Rocket Dog

At Christmas, I did quite a bit of clothing shopping with my mom. (I find shopping by myself kind of boring and there's only so much I think it's reasonable to make Robert go along with, so I often delay shopping outings until I see my mom.) And as many of you know, I am crazy about shoes. It's fortunate that I have no use for or interest in high heels and other often expensive, extremely uncomfortable shoes; this is the only thing that keeps my shoe supply down to a plausibly reasonable level. (I cannot easily estimate how many shoes I have now and I am afraid to count.) At one store, I saw this wonderful pair of deconstructed plaid sneakers and went absolutely gaga for them immediately. I was initially like, wow, if I were 17 years old, I would totally buy these shoes. But then I realized, wait, I can buy them even at my advanced age of 33 if I want to. (I have a somewhat older friend RB who is constantly referring to various 28-35 year old women as being "terribly young" - this cracks me up but at the same time is sort of reassuring.) So I tried them on, fell in love, and bought them.

One of the advantages of my job is that it's a pretty relaxed environment dress-wise. (Surprisingly to me, it's not actually as casual as at my previous job, where I wore pajamas on Holloween, which was the first Friday I worked there, and told people, "Oh, this isn't a costume; it was just the only thing I could find to wear on casual Friday that was actually a step down from how everyone dresses during the week.") The range of dress is very wide and often related in complex ways to what division people work in and what their position is within the division. (A middle-level manager in revenue and budget will wear a suit while a division head for a resource division will wear jeans and a polo shirt with the agency logo. Our previous executive director was the strangest dresser of all; my favorite outfit was when he gave an agency-wide talk wearing cowboy boots, chinos, a button-down shirt, a bolo tie, and a puffy ski jacket.) My outfits range from a silk shirt, a jacket, and dress pants (very rare) to jeans and sneakers. I typically wear a fitted t-shirt, a cardigan, cotton pants, and comfortable mary jane or mock moc shoes. I try to save the jeans for Fridays, but this week, I just had to wear them today. (I think this was partly in reaction to dressing up ever so slightly for my presentation to executive management on Monday and partly because any week, like this one, when we have Friday off is always kind of unreal and a good excuse to deviate from personal norms.) So I wore them with my killer Rocket Dog shoes. Are they just the cutest or what.

Ignoring Base Rates

One irksome thing I encounter in my job is somebody getting unduly excited about a statistic that they’ve read, like that “participation in kayaking doubled in the last 10 years and is now the fastest growing recreational activity in the country” or “female participation in hunting is up 70% from 1990,” that basically comes down to growth from a small base. It’s very easy for something to be up in percentage terms when the original number is very low. But it’s not as exciting to report “in 2000, 5% of the US adult population participated in kayaking, up from 2% in 1990” or similarly unimpressive percentage point increases. [Please note that I made up all these numbers.]

The situation is worsened by the fact that frequently, given a reasonably high sample size, small differences between two high or two low percentages are statistically significant. And people have real trouble understanding that statistical significance and substantive significance (or meaningfulness) aren’t the same thing. Statistical significance can tell you how sure you can be that the difference exists, but not how large the difference is or whether it means anything. For example, if I could talk to every single adult in this country and find out that 64% of women like dogs and 65% of men like dogs, I could say with assurance that men are more likely to like dogs than woman are, but the difference is tiny and what would be the implication of this difference? Probably nothing.

So next time you hear a statistic reported like this, remember, it might not mean much of anything at all, despite how impressive the numbers sound. Base rates matter. For the number of football players majoring in electrical engineering at American universities to double may only require one more guy doing it.

The Hunter - Who is He? (And where is the rest of his body?)

As a continuation of my literature review on hunter retention, I came across a 1961 paper ("The Hunter - Who is He?") covering an early survey of hunting license purchasers in Ohio that contained many oddities from a 2006 perspective.

“The result was a printed booklet… containing 200 questions on 23 pages… In timed tests, it took most people between 20 and 30 minutes to complete the questionnaire.”

There is no chance whatsoever of getting any reasonable response rate at this point on a 23 page, 200 question survey of hunters. (You would also very rarely see a modern methods section that contains as much detail as this one did. I suppose at the time, the detailed information was useful to people without very much research experience.)

“Coding for machine punching takes about 5 minutes for each booklet, while the key-punch operators can completely punch the data on two cards in about 2 minutes. The information was condensed on the cards by using combinations of multiple and addend coding.”

A two-minute data entry per survey seems pretty fast to me, though obviously not as fast as using optical scanning technology. I don’t even know what multiple and addend coding means.

“A cost accounting of the project is not complete since we are still in the process of receiving returns and tabulating data. A rough estimate based on an expected return of 4,000 questionnaires amounts to about $1.00 for each questionnaire. This estimate includes processing the data on punch cards, but does not consider any cost for machine analyses.”

Wow, a time when “machine analyses” had a variable cost?

“The first portion of our questionnaire was devised to identify the individual hunting license buyer and to determine whether he has belonged to what the psychologists call an ulstrith group (Toops, 1948).”

What the hell is an “ulstrith group”? From context, it could refer to just about anything. “Ulstrith” brings up a single hit on google, for an Edward Toops journal article written in 1959 on personnel psychology. (Needless to say, the UT electronic databases do not go back as far as 1959, so the content will remain a mystery.) Toops and the author of this 1961 wildlife paper were both from Ohio State. Kind of makes you wonder, were they friends? Did this guy include a reference to Toops’ work as a favor to a squash buddy whose new typology just wasn’t catching on? There isn’t any evidence that this terminology was even briefly popular. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to write “what one psychologist calls an ulstrith group.”

“Only one of about every 100 license holders reporting was a huntress.”

Huntress? That’s a funny and very outdated term. (Yes, I can figure out what it means by applying straightforward linguistic principles, thank you.) A quick google search reveals Huntress to refer commonly to a comic book hero, a British consultancy, an airplane, and a TV show. It seems related in my mind to the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, as well; maybe I have heard it in that context before. Only 1% of their hunters are goddesses, the rest are mere mortals. Oh well.

