A document by Dr_Helen_Webberley . Click on the document to view its contents.

Thank you everybody for participating in this session! I really enjoyed it. Logging off now! Hello! I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. At Birmingham I work mainly in the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. At the moment I am not teaching undergraduates because I am in charge of a major project that takes most of my time, but I have ten PhD students working on very interesting issues, from the rationality of emotions to the nature and the consequences of loneliness. I have been at Birmingham for most of my career as a philosopher. Before getting a lectureship there in 2005, I was in Manchester for one year, working as a Research Associate on a European project led by Professor John Harris, and I mainly wrote about bioethical issues and the question whether and to what extent scientific research should be ethically regulated. I always loved Philosophy, since as a teenager in school I encountered Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates. I was fascinated by how Socrates could get his audience to agree with him, starting from very innocent-sounding questions and gradually getting people to commit to really controversial theses! I wanted that talent. So, at university I chose Philosophy and studied in my hometown, Bologna. For half a year I was an Erasmus student at the University of Leeds and immersed myself in the history and philosophy of science. Then I went back to Bologna to complete my degree, and moved to the UK afterwards, where I got a Masters in Philosophy from King’s College London (with a thesis on the rationality of scientific revolutions) and the BPhil from the University of Oxford (with a thesis on the rationality debate in cognitive science). For my PhD I went to the Australian National University in Canberra. My doctoral thesis was an attempt to show that there is no rationality constraint on the ascription of beliefs. This means that I don’t need to assume that you’re rational in order to ascribe beliefs to you. I used several examples to make my point, reflecting on how we successfully ascribe beliefs to non-human animals, young children, and people experiencing psychosis. Given my history, it won’t be not a big surprise for you to hear that I’m still interested in rationality. I consider most of my work an exercise in empirically-informed philosophy of mind. I want to explore the strengths and limitations of human cognition and focus on some familiar and some more unsettling instances of inaccurate or irrational belief, including cases of prejudice and superstition, self-deception, optimism bias, delusion, confabulation, and memory distortion. To do so, I can’t rely on philosophical investigation alone, and I’m an avid reader of research in the cognitive sciences. I believe that psychological evidence provides useful constraints for our philosophical theories. Although learning about the pervasiveness of irrational beliefs and behaviour is dispiriting, I’ve come to the conviction that some manifestations of human irrationality are not all bad. Irrational beliefs are not just an inevitable product of our limitations, but often have some benefit that is hidden from view. In the five-year project I’m currently leading, funded by the European Research Council, I focus on the positive side of irrational beliefs. The project is called Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts (acronym PERFECT) and has several objectives, including showing how some beliefs fail to meet norms of accuracy or rationality but bring about some dimension of success; establishing that there is no qualitative gap between the irrationality of those beliefs that are regarded as symptoms of mental health issues and the irrationality of everyday beliefs; and, on the basis of the previous two objectives, undermining the stigma commonly associated with mental health issues. There are not many things I’m genuinely proud of, but one is having founded a blog, Imperfect Cognitions, where academic experts at all career stages and experts by experience discuss belief, emotion, rationality, mental health, and other related topics. The blog reflects my research interests, my commitment to interdisciplinary research, and my belief that the quality of the contributions is enhanced in an inclusive environment. But nowadays it is a real team effort, and post-docs and PhD students working for PERFECT manage it, commissioning, editing, scheduling posts and promoting new content on social media. Please check it out, you’ll love it! I wrote two books, Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (OUP 2009), which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Book Prize in 2011, and Irrationality (Polity 2014). I have several papers on irrationality and belief, and the most recent ones are open access, so you can read them here. Shorter and more accessible versions of the arguments I present in the papers are often available as blog posts. For instance, you can read about the benefits of optimism, and the perks of Reverse Othello syndrome. Some Recent Links of Interest: Are We Biased About Love? - Philosophy247 podcast “Agency Without Rationality” - Inaugural Lecture, University of Birmingham, 9 May 2016 “Us and Them” no longer: mental health concerns us all - blog post Philosophy Bites podcast on irrationality The Upside of Delusional Beliefs

