My Upcoming Mathy, Carroty Weekend with Leopold

While Robert is in Fort Worth, Leo and I will have the apartment to ourselves this weekend. No doubt Leo is, to the degree that he can be, excited at the prospect that I will forget that now that there is only one rabbit, I only need to feed half as much carrot at dinnertime. (Greens are good too, but not nearly as desirable.) I had Robert purchase some extra baby carrots as well as the ingredients for a dill flavored dip I want to try out, so that Leo and I can both enjoy the beta-carotene goodness of carrots this weekend. (When I was in CO, Robert made cheese dip for tortilla chips; while he’s gone, I’m making low-fat cottage-cheese dip for carrots. Am I going to be living life on the edge or what, people. I will try to avoid eating so many carrots that Robert comes home to find me looking like I have had an unsuccessful fake-tanner experiment in his absence.)

My main plans are:
Get enough sleep.
Play with Leo.
Treadmill.
Talk to my mom.
Don’t order a sausage/mushroom deep-dish to be delivered from Pizza Hut.
Do math.

I’d like to finish up the first math assignment covering the pre-calculus review section (I’m about halfway through) and get started on the next one. I’m currently working on a proof that the product of the slopes of two perpendicular lines is -1. I have done this for the case of two lines through the origin and simply need to show that it holds for all other situations as well (and I do have an idea of how I will do that).

It’s funny that after all my discussion with Tam about how I am fundamentally interested in math purely as a tool, and not in the theoretical aspects, that my course is so oriented toward proofs and such. One nice thing about this, though, is that I am learning things I already kind of know (since this will be my third time through Calc 1) to a much greater extent than I probably ever have. Despite how many times I have learned about inequalities, for instance, there are certain things about determining the range of values for which the inequality holds that I never really got, and I was always kind of faking it. I have discovered, however, that I do not remember my trig identities at all; I am definitely going to need to memorize them again.

Living in this no-calculator-land is an adjustment, but so far I’m holding up all right. I do worry that I am going to be performing all kinds of stupid math errors, but the one calculation I did with my calculator, because it involved fractions, I managed to screw up using the calculator anyway by forgetting to indicate that the 2.25 should be -2.25. Fortunately, the error was obvious because the final answer didn’t make sense. So maybe the instructor is doing me a favor. Doubtful, but maybe.

I’m also being forced to do graphing, which I don’t like, but the study guide said something like “If you love graphing, you will love this class. If you don’t, you will love it by the time you’re through.” (Uh-huh.) My favorite line from the study guide so far is, “Confusion means that your brain is ready to be illuminated.” I am totally ready for the “My brain, ready for illumination is” experiences that will be forthcoming. But so far, I am with the guy and have even found my first error (typo?) in the example problems in his study guide. I found it amusing when I realized that I was automatically taking the derivative of the function and finding its zeroes to make the graphing process easier; oh wait, I’m not supposed to know how to do that yet.

This morning I actually had this feeling about going to work like, I can’t believe how my job is interfering with my math! (Actually, I had many kinds of feelings about going to work this morning, all of which boiled down to I don’t want to go, so I shouldn’t put too much stock into this.) I have only been doing this math for two days and it’s already starting to feel like my primary responsibility in some strange sense; I guess it’s because I am seeing it as Step 1 toward my Big Life Plan. I just need to take advantage of the mental energy I have around it right now and get as much done as I can before I find myself wanting to play Zuma or any other stupid thing instead of my math homework. After all, I don’t think I will need to pace myself to avoid violating the limitation of 3 completed assignments being turned in for grading in a given week. (There are 18 assignments for the semester, if that gives you a sense of the length of the assignments.)

Bean Bolognese Recipe

Since a good number of my readers are vegetarian, and others are at least interested in eating the occasional healthy but yummy vegetarian meal, I thought I'd share this recipe that I only slightly adapted from Eating Well magazine. It's good enough for even an omnivore to enjoy. Also, as with so many bean-based dishes, the flavors blend overnight and it reheats marvelously; just remember to save the parmesan to sprinkle on right before serving.

Bean Bolognese

1 14-oz can light kidney beans, rinsed
1 T. olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
4 carrots, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
½ t. salt
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 bay leaf
½ c. white wine
1 14-oz can diced tomatoes
8 oz. whole wheat fettuccine
½ c. grated Parmesan cheese

1. Heat oil in medium saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, carrot, celery, and salt; cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 10 minutes. Add garlic and bay leaf; cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 15 seconds. Add wine; increase heat to high and boil until most of the liquid evaporates, 3 to 4 minutes. Add tomatoes (with juices) and ½ c. mashed beans (mashed in small bowl with fork). Bring to a lively simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until thickened, about 6 minutes. Add the remaining whole beans; cook, stirring occasionally, until heated through, 1 to 2 minutes more.
2. Meanwhile, cook pasta in boiling water until just tender, about 9 minutes or according to package directions. Drain.
3. Remove bay leaf from sauce. Divide pasta and top with sauce. Sprinkle with Parmesan just before serving.

Serves 4.

By my calculations using BalanceLog, each serving has 487 calories, 9 g of fat, 13 g of fiber, 21 g of protein.

Is Your House “Relationship Ready”?

This funny article in the New York Times chronicles some of the possessions that have functioned as deal-breakers for would-be lovers:
- 40 year old sheets with cartoon figures on them
- A real stuffed baby seal
- Mom’s tasseled gold lamps from the house a guy inherited and did nothing to redecorate
- Overhead lighting [?!]
- Stuffed animals, particularly unicorns
- High tech marijuana equipment
- “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt
- A mildewed towel

But I was pleased to find out that the guy who was originally disturbed by his date’s pet rabbits, including one “geriatric rabbit,” was eventually won over and they are now married and living together with their child and at least one huge white rabbit.

Look around your place for a moment. What do you have that would (potentially) cause someone seeing it for the first time to be turned off? In my case, I’m guessing it would be the almost-too-cute-for-me items of the bunny stuff (at least half of which is Robert’s fault anyway) and my Groucho paraphernalia (ditto).

Have you ever encountered any deal-breakers in the house of one of your dates? I haven’t, but I always thought that a girl I went to college with was nice to warn the universe about herself by pinning up on her dorm room door the utterly drippy sentimental poetry she wrote--stuff with titles like “My Friends” that even the writers of the Care Bears TV show wouldn’t touch. Anybody who went out with her already knew they were in for a rainbow-and-moonbeams kind of experience. I guess putting this out there from the get-go saves time.

Ignoring the obvious (absolute filth and cockroaches, molding newspapers stacked to the ceiling, stuff I won’t write because I don’t want searches for these things to bring people to my blog) what would be a big (idiosyncratic) turn-off for you? For me, I’m thinking a crucifix on the wall over the bed. Or a Poison (that’s an ‘80s metal band with big dyed hair etc., Mom, that I hope you have never been exposed to and thus have held on to the brain cells so many of the rest of us lost by the slightest contact with these morons) that the guy holds on to because he secretly still kind of thinks they are cool, even if he pretends that he's all post-modern and ironic about it.

Castaways of the Flying Dutchman

My mom gave me this book to read; it's a children's book by the prolific author of the Redwall series (which I take to be medieval adventures stories, only with mice). It was a fun (if very simplistic) little book but the thing I enjoyed most was how it really brought up my inner child, who just was blown away by this one aspect of the story. It's one thing that our 13 year old mute protagonist had had a horrible childhood and ended up as the cook's slave on a ship bound for Tierra del Fuego but saved the life of a scroungy dog who becomes his constant companion; the captain of the ship goes bat-shit crazy, about kills everyone trying to get around Cape Horn at the wrong time of year, and curses God and all his works. But then an angel from the heavens damns the captain and his crew to floating on this ghost ship in torment for eternity yet saves the boy and his dog, setting them the task to use their newly immortal lives to travel the world and help others. (The situation kind of struck me as being like both Cordelia and Angel from the TV show Angel alive in the same young boy, taking guidance from the Powers That Be and helping the helpless, only without the boob job or the personal history of being an evil blood-sucking vampire.) So here's the thing: the boy wakes up on the shore with his dog and discovers not only that he can talk for the first time in his life, but that he and his dog can now communicate with each other using only their minds. (The dog turns out to have a keen intelligence and a first-rate sense of humor, too.) And the dog in his turn is able to communicate with other animals, even if they do have rather goofy tendencies to be obsessed with butterflies (the cat) or are not very good conversationalists (the sheep).

I enjoyed this exchange:

Neb [the boy] patted the Labrador's head, passing him a thought. "Haven't you taught these sheep to speak yet?"

Den [the dog] shook his head in disgust. "All they know is to eat, sleep, and look stupid. 'Baaah' is about all I can get out of them!"

Rain was starting in earnest. Neb hunched his shoulders against the onslaught, hiding a smile. "I remember when every second thought from you was either a wuff or a gurrrr."