“Six percent of the hunters admitted that they sometimes discard the game after reducing it to possession.”

I was not familiar with the term “reduce to possession” but it appears to be a common legal term when dealing with public resources, including fish and game, but also natural resources such as coal. Apparently, reducing to possession refers to acquiring a right in property that you did not previously have; it removes the specific animal from the wildlife resource that is held in common ownership by the people.

“No one was interested in shooting a walrus.”

There’s a shocker. Really, though, I would have expected at least one person to have answered yes even to something this ridiculous. And what if their survey had revealed a huge unmet demand for walrus hunting? Yes, the Ohio fish & game department is going to get right on THAT. This is one of those absurd, unactionable survey questions that I love.

But best of all are the amazing figures that accompany the section we often call the “hunter profile.” I have never seen this taken quite so literally.

First, check out the blind-folded huntersaurus depicted on the top left. Oh yes, it is totally aiding my intuitive understanding of the data to look at a drawing of a decapitated head with differently shaded strata. Then we have the hunters with various degrees of leg amputation; and here I would have thought that this kind of disability would interfere with one’s hunting abilities. Glad to have been straightened out on that! Somewhere out there, Edward Tufte is sitting in a restaurant right now, feeling mildly irked without knowing why.

Ironically Enough...

It took me about 45 minutes to get the previous post, in which I claim that I do not have problems with computer software, to go up such that all the text was the same size and spacing. Of course, this means that everything is tiny and scrunched and looks basically terrible. What the hell? I didn't realize there was any way to screw this up using the Blogger software. Is it something about my photograph? I didn't have any problem when I uploaded other images. Anybody out there know anything about this kind of thing?

I am very curious now whether this entry is going to be posted in all caps, italics, or with an automatic translation into Swahili or something.

Sally's New Camera ... Case

I have now successfully taken and downloaded my first photo with my new camera, a Canon PhotoShot SD600 Digital Elph. I actually made several attempts to photograph the camera itself in the mirror, but that didn't turn out very well. So instead, I am showing you my camera case which the camera just fits inside (and no, I did not pick this particular camera because a spiffy red leather case was available; that was just fortuitous). The camera is small, but not so small as to be a real pocket camera in my opinion (nor will it function as a Mission Impossible/007/"his bowtie is really a camera" spy camera); however, for carrying around in my purse, it should work fine.

Getting a new piece of technology is kind of a mixed bag for me because I hate having to learn the new system. (I don't have this reaction to computer software, however; it's really about a physical object that has knobs and switches and settings and things that can break and confusing menus and unclear labels and so forth.) So far, this machine has been pretty intuitive to use as I set it up and played around a little bit with the various options.

The starter's manual was fairly good, but I did love the fact that only after it told you how to insert the memory card with a drawing and a few steps did it then say "Ensure that the memory card is correctly oriented before inserting it in the camera. It may damage the camera if inserted incorrectly." OK, thanks, if I just broke my camera, now I know how that happened. This is a crazy idea, I know, but ... shouldn't they put these warnings first? One thing I did appreciate a lot was that they included separate Spanish and English language manuals; I hate it when they give you this one huge manual that includes both languages. [Note to self: accidentally pushing Ctrl-S instead of Shift-S will cause your post to spontaneously publish itself whether you're ready or not. Avoid this in the future.]

When I was showing Robert the case photo on the camera, it did this weird thing where it suddenly switched the orientation of the photo for a split second and then switched it back. Of course when I tried to show Robert this bizarre phenomenon, it didn't happen. But then I made it happen again and was able to show him. He said that I must be pushing some button somewhere and I tested pushing around on various parts of the camera but couldn't make it happen. Finally I asked Robert to look it up in the real manual, that has all the details and everything, but right after that I realized that the camera was responding to the angle at which I was holding it and adjusting automatically. And Robert indeed identified that the camera has an "Intelligent Orientation" system for this. We got a good laugh out of that one. No doubt there are more laughable Sally mishaps to come. At least it doesn't have a lens cover that I can accidentally leave in place.

Roger Ebert on Gone With the Wind

Tam's momm recently asked in the comments section whether I managed to watch Gone with the Wind to the end and was it worth my time. In all honesty, I thought the movie was a hell of a lot of fun. The view of the Old South portrayed in it is obviously morally objectionable, sentimental crap. You can't take it at all seriously (I mean both in the sense of "can't take it seriously and not feel ill" but also that it's just not possible to do). But I found the (melo-) drama of the story quite engaging, and the Scarlett/Rhett relationship ludicrous, sexy, and bigger-than-life in a good kind of way. It's like the greatest trashy romance story ever.

You know how some movies (or books) are hard to get into? That you have to be in the right frame of mind to deal with its difficulties or strangeness, and you struggle with it for a while, but that eventually you reach a point where everything clicks for you and you start enjoying it? Gone with the Wind is not this kind of movie. If you have tried to watch it a couple of times, and it didn't do anything for you, I doubt you're going to like it any better any other time. For pop-cultural literacy, it's good if you have at least seen a bit of the movie and are thus generally familiar with its characters and style, and everybody should be able to recognize the origin of its famous lines (not giving a damn, needing to be kissed by somebody who knows how, birthin' babies, never being hungry again). But this isn't a movie that is good for you, that improves your mind, or anything like that, so don't force it, I say.

I have always liked Roger Ebert's review of Gone with the Wind and his observations the movie is very much a creature of the 1930's and an embodiment of widely held ravishment fantasies.

Toward an Efficient Level of Disorder

A couple of months ago, The Economist had a brief review of a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (how is that for a crazy-ass long title? Many dissertations don’t manage to cram that many words into their titles) which is, unfortunately, available to subscribers only. The review at Amazon covers much of the same ground and comes to a similar conclusion: there’s some interesting stuff here, but it’s too bad that the book itself is so disorganized and repetitive. (Heh.)