My name is Dr. Lisa K. Moores, and I am board certified in critical care medicine, pulmonary disease and internal medicine and have worked on guidelines to help improve venous thromboembolism (VTE) patient care. I’m also the President-Elect of the CHEST Foundation, the philanthropic foundation of the American College of Chest Physicians, an organization representing 19,000+ clinicians practicing pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine. I co-authored the American College of Chest Physician’s guidelines Antithrombotic Therapy for VTE Disease: CHEST Guideline and Expert Panel Report in February 2016 and have been on the frontlines of VTE research for over a decade. AMA! March is Blood Clot Awareness Month, and it is important to shed light on a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. A VTE, is a blood clot that forms in a vein deep inside the body that blocks important blood flow. VTE includes both deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE), conditions that affect an estimated 350,000 to 600,000 Americans each year. You might’ve heard the now debunked term ‘economy class syndrome’, a phenomenon that linked the formation of blood clots in veins with sitting in economy class for a long airplane flight and wondered, “Does this really exist?” No need to buy first-class only…it’s a myth! Because of the many misconceptions on VTE, I have worked alongside the American College of Chest Physicians to release evidence-based guidelines, Antithrombotic Therapy for VTE Disease: CHEST Guideline and Expert Panel Report, that provides 53 updated recommendations for appropriate treatment of patients with VTE. VTE typically forms in the legs of individuals and can be caused by everyday things as simple as sitting for a long period of time. Other risk factors for a VTE include: estrogen use (including birth control), obesity, recent injury or surgery, cancer, blood-clotting disorders and smoking. Because it can affect almost anyone it is important to me to provide information for proper treatment and care. Please feel free to ask about anything related to VTE, DVT, PE or pulmonary medicine. I will return at 2:30 p.m. EST to answer your questions. Ask me anything! Conflict of Interest Disclosure: My thoughts and opinions are my own. They are not official opinions of the Uniformed Services University, the United States Army or the Department of Defense.

ACS AMA Hello Reddit! We are Sylvia Daunert, Suzana Hamdan, and Irena Pastar of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. In February 2017, we published our research in ACS Central Science, an open access journal, entitled “Nanotechnology-Driven Therapeutic Interventions in Wound Healing: Potential Uses and Applications” We look forward to answering your questions about this research today! To introduce ourselves, alphabetically by surname: I am Sylvia Daunert and I am the Lucille P. Markey Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, as well as the Associate Director of the Dr. JT Macdonald Biomedical Nanotechnology Institute at the University of Miami. My group’s research focuses on the development of bio-inspired nanotechnologies to solve biomedical and environmental problems. We genetically engineer living cells and proteins for environmental detection, molecular sensing, molecular diagnostics, point-of-care tests, biomarker identification, and targeted and responsive drug delivery. We recently developed a nanocarrier-based method for the targeted delivery of stem cells for wound healing. The technology, while widely applicable to a variety of wounds, was first demonstrated in diabetic wounds and in animal models of corneal and retinal injury. I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan, and awarded my Ph.D. in bioanalytical chemistry at the University of Barcelona in Spain. I am Suzana Hamdan and I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Daunert Research Group at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. My current research interests focus on the biological studies of nanomaterials derived from pharmaceutical drugs. In fall 2007, I received a Master of Science degree from East Tennessee State University, and was awarded a Ph.D. degree in May 2015 from the chemistry department at Louisiana State University. During my graduate studies, I developed novel techniques for size-control of nanoparticles derived from organic salts, and designed molecularly imprinted polymeric nanoparticles for chiral recognition of biological targets. I am currently the author of eight published scientific papers, with a special focus on nanotechnology and analytical chemistry fields. I am Irena Pastar and I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Surgery. Our department has developed an unique wound healing research program focused on understanding the nature of non-healing wounds at the cellular and molecular levels. We have also been active in a variety of pre-clinical studies and clinical trials evaluating bioengineered products, drugs, dressings and devices important to wound repair. After receiving my Ph.D. in molecular microbiology and completing a postdoctoral fellowship in immunology at the Rockefeller University, I pursued translational research in cutaneous wound healing. My research focuses on the molecular pathophysiology of chronic wounds and cutaneous infections. I am a leading investigator and co-investigator on multiple federal and industry sponsored studies on novel wound healing therapeutics and chronic wound pathogenesis. Ask us anything about using nanotechnology to heal wounds! We will be back at 12pm ET (9am PT, 5pm UTC) to answer your questions. Hi Reddit! Sylvia, Irena, and I are online , and happy to answer your questions! Hello Reddit Users, We are logging off for a while, but will be back later to answer your questions. Thank you for your interest in our field! Irena, Suzana and Sylvia Hi Reddit! We are back online again and ready to answer more questions! We are logging off for now, we might answer few more questions later on. We would like to thank all who participated in our AMA Reddit today and apologize to those who did not get an answer due to a lack of time to get to all questions. Hope you continue your interest in nanotechnology and keep on supporting research. It is really important to us and our global scientific community! Thanks again, Suzana, Irena and Sylvia