Den kept his gaze on the sheep milling about in the pen. "'Wuff' and 'gurrr' are important expressions to dogs. But 'baaaaah' or 'maaaahah' - sheep don't even know what that means."

Sally's Closet: Swimming Mask

As a kid, I often went to the Salvation Army with my grandmother to use their indoor swimming pool. For persons of excruciating pallor who are prone to sun-induced headaches, an indoor pool is always a treat. There were windows in the swimming room, but the light never came in very strong at all. We were generally in a kind of cloudy, hazy atmosphere. (I know this doesn’t sound very pleasant, but I liked it.) The pool wasn’t very deep at all – only 5 feet at its deepest end – but was fun to play around in, and given the low level of swimming skills I possessed, it was probably just as well that I wasn’t messing around in an 8 foot pool. Another huge plus was the fact that there was hardly ever anyone else there. You would get the occasional elderly person practicing their water aerobics the like, but it was blissfully empty and serene most of the time.

One day I found a mask that had been abandoned by another swimmer; it was in fine shape other than missing the strap to hold it on. I put it up to my face and looked down into the water; everything was extremely clear and it felt very comfortable. It was much superior to the kind of plastic goggles that I was used to other kids using sometimes (I myself didn’t have any kind of gear). I took it home and with help from my parents, rigged a multi-rubber-band strap. I came to love the mask for making it easy to do series of rolls without getting water up my nose, for keeping the horrid chlorine out of my eyes (because I hate to get anything in my eyes – a topic for another discussion), and for the glass being so nice to see through. The mask was my constant swimming companion for many, many years. Eventually, the plastic got stiff to the point where it was hard to keep it flush to my face without water leaking in, but it served me well for a long time. I’ve never seen another mask quite like it. So long, mask.

Familiar Words That Look Wrong

You know that experience when you have looked at the same word so many times that it starts to look strange and wrong and mis-spelled to you? In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, I believe the word "wife" is called out as a familiar word that you suddenly aren't able to spell because you can't remember having seen the letters in that order before. I have had this feeling before looking at the word "who," which is, when you think about it, a kind of odd looking word.

Today I had a sudden inability to figure out what "foreign" was after seeing it several dozen times in a report I myself had written. It looked like a verb mis-typed with -ing becoming -ign and the final "e" of the root word accidentally left on - as though the word should be "foring." (I just googled "foring" and it says "Did you mean to search for foreign?")

There was a funny little moment when I realized that the word "foreign" was looking, well, foreign to me.

Operation Cheap Ass

Since I am looking at spending the medium-term future as a college student again, with all the poverty that goes along with that, I am currently embarking on a new spending mentality that I am calling Operation Cheap Ass. Essentially, OCA means not buying stuff, even if it's cheap, that I don't actually need. No, this isn't exactly the kind of personal finance methodology that will get me on the talk show or conference circuits or that I could recommend to a person with money management issues (it's the spiritual equivalent of the weight loss advice "Eat less" with all the assumptions that entails), but given what a cheap ass I already am, I think it should work well enough for me. (Maybe I should be calling this Operation Cheaper Ass.) By this I mean that I am already inclined to not spend money, so it's a simple [?] matter of taking that tendency to the next level, and I can identify some types of spending that are totally superfluous to my needs. (Like, no, I do not need to buy these shoes even though they are incredibly adorble. Really. I don't. Nor do I need these. Shoes I Don't Need could be its own regular series on this blog.) The downside to this, though, is that I don't have a lot of stupid purchasing habits that I can break and immediately see huge savings from. A lot of the things you hear people say you should give up, like the daily $4 Starbucks latte, I am already too cheap to buy. Well, I guess this is why I'm starting this new era with money in the bank and a money market account and not $15,000 in credit card debt. I've had a series of increasingly decent paying jobs but have continued to live like a more moderately paid person. But it's going to be very strange indeed not to have the regular income to support a comfortable lifestyle without really having to think about money.

My student timeline (an ever shifting thing) currently looks like this:

April - Dec 2007: Continue working full-time; take 2 refresher calculus classes online (sleep with calculator next to bed if the separation anxiety becomes too great)

Jan 2008: Start at UT part-time (2 math/stat classes per spring and winter semester for 3 semesters plus 2 psych classes where they can fit) and start part-time job - this addresses both the "get the quant up to snuff" and "get some good recommendations" issues that are my primary grad school stumbling blocks at the moment

Dec 2008: Grad school applications due

August 2009: Start grad school and do this for 4-5 years

Sometime about 2014: Get a full-time job again

So Operation Cheap(er) Ass will be in effect while I am still working my full-time job, but obviously things are going to get much tighter once I am no longer bringing home my normal income in Jan 2008. Then I will no doubt be in a new era along the lines of Operation Poor Student Somewhat Subsidized by Employed Boyfriend Who Will Not Want to Live in the Trashy Little Apartment I Can Afford. So don't worry - I do not expect to be sending out birthday present wish lists that say things like "Toilet paper" and "Fake pregnant-stomach apparatus so I can steal stuff more easily from Wal-Mart."

(Cue Jane's Addiction, "Been Caught Stealing" ...)

Calculator Dilemma Resolved

After spending $460 on tuition and $150 on the textbook and foreseeing two exam proctoring expenses for my online calculus class, I wondered whether the calculator requirements would necessitate me buying something special for the course, since it's unlikely in the extreme that the HP 48GX would be on the allowable calculator list. (Lists for classes and standardized tests pretty much always are limited to various TI models.) But the instructor has taken care of this for me by saying that no calculator of any kind will be allowed for use on the tests, nor will we be allowed to bring in any notes (not even an index card). I can't remember the last time I had to do any "real" math without a calculator (perhaps the GRE in 1996?). Though I appreciate that I won't be dropping another couple hundred bucks on a calculator for the class, it remains to be seen how thoroughly I will be cursing this guy once I start on the problems. (OK, I recognize that people did calculus without calculators from Newton/Leibnitz to the 1970's, but waah.) I also anticipate spending some time rememorizing the trig identities, etc., that I basically haven't used in a thousand years.

Sally's Closet: Garfield Hook Rug

As I believe I mentioned before, this past Christmas I brought back a whole bunch of random stuff from my childhood through college years that had been living in my old bedroom (now computer room) of my parent's house. Thus I hereby start a new series with photos and commentary on this assortment of oddities called Sally's Closet. Half Antique Roadshow without any hope that anything has a market value, half autobiographical This is Your Life of a decidedly unfamous individual and lacking any element of surprise. Well that is certainly a promising premise. Try to contain your excitement as we get started.

As a kid, I was a big fan of Garfield the cat. Yeah, I know the comic strip got lame in its later years, but I loved the strips from the late 70s and early 80s and owned the first half dozen or so of the compilations that I purchased from the Scholastic Book Club through school. (Other notable purchases from that time include Choose Your Own Adventure books and a book of insults. Fine literature indeed.) One particular strip that still cracks me up (and I do hope this actually exists and is not a weird false memory) is one in which Odie the dog asks Garfield whether he walks with both legs on the same side moving forward together or with legs on opposites sides, and Garfield looks down at his legs for a time, then says "I may never walk again." And as stupid as it is, I admit that I still always laugh a lot watching the Garfield Christmas special; I enjoy it to a ridiculous degree. I am so close to it at this point, and my experience of watching it is so steeped in all the times I've watched it before and the resulting cascading associations, I cannot say whether it is legitimately funny at all to someone seeing it for the first time. (And no, I have not seen the recent "live-action" Garfield movie, which I understand to be a total abomination.)



My first foray into Garfield-inspired artwork was tracing drawings from Garfield school folders, coloring them in, and selling them to my classmates for $1 apiece. It was amazing to me even then how many people were willing to pony up the cash for such a thing; it got to the point where people were commissioning particular pieces from me. Good thing I stayed small-scale enough that Garfield's copyright holder never issued a cease and desist order. I do not have any of these masterworks to share with you because I sold them all.



My second Garfield craft project was creating this Garfield hook rug. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Guesstimation

Alethiography has a post about estimating vs. guessing today and why it's better to perform some kind of structured estimation process, even if you're mostly making things up, than to simply take a wild guess.

I've often needed to come up with guesstimates for things like: how many man-hours will it take to enter and check data for 25 quarterly reports? Given the number of workers who will be at my disposal, when can I promise the client that the reports will be ready? One time I had my most average employee enter old data for one section of a spreadsheet and my second most average employee review his work so I had some clue as to the time involved. Once you have established some part of the process, extrapolation becomes your friend.