Some of the evidence in the book that The Economist points to seems really stretching it to me (“Hearing depends on random movement of molecules: when they coincide with sounds from outside, they are strong enough to stimulate the inner ear.” – so I won’t be able to hear things well enough if I don’t have piles of junk in my environment?), but the general ideas that not all chaos is bad, that organization and planning have real costs to weigh against their potential benefits, and that different situations/systems have differing optimal levels of organization/planning make sense to me. (We probably all know people that use extended planning and organization processes and tasks as a way to procrastinate about actually doing the work without appearing, to themselves or others, to be lazy, scared, or overwhelmed, or who simply are being extremely inefficient by using a single approach, that is helpful in some cases, globally and without consideration.) But to what degree are the authors arguing against a straw man? How many cleanliness, organization, and planning gurus/advocates actually make the case that every single thing should be as orderly as is humanly possible? I think most everyone would agree that the trick is finding the appropriate level of order for the situation; it’s just a matter of people disagreeing on what that right level is. I believe that one reason people can’t agree on the right level is because that level differs not only across situations and environments, but also, to some extent, across individuals. (Yes, I realize this is not some hugely original insight.) The fact that some people need their environments to be more orderly in order to function well could be a result of buying in to some cultural idea that messy places represent messy minds, but could also easily reflect something genuine about their own preferences and mental requirements. I’m not arguing that some kind of “revealed optimization” shows itself in the choices every person makes, but merely observing that this personal variable complicates the analysis.

All this being said, I am certain that many people who live their lives with a distinctly inefficient level of disorder will be happy to latch on to the idea that “mess is good” and use the book to defend themselves against those who would suggest that leaving 3 week old Domino’s pizza boxes on the floor of the living room is gross and unacceptable and of zero benefit, while missing any more subtle messages. I am anticipating a bit of misguided, self-righteous triumphalism from some of the people with “Bless This Mess” cross-stitches or “Planning: Much work remains to be done before we can announce our total failure to make any progress” demotivational posters on the wall.

I am sufficiently interested, though, that I might read the book myself. I am greatly curious to what degree they ground their thesis in actual research and how much is anecdotal evidence; I am not greatly inspired by the references to specifics like Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t plan his day, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because he didn’t clean his lab very well, and the Marine Corps doesn’t make detailed advanced plans. I can hope that the authors simply recognized that a general audience non-fiction book needs to have prominent examples to be a bestseller and used these anecdotes to illustrate broader theoretical, preferably research-based points.

Social Psych Programs: The Round of 16

Here are the schools that have survived my first winnowing of psych programs. I am certainly not planning to apply to all these schools, but they are the ones with programs I think are worth checking out further. 16 of the original 83 = 19% survival rate for stage one. (So far, I have been "serious" but not "ruthless" in my selectivity.)

Most interested (consumer psychology, marketing research, behavioral decision-making, and/or behavioral economics):
Arizona State
Carnegie Mellon (in Pittsburgh)
Chicago
Connecticut
Iowa
Ohio State
Temple (in Philadelphia)
Washington U. (in St Louis)

Somewhat interested (attitude change/persuasion and/or general decision-making):
Colorado - Boulder
Florida
Indiana
Massachussetts
Miami U. (in Oxford, OH)
Oregon
Purdue (in West Lafayette, IN)
Queen's (in Kingston, Ontario)

(It's kind of weird to me that it turned out to be 8 schools in group 1 and 8 schools in group 2. There's no reason that it shouldn't have, of course, but I am still vulnerable to these kinds of biases.)

Next up, marketing PhD programs. (The excitement is palpable.) I don't know yet what criteria I will be using for looking at these programs.

* This post has been brought to you by the number 8, the letter P, the state of Pennsylvania, and the punctuation mark parenthesis.

Two Great Tastes

I just noticed that although my profile suggests that I am interested in both "healthy cooking" and "exercise and outdoor recreation," I have not posted anything on either of these subjects. So let's look at a delightful recipe combining both of these pursuits that was posted today by James Lileks, who brought us the totally unforgettable Gallery of Regrettable Food.



Those of you in other states will need to consult the hunting regulations from your own fish and game agency, but in Texas, there is no closed season and no bag limit on recreational harvest of these fur-bearers. Just make sure you have your hunting or trapper's license unless you are fortunate enough to catch one causing damage to personal property or livestock on your own land. In that case, go ahead and have at him.

This recipe would make a fine centerpiece for a dinner party featuring fusion cuisine. May I recommend a "We're sure Hungary in Arkansas" theme?

Psyc 411: Topics in Social Psychology

The level of specificity that goes into the selection of potential grad school programs is actually kind of mind-boggling. You might naively think that a person wanting to do experimental psychology (as opposed to clinical psychology) would simply try to get into the best psychology PhD program that will take her and that will give her good grants and/or fellowships. But in psychology at least, you have to narrow that down to what kind of psychology; though there are some schools that have a general experimental psychology PhD, for the majority of schools, they break the field down into several categories from which you pick before you even apply to the program. The most common areas in experimental psychology are: cognitive, developmental, industrial/organizational, and social/personality. And within each of these broad subject areas, there are myriad interest areas.

One of the tasks I am currently working on is coming up with a preliminary list of social psychology programs that have professors doing research in areas of interest to me. My interest is in consumer psychology, which is sometimes classified as a type of applied social psychology, and for which very few specific programs exist. So when assessing social psychology programs on this first pass, I am looking for research being done in:
- Consumer psychology
- Decision making
- Attitude formation and change (or persuasion)

I started with a list of 83 schools that supposedly have a PhD in social psychology; I put this together based on books from the APA (American Psychological Association) and Peterson’s. Of this list, I have looked up online the psychology programs of 52 so far. 7 of them do not currently have social psychology programs. 35 of them do not have research in areas of interest to me. 10 of them have some research area that is sufficiently close to my interests that I kept them on the list for now. (That’s an 81% rejection rate for programs during this first pass.)

One of the interesting consequences of this narrowing process is that I can reject the psychology programs at all kinds of really good schools out of hand while other random-seeming schools will get further attention. Sorry, no way Harvard. But Ohio State, you sound quite promising with your interdisciplinary program in consumer psychology. Rice does not have a social psychology concentration at all, though apparently Dave Schneider is in the process of putting one together, so I will not be reliving my experiences in that psychology lab.

