Decius wrote:

In addition to doing research on the female orgasm this guy teaches a class called "unix tools for behavioral research."

By all indications, this course has been offered only three times: in Spring 2000, in Fall 2002, and in Spring 2004. It hasn't been offered recently.

The course link on the above-referenced page has been broken since before April 2004. However, a little digging finds the content still online at a slightly different URL, linked from an alternate home page for Prof. Kim Wallen. The syllabus for the Spring 2004 semester is still available.

Frankly I find it baffling that this course ever managed to gain approval as a Psychology course, considering that the subject matter is straight-ahead Unix shell 101. There's no questioning the general value of a certain dexterity with sed, awk, etc., but such a course qualifies as psychology only to the extent that in the struggle to achieve competency with these tools, you've got to get inside the heads of Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan, McMahon, and their colleagues from the heyday of Bell Labs.

Perhaps the department head eventually came to this conclusion and has thus declined to offer this course since Spring 2004. Perhaps not, though, because it still appears on "a partial list of current and recent course offerings by NAB faculty and affiliates." It's characterized as a "topical seminar elective"; other such electives include "Face Recognition", "Thinking, Feeling and Sex", "Animal Models of Developmental Neuropathology", and "Comparative Cognition", all of which seem considerably more appropriate for the psychology department catalog.

On "Unix Tools for Behavioral Research" As A Psychology Course