Last month, I was working on a survey for someone who will be having a crew of people interviewing users of three different lakes and she wanted to know how many surveys she needed to collect. That was easy to tell her without even looking up a formula - 400 completed surveys from the target population at each location, if she wants +/- 5% sampling error for each lake - and she said OK. But I decided I'd better sit down and do the math on this, taking into account the survey length, the number of interviewers available, the hours of the day they would be working, the proportion of lake users she could expect to be in her target age group, the response rate she could expect, and so forth, and it quickly became apparent to me that she didn't have the resources lined up to actually accomplish 400 surveys at each location in one day; she is looking at something closer to 200 per location. Now her dilemma is whether to try to find more interviewers, do surveys an extra day, or give up on wanting to look at each location separately.

Not everything is as neat as these examples, of course. One question that really stymied me this week: I got a call from a guy wanting to know much I thought it would cost him to get a web survey administered and data analyzed, given that each respondent (a bunch of fish experts that he said he already had contact info on, eliminating the need to estimate sample costs) would answer a series of questions about 0 - 187 different fish species, depending on how many species they claimed familiarity with. (And no, he didn't have a clue the average number of fish an expert will be familiar with; that was part of the reason he needs to do the survey. Pity.) After a bit of discussion, it came down to the fact that it would be enough for him to know whether $10,000 in grant funding would cover the costs. To that, I felt confident in saying yes. Every way I thought of estimating this, I came up with something under that amount. (If it comes to it, I can take an extended vacation, purchase the SurveySelect software, and do it myself for $10,000. Well, I guess I technically can't do that and stay within the law.)

One odd experience is when you come up with a really close estimate of something through a process that is way off in almost every particular but in which the errors of judgment mostly cancel themselves out. The hell is when you have way overestimated the amount of time you will need early on in a project and let that make you think you are sitting so pretty you can start making extravagant promises about delivering early, sending people home to save costs, and other such folly. It's like a rule of the universe that the gains you make early in the process will be undermined by some stupid thing at the end that you never saw coming... like getting 40,000 paper surveys that have all come from the printer folded with the address on the inside of the survey rather than on the outside for a self-mailer... or getting 25,000 survey forms for a follow-up mailing in which you need your workers to pick through the stacks to manually remove the ones with IDs that have already come back from your previous mailing, but the printer sent them to you in zip code rather than ID order. Oh yes, the last-minute disasters that I have experienced. I don't even want to think about what is going to go wrong at the first Houston fishing event next weekend. (It is an open question in my mind whether the bilingual interviewers from the survey firm I've hired will actually outnumber the families who show up for the event. I guess if they get bored, they can interview each other. "Oh please, can I be the illegal immigrant with 6 kids who hates the government this time?" "Only if I can be the very confused person who is here on the wrong weekend for a family carne asada.")

A Confusing Automated Message Does Not Quite Undermine My Grip on Reality

This evening I signed up for an online class with the University of Texas extension service. In one area of the form, I had to tell them whether I was concurrently enrolled at UT or any other college, and I indicated that I was not. When I submitted my request, it came back in big red letters telling me OUR RECORDS INDICATE THAT YOU ARE A STUDENT AT UT THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO CHANGE THE BIG ASS LIE YOU PUT ON THAT PREVIOUS SCREEN YOU LYING LIAR. But since I am most definitely not a student at UT, I didn't change anything on my form and sent it in anyway, taking my chances that the human being reviewing my form will be able to figure out that I am not, indeed, a student at UT, I have never been a student at UT, and I have never even applied to UT. I admit that I did look to see what I would need to take to get a second bachelors, a B.S. in Mathematics Option III: Mathematical Sciences Specialization in Statistics, Probability, and Data Analysis (including 6 hours of history and 6 hours of government that I didn't have to take at Rice), and I am thinking about applying to their MS in Statistics program at a later date in case my direct to extremely good PhD in social psychology program thing doesn't work out as I want it to, but that is as far as it goes. Maybe I am personally caught in a time loop and am already taking linear algebra at UT. If so, I'm in serious trouble when my final exam comes up in a few weeks. Or maybe their system is just screwed up. I'm going with that well-known rule of thumb: Do not ascribe to a breakdown of the space-time continuum what can be attributed to the incompetence of government employees. (I should know.)

Sally the Scientist/Mastermind

In the last 10-15 years, I have taken the Myers Briggs personality test (MBTI) several times, both in its freebie book and online forms and in its full professional form about four times associated with work, and have always come out very strongly as a particular type. (This past year alone, I’ve taken it twice in different leadership training programs.) I won’t belabor the details of the MBTI but point you to the Wikipedia article that has some good information if you want to refresh your knowledge of the test. This web site also has an online version of the test available for $5 if you want to throw a couple dollars at taking the test yourself (though I cannot vouch for how well the results will match up against the full form test administered by a expert). If you google “MBTI” or "Myers Briggs" I’m sure you will find other variants on the test also, perhaps something for free. Anyway, I am not personally wedded to the MBTI as being some deeply true, psychometrically valid personality test, but I do find it interesting and think that the results I get sound very much like me. (And more to the point, the results I don’t get sound very much not like me. I don’t get that astrological sign experience, where the description sounds kind of like you until you realize you were looking at the wrong one, and then the birthdate appropriate one sounds kind of like you also.)


So as any of you familiar with the test might expect, I come out as a strong INTJ every time. I liked a short description that came with my set of results from the class I am taking in Colorado:

INTJ
“Everything has room for improvement”
Theory Based – Skeptical – “My Way” – High Need for Competency – Sees World as a Chessboard
MOST INDEPENDENT

By contrast, you can see what a poor match my opposite type would be:

ESFP
“You only go around once in life”
Sociable – Spontaneous – Loves Surprises – Cuts Red Tape – Juggles Multiple Projects/Events – Quip Master
MOST GENEROUS

The results I got back from the training at work were a lot more valuable than I’d seen before because they included a breakdown of various dimensions that make up each of the four primary aspects being measured. So for example, Introversion was divided into the dimensions of Receiving (vs. Initiating), Contained (vs. Expressive), Intimate (vs. Gregarious), Reflective (vs. Active), and Quiet (vs. Enthusiastic). Apparently this “Type II” test is a fairly recent (2001) development to the test.

Here are some snapshots of my results. (I’m posting them in this photo form because the charts are easier to follow than text would be.)

Here’s my overall type INTJ. As usual, I am strongly Introverted, moderately Intuitive, very strongly Thinking, and very strongly Judging.




My least Introverted aspect is the Contained vs. Expressive category. So naturally, I am writing all about myself on the Internet where only a few people who are close to me will read it.



I really love this Intuition graph. It shows that I am strongly Imaginative and Theoretical and moderately Abstract and Original. But I am in the exact middle on the Realistic vs. Imaginative line. This sense of realism is the thing that makes me regularly criticize people whom I see as terribly misguided in their belief that they can make their Ursula Le Guin Fantasy World™ a reality by strength of will. (It’s probably the reason that I am not a truer libertarian than I am. I cannot base decisions about the real world on fantastical constructions that come down to something like “assume all new humans will spring fully-formed out of Milton Friedman’s head” or on impossible necessary conditions like “first, we privatize all the roads.”)




This Thinking graph makes me look like a potential emotional cretin, but though it does reflect much about my preferences, it does not mean that I am incapable of empathy, tact, or giving praise. Nor do I not have feelings of my own. I mean, come on, I love bunnies! What could be more gentle-hearted than that.




I am a hard core Judger, famous in my own mind for saying “I wonder how many people who say they work best under pressure have never tried it any other way.” But I would be a healthier and ultimately more productive person, I suspect, if I could cultivate a little bit more of the flexibility of the Perceiver. But only a little. A little Perceiving (especially in the Pressure Prompted category) goes a long way.




Has anyone else here taken the MBTI? What did you think of it? Do you find it a useful way to think about differences in personality types? Is there something you wish you could change about your own personality in reference to this categorization scheme?

Chick Flick: The Lake House (with spoilers)

A woman in my class brought several chick flicks for us to watch last week, one of which was The Lake House. I thought it was OK, but it was definitely no Kate and Leopold, my favorite modern chick flick with an implausible time travel premise. (Meg Ryan is a cynical market researcher! Hugh Jackman as a 19th century aristocrat delivers the killer, totally-old-school put-down, "He has less French than I, if such a thing is possible," with a delightfully straight face! What's not to like?)

If you are considering watching The Lake House, you may want to stop reading now because I am going to present some questions that I couldn't get out of my mind while watching it.

OK, I'm not even going to address the time issue. It's not clear to me whether the plot is consistent with its own premises and frankly, I don't really care. I mean, this movie has Keanu Reeves. He is not exactly known for acting in movies with great philosophical credibility (e.g. The Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic).

But I do wonder:

(1) Who invites some random dude off the street to his girlfriend's birthday party?

(2) Who kisses some random dude at the birthday party her boyfriend has thrown for her?

(3) How damaged was Keanu in the accident that Sandra didn't recognize him as the random dude she kissed at her birthday party two years ago? (Does she kiss so many random guys that she can't keep track?)