Of course, the most probable outcome of all this investigation is that I will apply to very few psychology programs at all and many marketing programs. As you might imagine, interest in consumer behavior is extremely high amongst people in the business field, and I expect that the proportion of marketing programs with a focus on consumer behavior will reflect that. I have yet to delve into my list of 57 business schools that have marketing PhD programs, but I already know some things about a few of them. For instance, I know that UT’s marketing PhD program is ranked by some as the very best in the country and they have a correspondingly low acceptance rate of something like 4% (marketing PhD programs in general accept an extremely low number of students per year, like 2). Unlike some other schools, whose web sites try to sell you on why you should want to go there, UT takes the approach of trying to scare people away with dire predictions of how you, random prospective grad student, won’t do well up against the kind of brilliant, top-notch, highly-recommended-by-professors-of-international-renown people they deign to accept (maybe this is necessary to keep the number of applications manageable, since who wouldn’t want to go to school in Austin). I know that every program at Chicago is going to be extremely mathematically-oriented. I speculate that I will not be applying at Mississippi State or the University of Manitoba unless their programs blow everyone else away. One advantage of getting a marketing PhD is that you will make more money than you would with a psychology PhD. Even in academia, starting salaries for marketing professors can be significantly higher because, unsurprisingly, the overall demand for people with knowledge of things like “how to more efficiently separate fools from their money” is much greater than for those who specialize in “how hierarchies within toddler day care groups influence the development of social self-efficacy.”

Some of the kinds of research areas in social psychology that professors list as their areas of interest include things like (and these are at varying levels of specificity): social cognition (which was the area of my senior research project – my topic was emergent properties of complex social categories), close relationships, emotion, motivation, concepts of the self, social development, personality, issues surrounding race/sex/class like prejudice and “the psychology of women,” health psychology, group dynamics, social control, psychology and law, attribution theory, altruism, and cultural influences. But last night, looking at the research interests of social psychology professors at about 15 schools, I came across some real oddities. What do you think of these (listed verbatim)?
- The psychology of evil
- Radical Behaviorism
- Terror management theory
- Animal communication, bird song, nestbuilding, and biparental care in birds
- Parental care behaviors of voles [yes, this was a different person from the bird woman, but at the same school]

Robert’s response to the bird woman’s interest area was “She studies the social psychology of birds?!” It turns out that she is a professor in both the social psychology PhD program and the biology PhD program at her university and has a web site all about mockingbirds, which appears to be her primary species of interest. She is pursuing a very interdisciplinary area of study indeed.

I Have the Yellow Highlighter Stains to Prove It

Today I spent a few of hours doing lit review for my hunter research proposal. Lit review is basically a process that never ends. Seemingly no matter what the topic, you can always find more papers that you should read. And each of those papers generates more papers in a sort of exponential growth sequence that so far for me on this project looks like 3^n. (Robert describes it as looking like a multi-level marketing scheme.) I have almost reached the point where I am not even looking at the bibliography section of the papers, but just hoping to get through and summarize the ones I have already printed out. These days when I see a reference that I cannot easily get from an electronic database through UT (generally because the particular issue of the journal is too old, though occasionally because UT doesn’t carry the journal), I am actually rather relieved – Oh good, I don’t have to track down this 1992 article in the Journal of the American Board of Family Practitioners on using a segmented database as the sample frame for a focus group.

The best quote of the day comes from a paper describing a series of focus groups with heterosexual men about their relationships with women and sex:

A comical moment occurred in the focus group when a man who had been rather abrasive throughout the session bragged, “I always use a condom” as he pulled one from his pocket. Almost instantly, nearly every other man in the group jumped up and pulled out a condom from their pocket—a scene reminiscent of an older Western in which all cowboys simultaneously pulled out their guns.

Other exciting activities included:

Writing an agenda for and then holding a conference call meeting on the Houston fishing project some of you know to be my current particular hell. Before the meeting, my right hand woman K said, “I think I need a Coke before this meeting.” I said, “I think I need a rum and Coke.” But because the trouble-making individuals didn’t bother to show up for the meeting, and two members of the triumvirate sharing ultimate management responsibility for the project (a division of power that has the usual results) were there and willing to bless my recommendations, we made about 2 steps forward with no steps back. I even managed to get the consultant for the non-profit organization funding our grant to agree to my boss’s cunning plan (that seriously continues to make me laugh in appreciation of the way a hidden evil genius really came through in this idea) for the consultant to take responsibility for devising the survey and methodology for my most problematic, uncooperative, yet demanding internal client D. As I told my boss when she thought this idea up out of nowhere in a previous (more private) meeting, “My god! That is absolutely brilliant on so many levels. Those two totally deserve each other!”

Sitting in on what turned into a 45 minute meeting with my boss and my right hand woman K that ultimately came down to the fact that K had mistakenly agreed to do something for someone in another division because K and my boss had an email chain earlier in the week in which they used the word “appropriate” to mean very different things. Oh the trouble people get into when I am home sick and asleep on a random Tuesday afternoon. Imagine how bad off we’d be if we didn’t work in the Communications Division.

Oddly Diminishing Marginal Utility of Food

This past weekend, Robert and I had dinner at the Central Market Café, which in its current incarnation has some really nice options (I am very fond of the Salmon Nicoise) but for the most part, likes to pair their utterly delicious and no doubt evil French fries with everything. (In my opinion, they are the best fries in Austin.) Robert’s muffaletta came with a quite large quantity of these French fries that even together we could not come close to finishing. What was so odd to me was the fact that after eating about 8 delicious French fries, the 9th fry was distinctly not very tasty. Robert had a similar experience after about 6. Which makes me wonder, why does the marginal utility of these French fries drop off so quickly? My best guess is that French fries are only good when they’re fresh and hot, so by the time you’ve eaten a few at a relatively slow pace, the rest are cold and blah. I don’t eat fries often enough (and slow enough?) to know whether a similar thing happens to other restaurants’ fries also, or whether there is something about the particular kind of breaded French fry that CM makes that causes this phenomenon. (Uh-oh; I am now halfway to convincing myself to experiment with this “for science.”) The good news was that after eating not-great French fry number 9, I had zero interest in eating another.

