$22 per hour, 24 hours a day

OC Register “Watchdog” Teri Sforza wrapped up her “trek through the Big Public Pension Club” today. Former Irvine Valley College VPI Dennis White gets a dishonorable mention: “top dog [in the SOCCCD] is Dennis White, $193,192.92.” ($100,000 pension club in Tustin, Westminster South OC)

That’s $530 a day. That’s $22 per hour, 24 hours a day.

So when he sleeps (I do believe he requires 8 hours a night; otherwise, he gets grumpy), he gets $177. Each night. Just sleepin’.

White was the dufus who, in 2003, declared that faculty may not discuss the Iraq war unless it directly pertains to their courses.

During his first visit to my School, he explained that, as a young man, he dropped out of school and joined the military, whereupon he discovered, he said, that the difference between officers and enlisted men was that the officers’ cars were better and the officers’ wives were “prettier.”

That’s when he learned the value of “getting an education,” he said.

He then briefly basked in his imagined charm and cleverness. In fact, at least at that moment, he was regarded as an idiot by every person in the room.

Today, psychologist Chris French of the Guardian once again railed against the commonly accepted but mistaken notion that memories are “recordings”:

According to this view, 'real' memories would always be 100% accurate replays of previous events as we originally experienced them. Anything that is not 100% accurate is therefore not really a memory at all, and therefore false memories cannot exist.

A survey last year of more than 600 undergraduates at a Midwestern university in the USA revealed that about 27% believed that memory does indeed operate like a tape recorder. Other surveys show that 36% of us believe that our brains retain perfect records of everything we've ever experienced, a mistaken view that, worryingly, is shared by some psychotherapists.

In fact, psychologists have known for quite some time that memories are more like reconstructions than recordings:

What we think we recall about events, with degrees of confidence ranging from uncertainty to absolute conviction, is actually a construction based upon a mixture of accurate recollections and gaps filled in upon the basis of our general knowledge and beliefs about what is plausible, our expectations, fragments of recollections of other similar events, and even input from dreams, fantasies and imagination. (See False memories of childhood sexual abuse)

It just so happened that, today, in one of my classes, I referred to the “reconstructive” nature of memory. Students looked skeptical. What were they thinking? Dunno.

I sometimes worry that they think I’m just making stuff up.