Also, If my sweetheart from the future really loved me, he would tell me who won the next Kentucky Derby or something of value. I could be both head over heels in love and rich at the same time. Just sayin'.

I thought Sandra Bullock was very appealing in this movie. I liked her better than in the movies she made when she was younger. It feels ridiculous to say about someone who is still fairly young (44) and so beautiful, but she is aging incredibly well. Keanu is starting to show his age, however, and not in a good way. I found their on-screen chemistry believable enough.

A Hairy Issue

It strikes me as very strange that the standard approach to haircuts is to get one's hair cut to the ideal length. To minimize the variance in one's hair length from the ideal over the period of time between cuts, you should get it cut too short instead. Can the downside of having hair that is too short so outweigh the downside of having hair that is too long as to justify the standard approach? Surely not. Any ideas on why we get our hair cut to the ideal length?

One possibility that suggests itself to me is that people are much more likely to notice your hair right after you have had a haircut; thus, your newly cut hair is especially salient and the memory of that ideal haircut is what will stick in people's minds after they are no longer really paying attention to your hair on a day to day basis. So if you want your hair to "look good" to others, you will get it cut to the ideal length.

I have also had the experience of having great difficulty convincing a hairdresser that I really do want my hair cut as short as I was asking. (Yes, I admit my preferred haircut is a little bit shorter than the ideal.) To the degree that people are willing to take their hairdresser's lead, they will get the ideal haircut, since we evaluate the cut immediately and decide whether that particular person did a good job (and make a behavioral intention whether to come back?) on that basis.

Some men will not have much oppportunity to go shorter than ideal if their ideal is very short indeed.

Award Possibilities

My week in Colorado went well. I almost got bumped off my flight out there on Sunday, which would have had me flying from Austin to Denver through Chicago the next day and missing most of a full day of class, but some poor fool was just late enough at the gate, and the airline worker was just sympathetic enough, for me to get that person's seat.

I have been at CSU enough now that I helped 3 or 4 different visitors on campus find the buildings they were looking for. This shows you how easy it is to get around in Fort Collins.

A woman from New Mexico introduced me and my roommate to a quite decent Mexican restaurant in town (Tam, you can imagine my excitement!). I ordered mixed chicken and beef fajitas (that was not a specific option on the menu) and my roommate was happy because it had never occurred to her to ask for them that way before. They were nice fajitas and helped in some small way assuage the culture shock I was experiencing being in a town that is approximately 103% Anglo.

It's actually been pretty interesting talking to so many people from those sparsely populated states in the West. When somebody mentioned that the Dakotas hadn't sent anyone to the program, I said that the 6 people in the department looked at each other and nobody wanted to go. One person from Idaho or Montana was wondering about the sample size he should use for his survey of the general population of the state and I said he shouldn't worry too much about it; he should just ask all 47 of them and hope that at least 30 are not currently in possession of automatic weapons and waiting for an excuse to kill an agent of the government with them. This really suggested to me that a mail survey would be a better administration mode than a face-to-face design.

A "Committee of Evil" was self-selected to come up with awards for our graduation in May. I have already been told by one member of the committee that a classmate is going to receive a "Most Ballsy Excuse for Not Doing Her Homework Correctly" award for her comment to the instructor: "I was doing a lot of drugs during the lecture on this stuff."

I can imagine three possibilities for awards I could have inspired this week based on feedback from my classmates:

"Most likely to strike fear in the hearts of random residents of the city of Fort Collins as she walks down the street" When the group I was with encountered another group of our classmates walking down the street one evening, I was so struck by how much this was like being in a movie with two rival gangs approaching each other that I yelled out to them in a loud voice "Are you ready to rumble?" They were not ready. People were giving me a hard time in the bar on the night before St Patrick's Day as other patrons were getting quite drunk watching basketball; I ordered a beer and my classmates were all mock alarmed, warning me that I shouldn't propose a rumble with any of these guys because I would probably get one. I explained that alcoholic beverages were not responsible for my proposal the previous night and that drinking a beer would just mellow me out.

"Question asked of an instructor that led to most extra work for everyone" It was a very simple question, really - I even waited until after class was over to ask whether this particular extension of the theoretical model that I had been thinking about could be tested using the techniques we had discussed that day in class. He said yes and told me to remind him to mention something about this when we reconvened on Thurs. But on Thursday he told the class that he had written a new homework assignment "Inspired by Sally" which was basically to have us test the thing I was asking about. He found a dataset that had the variables I had mentioned, so I'll do the analysis and see if I'm right.

"The Smoothie Award" was suggested by one person for what was basically the "Best completely out of nowhere funny invocation of the inside joke of the week embedded in a very serious and relevant question that the guest speaker got excited about because it is 'the primary criticism that economists make about the technique' he was discussing while everyone else in the room tried not to die laughing." My roommate suggested that once it was established that I made the joke purposely (apparently my insertion of this comment into the question was so smooth and my demeanor so serious that people couldn't tell for sure whether I did it on purpose), the guys on the back row were going to fall at my feet. For the record, my second question was the "second most common criticism that economists make" about the technique and he was very excited by that comment as well. (The speaker himself was an economist.) When the speaker told me that I have the makings of an economist, I didn't quite know how to respond. I decided to let him think I was a wildlife biologist with brilliant instincts. The truth is that I had not been at all familiar with the thing he was talking about, but as I told someone later, supply and demand is not a totally unfamiliar concept to me.

My favorite thing about the economist's presentation was his response to a question posed by an actual wildlife biologist - "Why do you say that something has to be scarce to have economic value?" The economist had a verbal response to this, but he accompanied it with a nifty little drawing that I will reproduce here. I found it quite eloquent.

Workplace Credibility

In the comments, Tam asked whether I would say more about my views on credibility in the workplace. Although I doubt anything I have to say on this topic is earth-shattering or even particularly original, I do have some strong opinions on why it’s worth cultivating and its importance to professional success. I’m sure the I/O psychology literature is full of various models of credibility, what the dimensions of credibility are, what the underlying factors that contribute to credibility are, and so forth. I invite you to look this up if you are interested in a scholarly treatment of the subject. What follows is based on my own observations, experiences, and ethical beliefs.

Credibility is a great thing because it influences your effectiveness with other people when they are in either of two modes of processing: the central mode (in which people put a lot of effort into evaluating the information they are receiving on a rational, cognitive basis) and the peripheral mode (in which they react in a more surface way without a lot of consideration). Credibility affects the central route to persuasion by encouraging people to listen to your arguments and consider whether they are valid (they will listen to you) and affects the peripheral route by encouraging people to accept that if you think this is the way things are, you are right (they will believe you).

I view credibility as having several overlapping elements which I will label Competence, Trustworthiness, and Objectivity. I also think credibility is aided by having a communication style that shows respect for others, is collaborative rather than declarative in nature, and involves a lot of listening. It helps to have a “reasonably” (in other words, generally reflective of the reality of your ability) high level of self-confidence as well.

Competence:
When you have a track record of being right and doing a good job, based on the development and application of your expertise, your credibility is enhanced. But it’s critical that you don’t use your expertise as a basis for acting superior or taking a know-it-all attitude because (1) it puts people off and (2) it’s not true anyway so (a) you will get busted at some point and (b) believing that knowing everything about some topic is the standard against which to measure yourself is a sure way to screw yourself up psychologically. No matter how knowledgeable, skilled, and downright amazing you are in whatever your field is, you have your limits; know what they are and acknowledge them publicly when appropriate. Don’t be afraid to say that you need time to consider/research/ask for others’ advice on something – these are all tools the competent person will use and it shows that you will perform due diligence to get the best answer you can rather than being primarily concerned with showing the group that you have a ready answer for any question. It’s also important to admit your mistakes (which you will make!), take responsibility for them, and then learn from them.

Example of incompetence somewhat decreasing credibility: I recently made a presentation to executive management on the analysis of a revenue-generating project. I had included a slide with some numbers that I knew were kind of odd because they were a weird partial net revenue figure. Viewed in isolation, the numbers were reasonably indicative of one thing, but when you tried to match them up with other numbers elsewhere in the report, they didn’t add up quite right. I knew this but thought (hoped) no one would notice. I should have realized they would catch the eye of our smart, detail-oriented deputy director of administration who would be incapable of not trying to make everything jive. I had to confess that yes, the numbers were off because that slide was computed using an approximation methodology and that they weren’t as “real” as the numbers elsewhere. I don’t think I’ve undermined my credibility with him forever, but it had to make the other numbers somewhat suspect to him. I am not going to include that slide, which was a legacy somewhat quick-and-dirty analysis I used back when I needed to identify some poor performing offerings (which is no longer true since we used this very analysis to get rid of them), in the future. Take-away: it’s not very smart to assume something just a little bit sloppy will pass muster. I may think that using an approximation was justified and that attempting to come up with the “real” numbers that would satisfy an accountant was a waste of time (which I do) but it was poor judgment to continue to report those iffy numbers when they weren’t needed.