One food I have learned to totally avoid, but that I do love, is cheesecake, due to its very strange utility curve. Unlike most things, where your first bite is the yummiest and then it quickly or eventually gets less yummy, for me, cheesecake is fairly bland for the first several bites, then (when I assume my mouth reaches some critical mass of cheesecake flavor) it gets really delicious for a sustained period time before decreasing. Unfortunately, by the time this good tasting stage arrives, I’ve already had to invest about as many calories into the experience as I want to spend in total on dessert because cheesecake is ridiculously calorie dense. The only way around this that I have found is to eat something super-decadent like a cheesecake with a chocolate brownie layer and fudge topping, in which the immediate wonderfulness of the chocolate carries you nicely to the point where the cheesecake flavor kicks in. Reasonable serving size for this particular dessert: 1.8 bites.

Speaking of reasonable serving sizes, I was very pleased to note this past Christmas that the makers of a popular brand of chocolate covered cherries finally realized that it was utterly ridiculous that the serving size on the side of the box was 1 and 2/3 cherries, a quantity that I don’t know it’s actually physically possible to eat even attempting to cut a slice out of that second cherry with a little knife; they changed it to 2 cherries.

An Inapt Promotion

On the way home from work this evening, I was debating whether to stop for gas or not. Unlike many people, whether I thought I could get a "good price" was irrelevant to my decision.

(Have you ever noticed that men, even young guys, will compare notes on the price of gas at different times or stations - "hey, you can get it for 1.79 at the Super Fill on Random St" (2c cheaper per gallon than at the station someone else is talking about) - when they wouldn't even think about their spending on other stuff, even when, e.g. going across the street could save them $1 on a bottle of shampoo? There's a weird kind of macho onesupmanship surrounding gas prices.)

I am completely habitual about fueling my car; at any given time, I have a single gas station, conveniently located on my drive from work to home, that I use under basically every circumstance. So much so that if I stop somewhere else, you are sure to read about it on this blog. In any event, I was down to 1/4 tank, which is where I like to refill. But it was so warm this afternoon (it was 85 degrees in my apartment when I got home), and I was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and feeling generally like I didn't want to bother. At the last minute, though, I decided to stop at my Shell station. When you start fueling at Shell, it activates an audio recording to attempt to entice you into the station. Today's recording went basically like this:

"...Since the 1550s, the Spanish have loved to drink some-Spanish-word, which we know as hot chocolate. But you don't need to book a flight to Spain. We have hot chocolate right inside!"

You know, somehow, sitting in 80+ degree weather, hot chocolate is just not quite the thing that tempts me. (They would have had much better luck pushing a 64-ounce ice cold soft drink.) Maybe this would sell in February in Boston or Denver (or Amsterdam), but this isn't the hot cocoa season in Texas (which is arguably shorter than the Texas mule deer hunting season). You'd think Shell's marketing team would have come up with appropriate seasonal messages for the various regions of the country. Note to Shell: get a clue.

TV Series: The Prisoner

I realize that I give the impression that I never watch television. In one strict sense, this is true; in the last few years, about all I’ve seen on TV is a few big sporting events (the World Series, the last game of the World Cup, the college football National Championship, etc.), Ronald Reagan’s funeral, the occasional criminal suspense show like Law & Order, and some of the very early footage of the Iraq Shock and Awe campaign. But I do see a lot of television shows from video, generally via my Netflix account recently, so it’s not because I think there aren’t any shows worth watching. But any kind of regular TV watching seems like a huge waste of time to me; it’s not just the commercials, which are a dead loss of about 18 minutes per hour, but the fact that it’s too easy to just start watching whatever happens to be available (whatever is airing at a given time or whatever your Tivo has recorded for you), whether it’s all that terribly good or not. (I say this as a person sucked into watching that stupid Helen Hunt/Paul Reiser sitcom in syndication way too many times because it came on after the Fox weather update at 10:05 p.m.) And successfully following any show with a narrative arc that extends from episode to episode is really hard to do. Even though I’m quite fond of many of PBS’s productions, it is impossible to watch them; they will take what is obviously a 2 and a half hour movie and break into 3 sections to be shown at seemingly utterly random times over the course of a couple of weeks – 7:00 Tuesday, 8:30 Thursday, 3:00 next Sunday. I have come to assume that one of the requirements for becoming a local PBS station schedule manager is being totally fucking drunk all the time.

In the last 5 years or so, I have seen several TV shows in their entirety on video. Let’s start with the first: The Prisoner.

The very first video Robert and I rented from Netflix was Gone with the Wind, which I had never seen. (Yeah, I know. This glaring oversight has now been corrected so give it a rest.) The second video was Season 1, Disk 1 of The Prisoner, which Robert had seen at least parts of in the past but was completely unfamiliar to me. If you’ve never heard of this show, it’s hard to describe just how bizarre, surreal, fascinating, strangely well-realized, spawning of a thousand associations, and basically brilliant it is. Starring Patrick McGoohan, following up his secret agent role in Danger Man, the 1960s show follows the efforts of the man identified only as Number 6 as he attempts to break out of the Village, a really freaky head trip of a prison, (or understand what the hell is going on or at very least maintain his sanity and his identity as a “free man”), while the authorities there try to break him down, presumably to find out why he resigned his commission with the government as a spy. A battle of the wills ensues, accompanied by a panoply of counter-culture-influenced SF weirdness. Number 6 is interrogated, drugged, hypnotized, made psychotic with technology, forced to wear ridiculous clothing, chased by a surprisingly menacing large white balloon-shaped person-swallower called Rover, and overall just totally played with by the authorities – a series of Number 2s and his/her confederates. The final episode is totally psychedelic, with a rendition of the song “Dem Bones” that still sticks in my head, but it does explain in the end, in my opinion, the deeper meaning of all that has occurred and makes a pretty clear statement about the nature of liberty. (As to whether this statement is a clever insight or sophomoric posturing, rational people may disagree.) Once you’ve seen this show, you’ll see allusions to it all over SF. Watching this show is to watching contemporary SF perhaps not quite as reading the Bible is to reading Faulkner, but you’ll still enjoy the little thrill of recognition every time you hear the words “Be seeing you.” I believe that for those who make it all the way through, the show will have high re-watchability and reward time spent familiarizing oneself with its universe/finding contradictions/debating with fellow-travelers in the middle of the night. Oh, and dressing up as any of the characters would make for a kicking Halloween costume, too. 8/10 stars.

