The Word of the Day is Variegated

Pattern Challenge Day 20: Variegated Stripes--Tuesday, 5/26/15

Now that it's definitely spring, I'm ready to return to another outfit I put together in the fall but didn't get around to wearing.  An outfit of stripes plus stripes.  Are you ready?

First, let's check in on how our friend Alice, my favorite reverse inspiration blogger, is rocking the double stripes look.  She's got variegated stripes going in her skirt and she's wearing them with polka dots, of course.

From happinessatmidlife.com

I sent back ripples in time of two variations on this outfit--the one pictured, with the vertically striped dress, and the one I tried first, with a horizontally striped dress that proved too short to wear without tights.  (Oh, apparently I already knew this.)  Alice picked up on the horizontally striped version.  And it totally makes sense to me that she'd wear polka dots in place of the spotted cheetah print.  For me, it's cheetah print forever (that must be why it's an infinity scarf--the cheetah print never ends).

Sleeveless black and white striped dress (Target), $14.00/wear
*Black/white/pink striped pullover sweater (thrifted, Van Heusen), $5.00/wear
Coral cheetah infinity scarf (thrifted), $0.43/wear [nice!]
Black buckle flats by Me Too, $3.83/wear

But this woman picked up on the vertical + horizontal stripe mix idea and ran with it.

From kslookbook.com

I really like the fact that my dress has vertical stripes.  Horizontal stripes are easy to find, but vertical ones are rare, and they make a nice change (and a pleasant contrast to horizontal ones in this outfit, I think).

Different is good.  Check out the black-with-white-spot dalmatian in the old New Yorker cover hanging on the small dividing wall between our kitchen and dining room.  Is he being excluded?  I think he's just taking his chance to see what else the world has in store other than white-with-black-dot dalmatians (and when he becomes back to visit his family, that pattern mix is going to look awesome).

And yes, a tiger!  (A zoo tiger photo taken by an ex-co-worker and framed for a Christmas gift; did he know me or what?)  And another pattern-mixed family below--that was actually a little cat puzzle my mom gave me that I framed after I finished.

In other news...Tam sent me this article about yet more fraud in the social sciences, this time by a political science grad student at UCLA doing research in the area of persuasion.  The article summarizes the research as finding that "one brief conversation with a gay rights canvasser could change someone's mind about same-sex marriage."  Really??  Come on, these results are so implausible that I find it hard to believe pathetic that nobody (including the co-author, a professor at Columbia) questioned them more vigorously before they got published in Science.

OK, the professor/co-author did greet the initial data presented to him by the grad student with skepticism, saying that "the findings would only be credible if the study were replicated."  However, the replication was conducted by the same grad student, so that didn't help.  The professor does admit that not working himself with the primary datasets (supposedly collected, actually fabricated) by the grad student was a mistake--the professor's rationale at the time was that because he did not have IRB approval from his university, he wanted to avoid working with the raw data.  How's that for irony?  The professor was concerned about it being an ethical breach for him to work with raw data, so he left that in the hands of his cheating co-author? 

It was interesting/sad that when asked why he thinks the grad student did it, the professor's response did not point out that the major route to academic success in the social sciences is by publishing high-profile, counter-intuitive, "sexy" research. 

In this case, the results were just too high-profile, counter-intuitive, sexy, and even applicable to real world situations for the cheating grad student's own good.  Some other grad students were like, Let's try doing this, too!  And when they couldn't replicate the results, and found that the dataset itself contained implausible properties, they (along with another professor) wrote a technical paper about the irregularities in the data that drew this shitstorm down on his head.  So if you're going to cheat, cheat big, but not too big.