Aotearoa.

authors: Scarf, Damian

subjects: Education, Medical

abstract: It has recently been demonstrated by Crampton et al that there has been a marked increase in the sociodemographic diversity of the University of Otago’s health professional programmes between 2010 and 2016.1 This change is evidenced by the fact that a historic 76 health professional Māori graduates crossed the Dunedin Town Hall stage in December 2018. A key driver of this change was the University of Otago’s Division of Health Sciences Mirror on Society selection policy. Here, by documenting the sociodemographic diversity of an equally important professional programme, clinical psychology, we highlight the need for similar selection policies to be implemented Aotearoa/New Zealand wide.

text: Holding a mirror to society? Sociodemographic diversity within clinical psychology training programmes across Aotearoa. It has recently been demonstrated by Crampton et al that there has been a marked increase in the sociodemographic diversity of the University of Otago’s health professional programmes between 2010 and 2016.1 This change is evidenced by the fact that a historic 76 health professional Māori graduates crossed the Dunedin Town Hall stage in December 2018. A key driver of this change was the University of Otago’s Division of Health Sciences Mirror on Society selection policy. Here, by documenting the sociodemographic diversity of an equally important professional programme, clinical psychology, we highlight the need for similar selection policies to be implemented Aotearoa/New Zealand wide.

year: 2019