What's Up With the Holy Ghost

Despite being raised as a Protestant (Methodist), I am pretty much clueless when it comes to the Holy Ghost. I do know that the flame of the Methodist Church emblem represents the Holy Ghost. But I also associate the HG with the dove, so that’s not very helpful. (It’s soft and fluffy, yet it burns; it warms your heart and shits on you from above. It contradicts itself. It contains multitudes.) My primary belief about the HG is that it is somehow related to the tendency of Pentecostals to speak in tongues.

As for God the Father, OK, he’s the Big Daddy, stern and powerful, with his favoritism (see: David, King; Job) and his protecting you against everything but his own wrath, which frankly can be seen to cover every single bad thing that ever happens to you.

Jesus is the sensitive, soulful, outsider boyfriend, complete with long hair and sandals, who loves you unconditionally but is never around when you need him, who never returns your calls, and who, basically, is just not that into you.

But the Holy Ghost is an enigma. No, not even an enigma; a complete non-entity. Of course, that may be my entire problem. Is this Spirit supposed to be some force emanating from God? What if the Holy Ghost is supposed to bring you to recognize your need for God and salvation? I admit, I’m not the greatest candidate for conversion in the universe, but I’m aware of time’s winged chariot, I have little confidence that cryogenics and/or neuroscience will be sufficiently advanced that I can basically live forever, I fear death, I do not want to burn (or freeze) in hell. And yet the HG is making no impact on me.

Maybe this “Holy Ghost” entity needs some re-branding to be relevant in today’s marketplace of ideas. Several thousands of years ago, ghosts inspired awe and commanded respect. But today, you say “ghost,” and I think of: Pac-Man’s cute little adversaries, Ghost Busters, Casper, the bad Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore movie, Charlie Brown’s Halloween costume, and Cordelia’s benevolent ghost roommate on the TV show Angel. Ghosts rank right up there with fairies in the list of Imaginary Supernatural Beings of Little Import That Scared Ignorant People in the Middle Ages. And the “Holy Spirit” terminology isn’t much better – too much connotation of séances, Ouija boards, automatic writing, and other fusty Victorian practices.

Of course, I’m not sure what would be better. Holy Smoke? Cigarettes, Kate Winslet. Very sexy.

Two Views of 1694 Through Contemporary Fiction

The last two books I’ve read (one finished and one just started) are historical fiction with events occurring in 1694. The startlingly vast differences in the two societies make for an interesting juxtaposition of what constitutes a promising plot of intrigue.

Puritan New England is two years past the height of the Salem witch trials. The religious fanatic Cotton Mather, though shaken from his recent encounter with the devils inhabiting Margaret Rule (as part of his holy crusade against various evil angels, an undertaking more dangerous than “ten thousand steps over a rocky mountain filled with rattlesnakes”) continues making excuses for his participation. The Sabbath is at its most pious, the celebration of even Christian holidays is considered corrupt, and nearly every source of recreational pleasure is considered a sin.

In the novel, a Shakespearean manuscript is being hidden to keep it from being burned and the possessors from being ostracized from society, or worse.

Japanese shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, born mentally retarded due to heavy inbreeding and now, at the age of 48, in great decline, is susceptible to the political machinations of his second-in-command Yanagisawa - with whom he had been practicing the ancient Samurai tradition of Shudo (age-structured male homosexuality) as nenja (dominant partner) from an early age - and his own cousin Lord Matsudaira, both of whom are struggling for control of the regime.

(Incidentally, Wikipedia relates that at about this time, Tokugawa begins being called the “Dog shogun” due to the severe protectionism he displays towards the dogs of Edo, the capital city. This eventually results in 50,000 dogs being sent to kennels in the suburbs, where they are kept on fish and rice at taxpayer expense.)

In the novel, a (fictional) senior elder is found dead and the investigators discover physical evidence of anal penetration. This is considered strange, wrong, and unseemly in a man of his age and status, who should be sticking it to someone else. The investigators interpret this to mean that the elder was raped because “he would never have abased himself to anyone.”

Driving Me Crazy

OK, does anybody know for certain what this sign means? In context, it appears to mean that the lane represented by the straight line continues and the lane indicated by the broken line goes away, hence necessitating drivers in that lane to merge into the other lane. However this is most certainly NOT the interpretation that my fellow drivers in Austin, TX associate with this sign. In practice, this sign says: "If you are in the lane represented by the broken line, and especially if you are driving any kind of truck, wait until your lane starts to disappear then swerve over into the other lane and almost hit the grey 1997 Nissan Sentra that is driving there. Do this because your stupid vehicle doesn't actually have the power to accelerate around said '97 Sentra (which is, you have to admit, fucking sad) and because to put your foot on the brake pedal would remind you of that time in 5th grade when you peed your pants during the spelling bee because you couldn't remember how to spell the word 'man' and you cried." Next time, I need to roll down my window and yell "Italians throw fruit at your mind!" I have it on good authority that this feels great.

I read a book many years ago about a guy and his girlfriend who rode their motorcycles basically around the globe, having all kinds of adventures with wild animals, crooked border guards, terrain that tore up their bikes, and terrible weather. But they made it all the way back to the US before his motorcycle was destroyed. He had stopped on the side of the road to take a photo of a sign and somebody deliberately drove over his bike. The sign read: "Welcome to Texas. Drive Friendly - the Texas Way."