Example of incompetence totally killing credibility: I cannot get into the details, but I have heard on the QT that a certain PhD researcher I know is not even being considered for the renewal of a contract because of a combination of incompetence, self-aggrandizement, and an overriding desire to show me wrong. For example: When someone says to you, “On this page of the report, I thought we had agreed to change this to X to match the questionnaire,” it absolutely destroys your credibility to say “But of course the questionnaire doesn’t say X. That would be completely stupid. I would never say X.” and then be shown, from a simple glance at the questionnaire, that, indeed, you said X.

Trustworthiness:
Beyond the basic level of not being a shiftless liar, you can earn people’s trust by showing commitment to the organization and its goals (not something I particularly do, by the way), avoiding gossip, following through to do what you say you will, and citing your sources/giving credit where credit is due. Living up to high standards of integrity helps also.

Objectivity:
This may seem like a more controversial part of the mix than the other two elements I’ve talked about but at least for me, objectivity is very helpful. I would say it’s especially significant when you want to persuade others to believe that you are right about something and have them act accordingly. Show that you care about the truth and what makes sense for the organization, not personal gain, and that you are not supporting or suggesting some course of action because it is easy or convenient for you. Make it clear that you came to your belief for valid reasons and lay the evidence out, carefully distinguishing between fact and opinion, so that others can judge for themselves. (And if you have changed your mind on the topic based on additional evidence, you don’t need to hide it.) I think many people often want to avoid this because they don’t trust their audience to come to the “correct” decision if they see all the facts, but in my view, treating people with that little respect for their rational abilities is a self-fulfilling prophesy. People are good at sniffing out spin and they hate it, so you’re better off having them think you’re wrong but at least honest than both wrong and deceitful (diminishing trustworthiness). (And if you manage to bullshit them on the front end, eventually you will sell somebody on an idea that ends up being wrong and then they will really hate you for putting them in the position of feeling stupid for having believed you. This is a kiss of death, in my opinion.) I have found that it’s always better to point out the weaknesses in your plan or recommendation yourself before anyone else has a chance to. Not only does this seem to me the right thing to do from an ethical standpoint, but it shows that you are being open and honest (hence creating trust) and as a matter of strategy, gives you the opportunity to preemptively explain why these weaknesses do not compromise the idea in its entirety.

Also, I cannot emphasize enough how much I think you can gain from learning to love your skeptics. Taking criticism can be very hard. It’s especially hard when you’re in front of a room of people, all eyes on you waiting to see how you will respond. But not only does criticism give you additional information and often lead to what is ultimately a better recommendation than you came up with yourself, it gives you the opportunity to make your case again and, in a surprising number of cases, hear somebody else make the case for you (and sometimes very effectively, especially if the two people share common values or a similar background that you do not). You may or may not be able to convince the skeptic that you are right, but you do show that you are a reasonable person, open to the opinions of others, and not unconditionally in love with your own thoughts. You will of course run into those skeptics who are rude or abusive or dismissive; if they do this in front of a group and you keep your cool, answer them a respectful way even when you want to slap them, etc., they have just done you a huge favor. (It does not feel that way the first time, though.) Most everybody else will now look at that person as an asshole and you as a person just trying to have a dialogue. You don’t have to maintain a super-human level of sangfroid through this process, but by not taking an aggressively defensive stance in response to the provocation, you will win sympathy and respect. (Your momma told you that it’s better to take the high road and she was right.)

Example of objectivity increasing credibility:
A short time after I started this job, I analyzed some data and presented results to a fairly large group of people in the organization (an open invitation to attend was extended). At that time, I was not very familiar with the general field of outdoor recreation or with the Hispanic population that I was going to talk about, while my audience was full of people with a lot of experience in the field and a good number of Hispanics. I was acutely aware that my credibility on this topic as an outsider and stranger who is also the whitest person many of my co-workers have ever seen (or at least, that’s what I’ve been told several times and even if it’s hyperbole, it’s not a gross untruth) was minimal. So I took the position from the very beginning that I am not an expert on the subject we are going to look at today but that I had the opportunity to analyze some data that I think will be interesting and I hope will spark some good discussion of the topic. I told them that the data we are going to look at is by no means the definitive, final word on the truth but will give us all more information to work with as we try to understand this complex and important topic. After my presentation, there were a gazillion comments and questions, some people just trying to understand what I was saying (since research results are not easy for everyone to grasp right away), some of them offering their own perspectives that were consistent with or somewhat different from what I had said, but definitely some who were upset by the information, had a strong emotional investment in believing something else, or fancied themselves experts and wanted to show off. I think I handled the situation well, however, and it definitely seems to me that my credibility was greatly enhanced after that. People discovered that I had expertise in the area of research and analysis (and was able and willing to explain what I did rather than stand on some authority that they should just trust my methods), that I was genuinely open to and interested in learning what other people know about content areas where they have experience, and that I wanted to contribute toward our shared knowledge rather than sell everybody on my own pet theories.

There was one finding in particular that was so highly controversial that not only did many, many people not want to accept it but I had actually said something borderline taboo. (In my ignorance of the organization and the background of this topic area, and not having considered the political implications, I had not identified it ahead of time as a potential bomb.) A couple years later, I was in a meeting where we were discussing this same general topic area and another person, who I don’t know was present at that earlier presentation or not, said, “I have heard that research has shown [my highly controversial finding].” Someone else said, “Yeah, I’ve heard that too. Sally, is that right?” I said, “Yes.” And someone else said, “Well, I wouldn’t normally say this but [tells how he has seen this exact thing happen].” The meeting head said, “This sounds like an important consideration for our plan. How should we account for this?” And people started contributing ideas. (I know this scenario sounds like an employee training video on how to have effective meetings, but it was basically like that.) It was kind of surreal but totally cool, too, that this thing nobody had been willing to talk about had became a part of reality to be reflected in planning a project. Also it was strange to be in the position where my Current Self is the subject matter expert being asked to verify research findings that my Prior Self had reported while I don’t think anybody but myself and my boss realized that was what was happening. That’s credibility.

Going to Colorado

I am flying to Fort Collins this afternoon for more training. Blogging will resume next Sunday (March 18). Have a good week, everyone.

Brand Spanking New GRE

I discovered today that the current version of the GRE will no longer be used after July 31 and a new version will be available starting in September. Of course, even my ideas about the "current" GRE were years out of date. The last time I took the exam, in 1997, it consisted of three parts – Verbal, Quantitative (math), and Analytic (logic) – and it was a standard multiple-choice paper and pencil test. However, by that time, the GRE was also available as an “adaptive” computer-based test; the test would start with a question of medium difficulty and based on whether you got it right or wrong, the test would give you harder or easier questions. The rationale was that by adapting the questions to the level of the test-taker’s ability, it could give a score with fewer questions and thus be more efficient. I’ve always thought this was an iffy idea because it put such undue weight on the first couple questions, which a person could easily botch due to nerves or just not having settled in yet, and forced the person to start with a medium level question rather than having the opportunity to start with something easier. In 2002, the Analytic section was eliminated and a new Analytical Writing section, which required the test-taker to write an essay, was added.

But now the test is being changed quite a bit to make it more closely assess the types of skills required by grad school, to lessen the possibilities of cheating, to lessen the effects of memorization of vocabulary words, and to make it more user-friendly (by ditching the adaptive part of the test and making it an online version of a standard linear test in which everyone gets the same questions and you can skip questions, go back and change answers, and all that). You can read about the details here if you are interested, but the main changes are:

Verbal:
- They are getting rid of the stupid antonym and analogy questions that test vocabulary out of context and instead focus on sentence completion.
- They are asking questions to test inferential reasoning and reading comprehension.
- They are introducing new question types, e.g. that require the test-taker to highlight a sentence out of a paragraph.
- ETS has characterized the changes to this part of the test as substantial.

Example question:

For the following questions, select the two answer choices that, when used to complete the sentence, fit the meaning of the sentence as a whole and produce completed sentences that are alike in meaning.

It is truly paradoxical that the Amazon, the lushest of all rainforests, is rooted in the most [ ] of all soils.
A. acidic
B. coarse
C. stark
D. impoverished
E. infertile
F. austere

Quantitative:
- The test includes fewer geometry questions but more questions that measure data interpretation and rely on real-life scenarios.
- An on-screen calculator with square root capability is available to reduce reliance on simple calculation. (Handy for those of us prone to make stupid math errors.)
- They are introducing new question types here as well, e.g. test-taker will enter the answer via the keyboard rather than selecting from a multiple-choice list.

Example question:

House Prices
Number of Houses
$100,000 - $133,000
12
$134,000 - $166,000
25
$167,000 - $199,000
8

The table shows the distribution of prices of 45 houses for sale in a certain region.
Select two of the following choices and place them in the blanks below so that the resulting statement is true.

