Conference this weekend (plus some pretty cool rats!)

I’m heading to Minneapolis this weekend for the 39th Annual Convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis, International. This will be my 3rd time to attend and I am really excited. It’s a four day conference, full of lots of fascinating lectures and presentations about both human and animal behavior.

I’ll be pretty busy while I’m at the convention, but I’ll try to share some snippets from some of my favorite lectures.

At the convention, I’ll be presenting a poster about a research project that I’ve been working on. If you’ve never been to a poster session at an academic conference — think science fair, but for adults! It’s a lot of fun because I’ll get to share and discuss my research with a variety of other people and should also get some great feedback.

I’m also helping lead a six hour workshop for professionals that is all about shaping. Specifically, our workshop is called “Beyond successive approximations: Useful strategies and tactics to improve your shaping.” There is information (as well as pictures) from last year’s workshop on the ORCA website here.

In other news, have you ever heard of Cirque du Sewer? I recently learned about it and just had to share.

Cirque du Sewer is a one person circus that features performer Melissa Arleth and her trained rats. The rats perform a variety of cool tricks, including running through obstacle courses and jumping through flaming hoops. Check out the video below, it looks like a pretty fun show. I hope her circus is helping convince people that rats are both sweet and smart, and don’t deserve a bad reputation. You can check out the Cirque du Sewer website here for more information.

Watch on YouTube: Cirque du Sewer

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One Response to Conference this weekend (plus some pretty cool rats!)

  1. Jenny May 26, 2013 at 3:56 am #

    That is just lovely 🙂
    Thankyou 🙂

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