Headhunted

Sometimes events unfold in a way that reassures you that you are doing the right thing.

One reason I have been getting serious about going to grad school for my PhD is that given my experience and credentials, I could easily spend the next 35 years of my career climbing the ladder of market research project, client, and personnel management. I am quite good at these things, but that’s not where my real strengths or interests lie, and I’m not eager to spend the rest of my life doing that. Even my current position is getting dangerously close to being too project management oriented, partly due to my own success in managing so many big projects at once. (Note to self: Don't be so good.) I’ve decided that in order to break free of that kind of career and do the kind of theoretical work that I like, I have to have a PhD and the knowledge it takes.

It's not like I have never considered getting a PhD before, obviously. That was my plan all through college and if I hadn't confused myself by adding an economics major to my degree during my last year, I could have finished my PhD in 2000 or so and probably would now be an assistant adjunct visiting professor of psychology at University of Southeast Tennessee State College, holding office hours and conducting social cognition studies out of my primer brown '89 Toyota Corolla. But the economics thing really did throw me for a loop and opened up too many other sort-of feasible grad school opportunities that my professors loved to encourage me about. At one point, even a joint JD/PhD in law and economics was being thrown into the mix. Then after I graduated without having anything lined up, and 6 months later got over the weird illness that plagued me while I lived in my grandmother's basement apartment, I somehow managed to get the like one job in the entire country where someone with a BA in psychology could get hired on to do research. We had all heard rumors that these jobs existed somewhere out there in extremely small numbers, but no one had ever seen one before. So after securing this job of Ivory-Billed Woodpecker rarity, which came with an actual paycheck, grad school seemed a little less desirable. And once you get used to having a job and money and some time that is totally your own, you get spoiled by it, and the unappealing idea of living like a starving college student kind of shuts down further thinking along those lines.

Today I heard from a work friend named M. from my previous job at a market research firm that several of my other old colleagues want me to apply for a job opening they have at this other local market research firm they now work at because I would be “amazing” at it. When M. told them about my current job situation, his boss responded “But would she leave for more money?” I was sufficiently curious about, if not truly interested in, the job that I had M. send me the information.

Let’s review the fundamentals of this job:

Title: Market Research Manager

Description: oversee research projects, ensure that projects meet client needs, manage a team of analysts, ensure that projects are completed on time and on budget

Essential duties: proposal writing and business development, managing all aspects of projects (the standard humongous list of tasks associated with that, most of which you will have to delegate to your staff, while retaining ultimate responsibility, even if they’re not totally competent because you will have so many projects going at a given time, you couldn’t possibly keep up), day to day client interface, managing relationships with vendors, managing resources… and they do not say it but it is implicit in all of this - managing expectations, especially of your own chain of command because your VP will always, always, always attempt to over-commit your team and constant vigilance is required just to keep things at the level of borderline too crazy and not over the edge into the territory of totally fucked up.

Job requirements: all your standard things and “SPSS experience preferred but not required”

It is not true that there is no situation under which I would take this job. If I didn’t have a job right now, I’d have to consider this one because I am qualified for it and it will pay reasonably well. (I am as certain that they would pay me more than the state agency I work for now as I am about anything.) But I really can’t see myself ever taking a job at this point where even mere experience with a stat package is not required. Get real.

Basically, to the degree that I want a job that is interesting (I won’t go so far as to say “fun” because holding that particular mental image can easily result in every single possible job in the world being not good enough to meet your standard, which is a terrible place to be; I think it’s better to look for work that overall interests and satisfies you and not get caught up in this childish fantasy that your ideal job would never have any boring, mundane, or tedious elements to it), pays well, and doesn’t require a huge amount of work or generate a large amount of stress, I need to be able to differentiate myself in some way, to have some combination of knowledge and credentials that lets me find a niche. And that’s the project I am currently dedicating myself to.

In Which Sally Does Not Steal

I was home sick from work today and when there was a knock on the door, I was not actually asleep (I wish), but completely tired and a little fuzzy from the pain meds I’m taking. It was a UPS guy (and yes, he was young and cute, but I was sufficiently out of it that I did not check to see if he was wearing shorts despite the cool weather – remember, Austin’s stores stock more sandals than normal shoes all year long) with a package that I signed for, briefly wondered what Robert had bought from eBags, and then realized that the address was for the new apartment complex next door. I rushed to the end of the walkway to call him back, but of course by that time, the guy had run to the edge and jumped over while his truck below opened up the hidden door on top to allow him to fall straight into his seat (with some proprietary cushioning technology to protect him) and then started driving them both away as soon as the guy’s ass made contact, so I was too late. When Robert got home, he drove the package over to the other complex’s office, where it appears the intended recipient had already checked in worried about a package that hadn’t arrived. I hope that she bought her significant other something really spectacular and that will make a very good impression tonight.

Or perhaps, like me, she takes that whole “you can’t love someone else until you love yourself” thing seriously in a commercial sort of way and bought herself something special. Last night, I ordered a little Canon digital camera from Amazon that I’m very excited about. (So it’s too late to tell me I should have bought a different kind; don’t harsh my mellow, man.) (I swear, I was not influenced by the cute red case because I didn’t even know about it until it was featured alongside the memory card I picked out.) Its major disadvantage is that it has a somewhat slow shutter speed, so I am going to be limiting my sport photography to turtle and/or snail races and you all will have to forgo the pleasure of seeing mid-binky bunny shots unless I manage to figure out how to use the video recording thing and get extremely lucky. Last night’s (unfortunate) rabbit photo op involved Leo, who, having pulled some duct tape loose from underneath one of the overlapping rugs that cover the entirety of the floor in their room, was munching away like crazy. This seemed freaky and disturbing, but the constituent parts of duct tape are less different from the Petromalt hairball preventative gel that the rabbits love to eat than you might think. Clearly, this was a result of his body’s need for petroleum byproducts… or just further evidence that my mini rexes are primarily stomach. The fact that both rabbits have refused to eat a strawberry on two different occasions seems increasingly bizarre, the more strange, non-food items I see them chow down on.

