Profs and Pints - Richmond

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Life Hacks for Distracted Brains,” a look at how we all could benefit from research-based strategies for managing Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, with Laura E. Knouse, professor of psychology at the University of Richmond, licensed clinical psychologist, and author of Living Well with Adult ADHD: Practical Strategies for Improving Your Daily Life.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/rva-hacks-for-distracted-brains .]

Technology has altered our environments in ways that challenge our capacity to stay focused and complete tasks. Netflix beckons us away from doing the dishes. We doom scroll instead of undertaking planned projects. In bumping up against deadlines for completing important tasks we realize that we’ve been doing just about anything else.

Fortunately, the science of psychology offers insights into what we can do to take back our attention and bridge the gap between our intentions and our actions.

Learn new strategies for staying focused with Dr. Laura Knouse, a clinical psychologist who studies ADHD in adults and is an expert in using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat it.

In a talk geared toward a general audience but sure to also benefit those with ADHD diagnoses, she’ll discuss evidence-based approaches to helping people gain new self-regulation strategies and manage thoughts and feelings that reduce motivation.

To help you become better at starting and completing meaningful tasks, she’ll teach you how to recognize and change emotional states that reduce motivation, and also how to notice and respond to sneaky thoughts that can derail task-completion efforts.

You’ll learn hacks for staying focused and the basic psychological principles that explain why they work. These include the principle of negative reinforcement and also the Premack Principle, which holds that we’ll perform a less-preferred activity for the sake of being able to perform a more-preferred one.

Audience members will have the opportunity to develop personal action plans for using these hacks to progress toward one of their important (but avoided) goals. To offer more in-depth guidance after the talk, Professor Knouse will have copies of Living Well with Adult ADHD available for sale. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image from Pixabay.

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: "Eugenics Then and Now,” on a dangerous movement in science and its lessons for current research, with Carlo Quintanilla, molecular biologist and health science policy analyst at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-eugenics .]

Global concerns about the return of eugenic thinking were reignited by Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s 2018 announcement of the first gene-edited babies, Lulu and Nana. He was quickly condemned by the scientific community and jailed for illegal medical practice, but he and others around the world continue experiments with goals echoing eugenic ambitions.

As genetic technologies advance at extraordinary speed, society faces a new set of ethical questions about shaping the traits of future generations. Are we entering a new era of eugenics? If so, how should we respond?

Hear such questions tackled by Carlo Quintanilla, who studied rare genetic mutations in human disease as a graduate research scientist and instructor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and now works at the intersection of genomic medicine, science, and society.

Dr. Quintanilla will begin by discussing the origins and history of eugenics, tracing its development in the 19th and 20th centuries as an idea, a scientific movement, and a set of policies. He’ll examine the rise of Social Darwinism in the United Kingdom, forced sterilization programs in the United States, and the atrocities committed by the Third Reich in the name of “racial hygiene.”

From there, he’ll explore how our ability to shape human health and heredity have been transformed by modern reproductive and genetic technologies such as in vitro fertilization, prenatal and embryo screening, and genome editing. You’ll learn how these tools hold enormous promise when it comes to the prevention and cure of rare and debilitating genetic conditions, yet also raise profound questions related to their potential enablement of a new, technologically driven form of eugenics.

Dr. Quintanilla will then delve into the ongoing debate among scientists, bioethicists, and policymakers over what should be classified as eugenics today. He’ll highlight recent controversial uses of genetic and reproductive technologies that are pushing ethical boundaries faster than society can define them, from embryo selection for traits like IQ and height to speculative military interest in genetically enhanced soldiers. These examples raise urgent questions: Where should society draw ethical boundaries? Who gets to decide? And is the term “eugenics” still useful for guiding policy and public debate?

We’ll close by examining the social, political, and regulatory forces that will determine the future, considering whether they will restrain the push toward further genetic control or accelerate it. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The frontispiece of the 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, by pioneering eugenicist Francis Galton (Wikimedia Commons / Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “The Road to Mass Surveillance,” on the proliferation of automated license plate readers and the threats that they pose to our freedoms, with Steven Keener, a leading researcher on such devices as an assistant professor of criminology and director of the Center for Crime, Equity, and Justice Research and Policy at Christopher Newport University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-mass-surveillance .]

Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras have popped up throughout the country, with Flock Safety emerging as the predominant producer. They capture images of every passing vehicle and feed that data into centralized databases, giving tremendous power to track our movements on the road to both the government agencies that use them and the private companies contracted to operate them.

Proponents of the technology praise it for helping to track stolen cars, felony suspects, and missing persons. But it also has been used by law enforcement officers to stalk ex-partners, and its misreads of license plates have led to false accusations of crimes. Data from the cameras have been shared with entities that are not supposed to be allowed access, and attempts have been made to use such data to track individuals attending protests or crossing state lines to access health care that their own state banned. People have hacked into the cameras and the data they gather and broadcast that information on YouTube.

Learn in depth about ALPR cameras and the debate over their use and regulation with Steven Keener, the lead author of the first geospatial analysis of this emerging technology, “Surveillance Inequality: Race, Poverty and the Geography of Automated License Plate Reader Cameras.”

Dr. Keener will provide an overview of how ALPR cameras operate, describing what images are captured of each passing vehicle, what happens to those images in the short term, the lifecycle of the data that the cameras collect, and how the cameras are operated jointly by local police and private surveillance companies.

He’ll offer insights on the comprehensive, expansive database that has been built using the images captured by ALPR cameras, describing where that information is stored, who has access to it, how long it can be accessed and for what reasons, and what happens when the dataset is tapped into for investigations and criminal cases. You’ll learn about where cameras are placed and about trends in their use.

Dr. Keener will look at the risks of such a comprehensive dataset of individuals' daily movement patterns and bring you up to speed on court cases challenging ALPR surveillance systems on grounds such as the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure. We’ll look at rigorous debates at the local level over whether to maintain or cancel contracts with the private surveillance companies and at efforts by state lawmakers in Virginia and elsewhere to put guardrails on such technology.

Dr. Keener, a critic of ALPR systems who actively works with community organizations evaluating the cancellation of ALPR contracts, will equip talk attendees with the knowledge to engage in local advocacy. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Traffic in downtown Los Angeles (Photo by Prayitno / Creative Commons).