$175,000
$185,000
$190,000
at most $42,000
at least $57,000

If the highest price of the 45 houses is [ ], then the range of the prices of the 45 houses is [ ].
Click on a choice, then click on a blank.

Critical Thinking and Analytical Writing:
- Requires specific responses from test-taker in writing the essay so as to lessen the possibility that he is relying on memorization of an essay. I’m not familiar with the current test, but apparently it was open-ended enough that people could memorize their own or somebody else’s example essay and reproduce it on the test.
- The test will include one 30 minute section in which the test-taker writes an essay supporting a particular statement and one 45 minute section in which she will write an essay analyzing and critiquing a passage.

Example question:

"Hospital statistics regarding people who go to the emergency room after roller-skating accidents indicate the need for more protective equipment. Within that group of people, 75 percent of those who had accidents in streets or parking lots had not been wearing any protective clothing (helmets, knee pads, etc.) or any light-reflecting material (clip-on lights, glow-in-the-dark wrist pads, etc.). Clearly, the statistics indicate that by investing in high-quality protective gear and reflective equipment, roller skaters will greatly reduce their risk of being severely injured in an accident."

Write a response in which you examine the argument’s unstated assumptions, making sure to explain how the argument depends on the assumptions and what the implications are if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

The test will no longer be scored on the 200-800 scale that I was familiar with either. The new Verbal and Quantitative sections are designed to have a mean of 150 and be scored in 1-point intervals. The Writing section will continue to be graded on a scale of 0 – 6 with one half-point intervals.

Although I have not looked at the new question examples in detail (and there is as yet a limited amount of information available on the ETS web site, though more is supposed to be coming out soon), my immediate response is (1) the new questions seem likely to be a superior assessment of the kinds of things grad students need to be able to do to succeed and hence a more valid test and (2) I will likely perform better on this kind of test, with its emphasis on drawing conclusions, understanding texts, and interpreting data, than the old one, which relied heavily on memorization of obscure vocabulary and mathematical computation. (I will leave as an exercise for the reader consideration of how much those two thoughts are intertwined.) (Robert said he personally benefited a great deal from the Analytical section's questions based on 5 people sitting around a table eating different flavors of ice cream, etc., but that he doesn't see how that matches up as well against grad school work as analytical writing.) I still plan to study for the test and take the practice exams to become thoroughly familiar with the kinds of questions asked, but I think that there are many areas of the test that I will be very well positioned to answer given that I have, you know, spent the last 10 years since I graduated from college doing quantitative research and writing about it and, one hopes, improving the related skills considerably. If anything, this puts me a leg up on the kids who have just graduated. I may be a full decade further removed from 9th grade geometry, but I have significantly greater experience doing many things this new test is intended to measure, like “analyzing and drawing conclusions from discourse,” “interpreting and analyzing quantitative information,” and “articulating complex ideas clearly and effectively.”

Of course, if I score in like the 60th percentile on the new GRE, be prepared for a long discussion of why it is likely to be totally bogus as a predictive indicator of grad school success. (Yes, this is an empirical question, but the data necessary to answer it are going to be a while in coming, giving me considerable latitude to opine on the subject from a purely theoretical perspective.)

Sweet Katy

I took this photo of Kate and Leo about a week and a half ago with my new camera. Aren't they adorable?

Tonight as soon as I opened the front door, Leo thumped at me from the bunny room, which was unusual. When I went in, Leo was clambering at the door of the cage but Katy was lying very still. I wanted to think that maybe she was asleep but she didn't react when I spoke to her or hit the floor next to their cage. She must have died several hours before I got home because her back legs were very stiff, thus demonstrating how the "dead bunny" sleep position differs in one significant aspect from the real thing. I let Leo out of the cage and I couldn't tell at first whether he even knew that Katy was dead because he got up in my lap as usual for his evening papaya digestive pills and petromalt and hung around me to be petted. But later, when Robert had gotten home, Leo went into the cage again and sort of nudged at Katy in a couple places before coming out again for more petting. Then when Robert and I left the room, Leo almost immediately went back into the cage and lay down next to her for a while. I think he knows.

I had not noticed before how grey Katy had gotten, especially in the face and back. Our best guess is that the rabbits are about 7 years old, but it's very possible Katy could be older than that. She is (was) certainly old enough that it is not completely unusual that she could die suddenly.

Katy was a very beautiful bunny (so cute that she was frequently featured in photos on the House Rabbit website) who loved eating cilantro and dried strawberries, stealing carrots from under Leo's nose, digging in her litter box, destroying large cardboard castles, and licking Leo's ears. During her shed phase, she would lose fur on her face so that it had deep grooves in it; I would tease her about being a groovy old girl. When Katy first came to live with us 3 1/2 years ago, she was distrustful of people and disliked being touched in any way. By the end, she had become thoroughly comfortable and even seemed to enjoy it when we would pet her. As a rex rabbit, she has incredibly soft fur that prompted Tam to remark that you never actually touch her but rather feel the softness waves that emanate from her. If so, these waves are so powerful as to continue after death. I knew that I was going to take Kate and Leo home from the very first moment I touched them at the house where they were being fostered. It was wonderful to have Katy around and we are going to miss her, and seeing her sweet face, very much.

My Rice GPA 5 Different Ways

Since a lot of the materials I've been reading about graduate school talk about the extreme importance of one's undergraduate GPA, Robert dug out a copy of my transcript from a file cabinet I didn't know we had so I could figure out mine. I had a rough idea of my overall GPA but had never looked at the various different GPA calculations that grad schools use.

Overall = 3.64 [= cum laude]

Excluding freshman year = 3.88

Last 60 hours = 3.92

In major: Psychology = 3.80 / Economics = 3.81

I also did one calculation simply on quantitative courses, which Robert suggested - I was almost afraid to go there but I came up with a surprisingly okay 3.40. (Unless of course I did the math wrong. Heh.) This doesn't change the fact that my quant background is weak.

And yes, I did screw up in that adjustment period of my freshman year. It's too bad it took me 25% of the way through my college career to get my act together, but at least it happened at all.

About 1,880 Words on Skillscope

With my mind awhirl with thoughts regarding my grad school plans and my eyes gone half-blind with digging deeper into department web sites for more specifics of program curricula, admission requirements, and current grad student profiles/vitae (as a guide to how I stack up against the types of students they enroll, which, let me add, is not a very joyful exercise when looking at top 10 programs), I decided I needed to take a step back. So I am taking a little different approach to this today by getting a bit more holistic and a lot more self-assessing. I was considering doing a SWOT analysis on myself – this is a standard methodology often applied in the business environment to a company or brand, but also I think could be helpful on a personal level – to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in the context of successfully getting into a choice graduate program and excelling there. (Yes that is hopelessly wonky.) But even before doing that, I thought it would be nice to look at some more fundamental personal characteristics re: “who I am” and “who I seem to be” in a professional (i.e. not hanging out with my friends) environment. (However, I would expect that many of these characteristics are common across these contexts.)

As part of management training I took last year (which was excellent, by the way), we took a number of different assessments. One of these was the Skillscope test, a 360 degree feedback instrument in which your supervisor, direct reports, and peers in the organization (anonymously) rate you on various attributes covering 5 major managerial areas: information skills, decision making, interpersonal skills, personal resources, and effective use of self. You also rate yourself. I cannot vouch for the psychometric credentials of this test, but it looks reasonable and appears to cover the types of attributes that are commonly believed to be related to career/managerial success. The brochure claims that is based on “extensive research” and I am willing to propositionally believe that the industrial/organizational psychologists and other social science researchers who developed it knew what they were doing enough that looking at the results of the assessment will not be actively dangerous.

Here are is the explanation of how the scoring worked:

“Raters were asked to mark as a strength only those items that are definitely characteristic of you and to mark as a development need only those few items you especially need to work on. The absence of a response is ambiguous and intentionally designed into Skillscope. It can mean that the rater did not think the item applied to you, or it can mean that the rater could not clearly identify the item as a strength or development need.”

One thing I have to recognize when looking at this is that it is going to be a reflection of the salient characteristics most associated with my particular job. There are going to be areas that show up as neither a strength or weakness because this aspect is simply invisible to them or because it is not something that applies to my specific job but that may be a strength or weakness if I were in a position that requires it. For example, no one (including me) rated me for several characteristics that I more strongly associate with a person in a greater personnel management/leadership role: “Effective at managing conflict,” “Brings out the best in people,” or “Able to inspire, motivate people.” I did get ratings on the other 95 characteristics though. In many cases, only a couple of people termed them a strength or a weakness, such as “Introduces needed change in the face of opposition,” “Skilled at relating to many different types of people,” and “Good initiative.”

For each item, I could see how I scored myself, how my boss scored me, and how others scored me. Following the instructions, I categorized the items in four categories.