Hello Reddit! We are a team of researchers at Michigan State University who recently published a paper in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examining how preschool kids’ social networks and personalities affect each other over the course of a school year. Here is the link to our study abstract: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2017-04563-001/ Emily is an associate professor in social psychology and Allison and Sharon are both graduate students in clinical psychology. They all study the development of kids’ personalities and emotions. Jenna is an associate professor in community psychology who studies kids’ social networks in schools. We decided to put our heads together to learn more about how kids’ personalities and social networks influence each other. In a nutshell, we found that some aspects of kids’ personalities (e.g., displays of positive emotion, ability to regulate behavior) are shaped by the playmates in their networks. However, we also found that some aspects of kids’ personalities can shape their networks too. The results of our paper was recently featured on Reddit and you guys had a lot to say about it!: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5s73mt/when_preschoolers_spend_time_around_one_another/ We’d love to answer any questions you have about our study. We’d be happy to chat about the theories behind our work, our observational methods, the analyses we used, or what we found. We’d also be happy to answer more general questions about kids’ personality development or kids’ social networks. Or, if you are just interested in what it’s like to be a psychology professor or graduate student, ask away! If you’d like to see the full study, you can request it here: http://psychology.msu.edu/Faculty/FacultyMember.aspx?netid=jneal Go to the following citation, hit the request a copy button, and enter your email to have the paper automatically send to your inbox: Neal, J.W., Durbin, C.E., Gornik, A.E., & Lo, S.L. (in press). Co-development of preschoolers’ temperament traits and social play networks over an entire school year. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. We will be back at 4 pm ET to answer you questions!

I’m a historian of science, technology, the environment, and American capitalism. I have a PhD from MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, where my research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. My dissertation, “Inventing Purity in the Atlantic Sugar World, 1860-1930,” was awarded prizes in 2015 for the best dissertation in business history in both the U.S. and Britain, and his work has been published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Journal of British Studies, and Enterprise & Society, while another article is forthcoming in Radical History Review. I’m currently a visiting scholar at UVA and working on my first book Purity and Power in the American Sugar Empire, 1860-1940, which narrates a new history of U.S. imperialism by tracing material struggles over knowledge about sugar’s substance and value. Drawing on research in U.S., Cuban, and Hawaiian archives, Purity and Power shows how the U.S’s attempts to govern nature and human labor in its Pacific and Caribbean colonies were inseparable from contests over corruption, free trade, and corporate power at home. I’m also preparing an article about food, labor, and scientific knowledge in the 1880s and 1890s, examining scandals over the smuggling of frozen Canadian herring into Gloucester, Massachusetts. Before this, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis and a research associate at Harvard Business School. Ask me anything about the history of science or technology! EDIT—thank you! This has been great fun. I hope my answers have been helpful and sorry I couldn’t get to all of your questions.