When Robert picked up my pain medication on his way home (red roses and a bottle of Darvocet, a classic combination), he saw that the Albertson’s across the street from my old apartment is going out of business, as so many Albertson’s in the Austin area have done in the past year. I was completely loyal to that Albertson’s store for a couple of years, but I can see that a grocery really can’t thrive with a business model that is based on attracting customers who have anxiety about the totally crazy-dangerous drivers in the HEB/Blockbuster parking lot on the other side of the street and who have such dysfunctional levels of new-place avoidance that they will continue to shop there even when know that another store is better. (Perhaps one aspect of my criticism of the Theory of Planned Behavior model I discussed yesterday is completely based on the fact that I personally am insane. Hmm.) I mean, the new Whole Foods downtown has a parking garage that is so much like that of a busy hospital that I can’t stand to go there, but they seem to be doing a fine bit of business. These days, Robert and I shop at a combination of the new Wal-Mart across the street (that was featured in the Economist when it opened, which was a kind of weird experience), the HEB down the street, the Central Market, and the farmer’s market. There is not a typical mid-level grocery store in the bunch. This sort of shopping pattern is right in line with the “postmodern” consumer who defies simplistic segmentation schemes. I am so trendy.

And So It Begins

I have often observed that there exists an inverse relationship between the number of objectively interesting things going on in my life and the amount that I write about it. And last night I set up a blog. The implications of this are left as an exercise for the reader. (Yes, all one of you.)

I had been considering this for a while, but always pulled back, worrying about the amount of time I would waste on it. However, last night I fully realized that blog time would come out of time spent playing computer games downloaded from Yahoo and not spent, for instance, studying ancient Sumerian. Since I had just maxed out my character on Fate on the hardest level this weekend (leaving her descendant Van and his pet dog Skipper with a really impressive heirloom and such a reputation to live up to that Van has thus far refused to learn any martial or magical skills, purchase any weaponry, or go down into the dungeon; he is acutely aware of the moral ambiguity of killing colonies of dragons who have made the dungeon their home for decades just because some random guy aboveground is willing to pay to have them gone and has been considering taking up the life of a wandering troubadour and/or small-time dealer in funky herbs), and my new game Myth Match makes my eyes hurt if I play too long (shoot colored balls to make sets of three or more explode and thus shorten the snake of balls slithering quickly around the screen, occasionally stopping to watch some of the silliest game dialogue ever between a ferret who insists he is not a cat and various keepers of the sigils you are trying to capture through this bizarre ball-exploding quest), this seemed like a good time. Oh, and a friend of mine Who Will Not Be Named hasn’t updated her blog since January 7; I think I killed it by leaving a comment that her last post inspired me to dream about a Elijah Woods-esque rock star with a 12 year old girlfriend. This sequence of events has revealed to me the great power I possess by relating my random thoughts on the Internet. What can I accomplish if I have my own blog? Cower in fear, my friends.

Another motivation for me is that having finally gone through all the personal junk I had left at my parents’ house and brought some of it home with me to look at and in some cases document in some fashion before throwing out, I now have a bunch of boxes in my own closet instead of my mom’s old hope chest. (These boxes went through an interim stage of freedom in which they resided in my living room.) This blog could make a good forum for showing these choice and occasionally embarrassing items. Of course, I have also talked myself into buying a very small (pocket-sized) digital camera for this project and love the idea of being able to share earth-shatteringly significant documentation of things like the fine honey nougat named after me that was being sold at Central Market this past Christmas. (I was flattered but I actually don’t even like nougat.) So: photos to come.

When discussing odd blog topics last night, Robert challenged me to write about unicorns, as though that’s some kind of toughie. I mean, get a grip, man, you are talking to a person who once owned (in like 4th grade, okay) a t-shirt featuring a unicorn astride a rainbow (!) constructed out of sequins. I have read “The Last Unicorn” about 10 times and still am fond of it. A unicorn is a significant character in Zork II, which my mom played with me (and made a very nice map of), thereby demonstrating that at least one Infocom junkie in the world is not an irredeemable geek. I can write about unicorns for about 16 paragraphs and not even exhaust my own personal history. This is not a hard one.

I spent quite a bit of time at work today reading about Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TpB) [and no, I have no clue why the p is lower case] in conjunction with a class assignment at the human dimensions of wildlife management training course I am taking in Colorado. This course involves four one-week sessions in CO and assignment/projects to do off-site. The course is a total of 16 graduate hours and at the end I will get a certification of questionable usefulness. But the course is free to me and to my agency (everything is being paid for by a grant which my agency ultimately funded to some extent, of course, government working as it does) and it’s become quite interesting now that we have moved past the wildlife management stuff and gotten more heavily into social science (the “Concepts” class is basically all applied social psychology), research methods, and stats. Actually, though, the wildlife part did engender a lot of fun controversy, like when the hard-core wildlife biologists in the class were forced to grapple with the potential consequences of democracy (e.g., that the public might eventually say who needs animals anyway), and I now know more about the North American model of wildlife management than the vast majority of the US population. (One consequence of this model is a dearth of American children’s literature featuring poaching of the lord’s game, but most people probably like the idea of wildlife being held in public trust.)

In addition to my reading, I was writing a survey – I know, this is a shocking revelation – using this approach, to be implemented on a sample of my co-workers (yes, doing these little exercises is a lot like being a psychology major all over again.) My investigations (facilitated greatly by now having access to a broad cross-section of peer-reviewed journals via my UT password) have addressed, if not actually answered, some of my immediate questions about the model (e.g. comparability to Bandura’s self-efficacy model, the role of past behavior or habit, the affective component), though I still have a lot to wonder about (e.g. the degree to which people generate beliefs that are consistent with their behavior rather than having their behavior determined by their beliefs).

Anyway, my main point is this: in reading Ajzen’s “Behavioral Interventions Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior” paper, I was struck by the statement, “It is an empirical question which of these two approaches will work better.” (I restrained myself from highlighting this in yellow, but could not resist boxing off the sentence with a pencil.) It was a nice confirmation that indeed, I am in my element.