Good news and not surprising: You said an item was a strength and others agreed [I included only those with at least 4 of my 5 raters marking it as a strength.]

Probes, digs beneath the surface, tests validity of information (5/5)
Creates order out of large quantities of information (5/5)
In a new assignment, picks up knowledge and expertise easily; a quick study (5/5)
At home with graphs, charts, stats, budgets (5/5)
Logical, data based, rational (5/5)
Shows mastery of job content; excels at her function or professional specialty (5/5)
Good public speaker; skilled at performing, being on stage (5/5)
Isn’t abrasive; doesn’t usually antagonize people (5/5)
Has good relationships with peers (5/5)
Listens well (5/5)
Collaborates well with others (5/5)

Defines problems effectively; gets to the heart of a problem (4/5)
Adept at disseminating information to others (4/5)
Strong communicator on paper; good writing skills (4/5)
Structures direct reports’ work appropriately (4/5)
Has good relationships with direct reports (4/5)
Has good relationships with superiors (4/5)
Takes ideas different from own seriously, and from time to time changes mind (4/5)
Creates good give-and-take with others in conversations, meetings (4/5)
Willing to admit ignorance (4/5)
Has integrity; trustworthy (4/5)

- To me, this is saying that I am empirically oriented, I interact with people in an effective professional manner, I communicate ideas well, and I have a good level of credibility. For those of you who haven’t heard the speech before, credibility in the workplace is a highly significant concept for me. Credibility is the thing responsible for that wonderful EF Hutton experience: when you talk, other people listen. The great thing about focusing on credibility, rather than say authority or genius, is that anyone can develop it.

Good news and surprising: You said an item was a development need but your raters viewed it as a strength

Seeks information energetically (5/5)
Works effectively with other people over whom she has no direct authority (5/5)
Can organize and manage big, long-term projects; good shepherding skills (4/5)
Implements decisions; follows through; follows up well; an expediter (4/5)
Resourceful; can marshal people, funds, and space required for projects (3/5)
Action-oriented; presses for immediate results (3/5)
Team builder; brings people together successfully around tasks (2/5)

- People are giving me a lot more credit for project management and team management skills than I thought I had. Any success I have with marshalling people and building task-based teams, I attribute primarily to treating people with respect, having an aura of competence, and basically having my shit together so people don’t think I’m going to waste their time. I am certainly not getting it done by calling on a significant network of people who are just willing to do anything for me because I’m so friendly and nice or have some high level of charisma or political astuteness or status. As for “pressing for immediate results” – I hope they mean that in a good way.

In addition, some people (3/5 or better) did rate as strengths some areas I thought were neutral that could be categorized as “Good news and sort of surprising/heartening.” We didn’t go through the exercise of gleaning these from the list during my class, so this is actually new information to me; don’t you feel privileged to be here as I let these unknown strangers toot my horn:

Sets priorities well; distinguishes clearly between important and unimportant tasks (5/5)
Flexible; good at varying her approach with the situation (5/5)
Good coach, counselor, mentor; patient with people as they learn (4/5) [!!!]
Capable, cool in high pressure situations (4/5)
Establishes and conveys a sense of purpose (3/5)
Can translate strategy into action over the long haul (3/5)
Builds warm, cooperative relationships (3/5) [no, I did not make that up]
Thinks in terms of trade-offs; doesn’t assume a single best way (3/5)
Deals with interruptions appropriately; knows when to admit interruptions and when to screen them out (3/5)
Optimistic; takes the attitude that most problems can be solved (3/5)
Capitalizes on own strengths (3/5)
Learns from own experience; not set in her ways (3/5)

- The idea that I am patient with people as they learn surprises me quite a bit. This is not how I view myself and not, I think, very true of me in the past. But upon reflection, I can see that I have done a fair amount of training/educating at this job either in more formal talks/presentations to various groups of people on areas in which I am a subject matter expert or in one-on-one situations, so perhaps it’s not strange for this to be a salient aspect of my behavior. And I am glad to get feedback that I am being effective in helping people figure stuff out. Maybe one thing that helps here is that I am adamantly opposed to any style of training or instruction that treats people as they though they are morons just because they don’t happen to know something that I know. Ignorance is not stupidity. (As I recently told Robert, it would be like some Korean person treating him with contempt because he doesn’t speak Korean; even toddlers have mastered such simple things as that!) This is particularly true in a work environment. I mean, yes, it would be easy to get impatient trying to get non-technical people to understand technical concepts, or having to show the 9th person some basic thing in Excel, or explain yet again that target sample size is not based on a percentage of the population, but somehow, I actually don’t. I don’t know if I’ve said this before in this venue, but I am a firm believer that treating other people like idiots for not knowing the things I know is simply another way of denigrating my own skills and abilities. Even if I didn’t think it so critical as a matter of policy to treat other people with respect, I at least have enough self-respect to acknowledge that there are many things I know due to my own experience, study, and particular mental strengths that are non-obvious to the average person. I am much more patient with others than I am with myself, actually, and that’s pretty screwed up. I need to work on that.

Bad news and not surprising: You said an item was a development need and your raters agreed

Has vision; often brings up ideas about potentials and possibilities for the future (2/5)
Spots problems, opportunities, threats, and trends early (1/5)
Manages the process of decision-making effectively; knows who to involve on what issue (1/5)

- It’s unfortunate that I am lacking in some of this “big picture” stuff; in some ways, this is a reflection of my current job, which is mostly about execution rather than planning. (Hence the irony of my job title: Planner IV.) But I do think that I could do better in these areas; there’s not any real barrier holding me back from it.

Bad news and surprising: You said an item was a strength but your raters viewed it as a development need

NONE [woo hoo!]

- Many of my colleagues were really dismayed by the number of items that fell into this category for them. I was pleased to see that I don’t have any obvious blind spots where I’m oblivious to my ineffectiveness or negative image.

Not a Good Pick Up Line

A woman I know told me that when she was at a party recently, she met a college-aged guy who flirted with her a bit and when it came out that she was 32 (a most excellent age, by the way – it’s a power of 2), he was like, “Wow, I can’t believe you’re so old! That’s older than my mom…”

“What?” I said. “She must have been crazy young when she had him to be younger than you are!”

“Let me finish. He said ‘That’s older than my mom was when I was born.’” Apparently his mother had been 29 at that time.

It seriously took me a moment to process this statement because the idea of somebody being “older than somebody’s mom when she gave birth” does not strike me as a particularly weird or disturbing thing to provoke an excited, incredulous outburst of any kind. Especially given that women sometimes start having babies when they are teenagers, this is potentially setting the bar of old fogey-hood pretty low. The guy himself turned out to be about 23, which seems old enough to have a bit more maturity than this. And a bit more common sense, too. No woman who isn’t at a senior citizen singles mixer wants to hear “I can’t believe you’re so old!” She’s just not going to be thrilled with the compliment that she had up until that point been successfully passing as a woman in the bud of youth rather than an ancient, decrepit, one foot in the grave old-timer when she is still in the young adult 18-34 age bracket. There’s a reason Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate didn’t use this line on Mrs. Robinson. But maybe I’m just bitter because the kids at the grocery store don’t ID me when I buy booze anymore.

I’m very glad Robert hasn’t had this same freak out reaction to the idea of dating a woman who is older than his mom was when she gave birth to him since I had already passed that age when he and I met. And of course it would have been awkward for a 21 year old Robert in any case to have to limit his potential partners to high school girls.

Under what circumstances would you find the statement “I can’t believe you’re so old!” to be a compliment?

School List Update

Rather than narrowing down my previous list of 16 psychology programs this weekend, I have actually added in four others - Michigan, Illinois, Penn, and Cornell. These schools have decision-making programs that look interesting but that I didn't include in my earlier round when I was focusing on social psychology. Oops.

I would not have guessed that Ohio State has the #3 ranked social psychology program in the country (per US News &World report), but I had thought the program looked fantastic (at least for my interests) on their web site. Hmm, I wasn't expecting Ohio State to be a "reach" school. (Regardless of how much one believes that these rankings reflect the actual quality of the schools, they do constitute an important part of our shared, constructed reality about which schools are very good/desirable and which are less so. Even if you believe that the rankings are mostly a reflection of how good psychology professors think these schools are, and what the hell do they know about hundreds of different schools, the rankings still matter, since one's job prospects in academia are greatly influenced by the perception of how good your school was.)