Hi Reddit: we are two researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists. We work on a variety of transportation issues, including how self-driving cars will impact our economy and environment. We just published a short report that outlines seven “principles” for autonomous vehicles, meant as a basic guide for shaping how policymakers, companies, and other stakeholders approach this transformative technology. We want to ensure that self-driving cars create a clean and safe transportation system for everyone. Josh Goldman is a senior policy analyst at UCS, where he has led analytical and policy efforts on vehicle electrification, biofuels, and fuel economy; he previously worked for the EPA, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Jimmy O’Dea is a vehicles analyst at UCS, where he works on vehicle and freight policy. Dr. O’Dea holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and worked for Senator Brian Schatz during a AAAS Science & Engineering Congressional Fellowship. Ok, that’s it for us (~3:08pm eastern). This was great! Thank you.

Hi Reddit, My name is Erin Mordecai and I am an Assistant Professor of Biology at Stanford University. My research focuses on the complex ways in which global change (including climate, land use, species invasions, etc.) influences infectious disease. I am joined by coauthors Jamieson O’Marr and Chris LeBoa. Jameison is a junior undergraduate majoring in biology at Stanford University, whose research interests involve using ecological methods to study and predict the spread of infectious disease. Chris is an undergraduate human biology major at Stanford University concentrating in disease ecology. His research focuses on using preventative strategies to reduce infectious disease risk. We recently published a review paper titled “Environmental and Social Change Drive the Explosive Emergence of Zika Virus in the Americas” in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. This study was unusual in that it was written as a class project in my Stanford undergraduate seminar course, Bio 2N: Global Change and the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease. We set out to explore all the ways in which global change may have fueled the emergence and spread of Zika virus in the Americas in the last two years. We found evidence for many factors at play, including poor housing and infrastructure, suitable climate, abundant mosquitoes that are well adapted to live and breed near humans, lapsed mosquito control, and global travel. For example, we found that Zika cases shot up in a province in Ecuador following a massive earthquake that destroyed housing and infrastructure. We also found that deforestation and low GDP both correlated with the number of Zika-linked microcephaly cases in Brazil. Because of the high suitability for mosquito transmission throughout much of the Americas (including parts of the southern US), we need to be much more vigilant about vector control and rapid public health responses to new emerging diseases. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything! Don’t forget to follow Erin on Twitter @morde.

Hi reddit! The microbes that inhabit humans – collectively called the microbiome – play a critical role in human development and physiology and can be considered an additional organ. They play major roles in food digestion, immune system development, and inflammation and directly affect the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and asthma in industrialized societies over the past 50 years. I’m Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science, and I study how the microbiome effects humans (especially in regards to their diet) as well as how it can affect entire societies-shaping them through both common diseases and pandemics. I’m looking forward to answering questions about the several major ways microbes affect humans. Microbes play a major role in early childhood development, including affecting the immune system and even brain development. Our society’s obsession with cleanliness and antibiotics is thus having a major impact on childhood development, including recently identified early microbiota effects on asthma. Obesity and diabetes rates are skyrocketing worldwide, and recent data indicate that the microbiome plays a central role, including the finding that obesity can be transferred through feces. By understanding an individual’s microbiome, it is now possible to design a personalized diet, resulting in weight loss. In addition, historical evidence reveals that microbes significantly affect societal development. By studying ancient microbial DNA, new insights have been shed on the plagues and pandemics that have shaped our history. I’ll be back at 3 pm EST to answer your questions! Ask me anything! EDIT:Thanks so much for a stimulating conversation, had a great time. Eran