After many, many tedious, headache-inducing hours, I have looked at 30 of the 57 marketing PhD programs on my list also. God, so many of these programs sound terribly boring. There's a surprising amount of variation in the background requirements of these programs - some are extremely quantitatively oriented and want a lot of math (application of social psychology - use percentage of current students who are Asian men as a proxy for the degree to which the program selects on and emphasizes mathematical ability over all else; Robert has independently come to this same conclusion with economics programs), some require a masters degree (preferably an MBA), and a few require competency in a programming language (this is usually for those taking the quantitative track rather than the behavioral track I am interested in). And the programs themselves vary a lot too, of course, but it's often hard to really tell much about the details from what they put online. I would like to be able to use the criterion "Immediately reject any program that will require me to take financial accounting, principles of management, or business policy and strategy" but the schools can be damn cagey about the specific requirements of fulfilling the programs. Failing that, I would like to just eliminate them all from consideration, but I don't know that I can do that yet. I had almost gotten to that point when I read some information for students interested in consumer psychology that strongly suggested we look at marketing programs rather than just psychology programs. So OK. There may be a couple of them worth looking at very carefully and eventually applying to. The process of getting there is turning out to be rather painful, however. And I've only done even a cursory glance at about half of the schools listed. I may have reached the point where I need to get serious about the remaining schools left to investigate and just decide, No, there is no way that this program could be better enough than the ones I've already identified as serious candidates to justify my having to live in Mississippi. Hell, I am willing to do that right now. 2 down. 25 to go.

Happy Texas Independence Day!

Thanks to those Texians who met on March 2, 1836, to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico at the then-distinctly-undelightful town of Washington, TX (which is now a pretty state historic site). This both makes today a holiday from work for me (yay!) and gives nostaglic Texan die-hards an alternative romantic heyday superior to that of their southern brethren who like to go on in annoying ways about the Confederacy (double yay!).

When Praising Children is Counterproductive

Alethiography links to an excellent article about the differing outcomes of praising kids for their effort versus their intelligence. (I initially was just going to comment on her blog, but realized quickly that I could blather on for a year on this topic and that's what my own blog is for.) The article is well worth reading in its entirety, but the bottom line is that research has found that kids who are praised for their effort do better on later tasks and enjoy the challenge of harder tasks while kids who are praised for their smarts do worse on later tasks and gravitate toward easier tasks. They posit that this is related to the fact that kids labeled as “smart” want to maintain that image and thus avoid situations where failure could reveal them to be lacking in innate ability. However, even after parents and teachers are apprised of this body of research, they discount its validity or resist the implications for their own behavior; they continue to think it’s important to build the child’s self-esteem by (over-)praising their natural intelligence.

One thing I wonder about (and this has probably been investigated, but I am not familiar with this line of research outside of what the article described) is whether the effect of the praise is the same controlling for the kids’ actual intelligence or effort (it's easy to imagine interactions between these variables). And taking this outside of the lab, if you (as parent or teacher) consistently praise a child who produces a good work outcome specifically for his effort, when he does not put much effort in at all because he truly is quite intelligent and the work is not challenging enough for effort to be an issue, does that really work? At some point, can’t they see this is bullshit? (And I say “child” but is there any reason to believe this couldn’t also apply to an adult employee and his manager? I would like to think that we are not all stuck at our current level of self-efficacy just because we passed the age of 21.)

On an unrelated note, was I the only one who thought this comment from the writer of the article was kind of sad: “I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great—I’m proud of you” was a way I expressed unconditional love”? Maybe this hit me harder than it should have, but doesn’t it seem kind of a messed up way to say you love someone unconditionally, to imply that your attention and affection and care are tied up with them being “great” (whatever they think you mean by that) and making you proud? I’m not saying I can’t understand how this happens or that you should never tell your kid you are proud of them or whatever, but what a revelation to realize that you are expressing supposedly “unconditional” love with some very strict conditions. This unintentional and potentially mixed message is probably very common too.

I have to admit that I do have some of the characteristics of the “smart” kid they describe: I can easily be put off by something as being too hard too quickly and I don't like to look stupid or bad at something. I also don't think I'm very good at math, though by that, it is unclear whether I mean "very good compared to other people" or "very good relative to my other skills" or "very good where very good = insanely naturally brilliant as surely we can all admit some few people actually are"; also this reminds me of other research that showed, as I recall it, that kids who had lower confidence in math were actually the better mathematicians, so the upshot of this is unclear. (Good but unconfident, so when forced to do hard math, I will surprise myself by doing better than I would have expected, but when given the option to do hard math, I will be too scared to try?)

But I never got into the habit of undervaluing effort or wanting to appear that everything I did was due to natural ability. In fact, maybe I was just kind of unobservant, but I don't really remember encountering this attitude and related posturing until college, where it was common. (I remember that in elementary school, when the newspaper reporter came to take my picture and interview me for being the school Mathlete champion, they asked me whether I studied a lot in preparation for the weekly competitions, and vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that I knew a lot of other people did but that I didn’t study at all, I lied and said, “Yes.” Yeah, my mom did challenge me on it when she saw the article in the paper.) And in college I basically viewed this attitude and the behaviors that went with it (chronic underachievement, ridiculous competitive bragging on whose effort/success ratio was the smallest, etc.) with contempt. It seemed most typical, at least in its most aggressively in-your-face variety, among guys, too, many of whom (let’s be honest) were obviously smart enough and no doubt the big fish in their small high school ponds but weren’t godlike geniuses. (The girls afflicted with this problem may have been quietly doing badly in the privacy of their own rooms and with less macho self-delusion.) And when I think of the really super-smart girls I knew, the kind who took upper-level courses in engineering or math as sophomores, even though they were music or history majors, just because the classes sounded fun, and proceeded to kick everyone’s ass – these girls worked hard, but they weren’t mindless drones.

(OK, I’m going to have to make a special digression here to say: Those guys who want to attribute the school success of hard-working girls to a willingness to put up with endless, stupid worksheets and repetitive busywork – Screw you and the failing business you are running out of your or your mother's basement because you can’t work for other people and their “ridiculous” expectations of what you will spend your time doing and the computer where right now instead of getting down to the unexciting prospect of doing the paperwork that business requires you are having your fun posting your idiotic sexist statements on other people’s blogs. You did not get a C in 6th grade while Jenny got an A because you were a genius who was above that “crap” and she was an unthinking drudge. You were a fuck-up and you don’t even have the balls or the sense after all this time to face it.)

One piece of praise from school that has always stuck with me was when my 10th grade English teacher wrote “Sally is a tireless reviser of her work.” She then expanded a bit on this in the context of a few famous literary figures (Poe, Baudelaire, I don’t recall who else) who are well known for working away to improve their writing through revision after revision. (Remember that back in those days, you would sometimes turn in half a dozen drafts of an essay or paper before the final one?) Although this comment didn’t rock my world in some fundamental way, I think it made a lasting impression on me because I was glad that my efforts were noticed and seen to have a positive impact on my final product, it was basically new to me to think about the process that “real” writers used to create their work, I was particularly fond of EAP at that age so it was kind of a thrill to be compared to him, and it spoke to the part of me that wasn’t doing this work to get a grade (I could have gotten an A on my first draft) but the satisfaction of challenging myself to do good and then better work. And in retrospect, I greatly respect that fact that she didn’t give in to whatever temptation may have existed to simply say “Sally has a talent for writing.” It was a much larger compliment for her to call out my discernment and my high standards. (And in case you are wondering, I am not a tireless reviser of my writing [can’t call it work] on this blog. Sorry.)

I was initially disappointed, but later sort of cheered up, when several years ago I went with a bunch of co-workers to one of those Dave & Busters game/video places and in the basketball game (shoot as many baskets as you can within a given time frame), I did distinctly average. It had been a solid decade since I’d even held a basketball, but back in the day, I was a good shooter with an in-game free throw percentage to rival or outshine even the best NBA free throw shooters’ records. People now like to tell me that I have a talent for these kinds of tasks (ones which involve aiming for something then hitting it), which I think is probably true in a limited way, but I don’t remember hearing that back then, when I would sometimes start shooting baskets after school, would take a break for dinner, then shoot until it was so dark that I was relying on muscle memory to tell me where the basket was. There were times I was so in the flow of it that even when I would tell Mom, after she came out for the umpteenth time, that I would quit after I missed one, I eventually just had to stop because I had this deep feeling that I wasn’t going to miss, that I could not even miss if I wanted to. At Dave & Busters, it was weird to confront myself as just a regular person, not a prodigy, not a Shooting Machine, but it’s nice now to think about the truth: I was a normal kid, with a small knack for some kinds of hand-eye coordination and extremely slow foot speed, who regularly scored points in games, whose friends on the team would laugh and say “our strategy should be Sally shoots and draws the foul,” who was teased by unfamiliar girls at tryouts when I set up for my first (uncool two-handed) free throw but not for the rest, who had occasional moments of transcendence, because I had worked really hard. And because I had a good coach who has always demonstrated the value of effort and didn’t just preach it, who remains my go-to man for straightforward advice on applying basic principles of physics to sports, and who didn’t carry praise or blame too far. The Carver Middle School 6th grade volleyball team and I could not have done it without you. Thanks, Dad.