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this Spring semester which will host AMAs by a number of world class academic philosophers working in a variety of different areas of contemporary philosophy. Check out our series announcement post to see blurbs for all the AMAs lined up this semester. You can also check out last semester’s series announcement post to see all the AMAs from Fall 2016. So far this semester we’ve had AMAs by Amie L. Thomasson on metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of art, available here, Samantha Brennan on normative and feminist ethics, available here, Chris W. Surprenant on moral/political philosophy, available here and S. Matthew Liao on ethics, bioethics and neuroethics, available here. We continue our Spring 2017 Series this upcoming Wednesday with an AMA by David Chalmers (NYU). Hear it from him: David Chalmers I’m a philosopher at New York University and the Australian National University. I’m interested in consciousness: e.g. the hard problem (see also this TED talk), the science of consciousness, zombies, and panpsychism. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the philosophy of technology: e.g. the extended mind (another TED talk), the singularity, and especially the universe as a simulation and virtual reality. I have a sideline in metaphilosophy: e.g. philosophical progress, verbal disputes, and philosophers’ beliefs. I help run PhilPapers and other online resources. Here’s my website (it was cutting edge in 1995; new version coming soon). Some Recent Links of Interest: “What It’s Like to be a Philosopher” - (My Life Story) Consciousness and the Universe Reverse Debate on Consciousness - (channeling the other side) The Mind Bleeds into the World: A Conversation with David Chalmers - (issues about VR, AI, and philosophy that I’ve been thinking about recently) OUP Books Thanks to OUP, you can save 30% on any OUP title by Professor Chalmers by using promocode AAFLYG6 on the oup.com site, while the series is ongoing. Those titles are: The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives The Character of Consciousness Constructing the World AMA Professor Chalmers will join us Wednesday for a live Q&A on 2/22 at 12PM EST. Please feel free to post questions for him here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Chalmers to our community!

Hi Reddit! We are Eric Jonas (a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Konrad Kording (Professor at Northwestern and RIC). Our research focuses on trying to understand how the neurons in the brain compute and give rise to behavior. A lot of what we do is come up with mathematical techniques to understand neural data and work on new methods to acquire this data. We recently published a paper titled “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?” that tried to address if the analysis methods we frequently use in neuroscience are likely to provide the level of “understanding” we seek. One of the biggest challenges facing neuroscience is that we don’t actually know ahead of time how neural systems work, so validating analysis techniques can be a catch-22. We attempted to use these techniques on a microprocessor – a system we understand really well – to see if we could make sense of how it works. This ended up being quite difficult, and we suggest ways that we might move forward as a community to make sure our analysis methods really do what we hope they will. Our study has also been written up in the popular press. Read the articles in Arstechnica and The Economist) to learn more. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything! Follow Eric on Twitter @stochastician Konrad at @kordinglab.

I’m Phil Baran and I teach Organic Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute. I also head the Baran Laboratory, a vibrant and passionate team of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars vigorously trying to uncover Chemistry’s many hidden secrets in the pursuit of useful reactions that can simplify the way molecules are created in the lab. In a nutshell, we like to pursue problems whose solution can have a rapid impact in areas that are important to modern society such as the invention of new pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, or materials. Our general philosophy to making complex molecules in the laboratory has been summarized in multiple locations but suffice it to say we are aiming for syntheses that are as close to “ideal” as possible. With regards to inventing methodologies we like to focus on tangible and practical ways of forging bonds that are meaningful to as many folks as possible. In that regard, we are most enthusiastic about solving specific unmet needs in reactivity that have a high likelihood of being “translational”. Finally, we like to collaborate as much as possible with industry as the fastest return on tax payer money happens when fundamental science and real-world problems come face to face. To learn more about our research, check out our Blog, Open Flask (http://openflask.blogspot.comhttp://openflask.blogspot.com/), our website (http://www.scripps.edu/baran/html/home.html), or follow us on Twitter (@baranlabreads). When I was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship (aka “genius grant”) in 2013, they said that I my research “is not only enhancing our ability to make fundamental structures for a broad range of medicines and materials, but is also strengthening the intellectual foundations of organic chemistry.” https://www.macfound.org/fellows/884/ I was on earlier today, Monday, February 13, to answer your questions, and will pop in intermittently later to answer some more, if you’d like to go ahead and keep asking. So ask me anything!