Empirical Question

A Few Likes and Dislikes

2012-01-28T21:59:00.001-06:00

While Tam looks with increasing disfavor on people's habit of rating everything they experience, I find the rampant Facebook "liking" and "disliking"* of consumer products distasteful. There are very few products I would want to announce to everyone I know, or basically the world, as having some kind of significant attitude toward. I don't believe this is any principled belief; it just feels cheap and tawdry somehow (esp. because I think a lot of the impetus for doing so is in response to marketers' promotions -- e.g., "like us on FB to enter our contest for a free XYZ!" (Why yes, I am a marketing student.)). And really, my FB page is already overfilled with annoying, meaningless garbage without finding out that the guy who sat behind me in 8th grade math class "likes" Tombstone pizza.

*After posting this, I thought, Wait - is there even a dislike option on FB? I don't actually remember, but I'm thinking no. OK, I checked - you can "like" but not "dislike" things on FB. This makes my disdain all the stronger. All the rabbits in the world and I disapprove.

This being said, I am happy to share my thoughts on a couple of recently-bought products/experiences in this setting. (My marketing strategy professor's favorite way to end any given sentence, whether it really makes sense or not, is with the words "in this setting." Another guy in our department ends sentences characteristically with "from that standpoint." A psychology professor is partial to "in this space," though he uses it less frequently and mixes things up by stating it in other positions in the sentence.)

LIKES:

Lands End Weatherfield Shoes: These are my perfect "walk over 2.5 miles to school on wet, slushy, icy, or snowy (below about 2") ground in comfort and wear them indoors all day, admiring the subtly contrasting colors and pleasant shape below where my jean hems scrunch up" shoes. I have the brown ones, and because they are currently on sale, have ordered the black and violet, too. Because we contend with snowy conditions through Easter, I thought the violet ones would be nice for that time of year when 95% of the rest of Americans are wearing spring clothing. I really, really wish they would make them in dark grey and in red or green or pretty much any other interesting color (perhaps not yellow or pink).

Kashi Dark Mocha Almond granola bars: I gave these up for a couple weeks when I was being really strict about eating zero wheat, but I am now back to eating about 5 of these per week (with no negative effects; I have added back wheat only in the very small quantities in these granola bars and my mom's meatloaf recipe, which is mostly oat-based but has about half a tablespoon of wheat germ per serving, too). I tried a bunch of strictly oat-based granola bars and they all (1) were not very filling for the calories, (2) tempted me even when I wasn't hungry and (3) left me wanting to eat another one right away even though (4) some of them didn't even taste all that good. The Kashi mocha ones are filling (for only 130 calories), satisfyingly toothy, have a chocolate-y flavor without any gooeyness, are not very sweet, and taste quite good, but I never crave them when I'm not hungry or feel left wanting more. I really appreciate foods that have a high ratio of liking to wanting (to hijack the terminology of neurologist Kent Berridge, who has done a lot of interesting, great work demonstrating that finding something pleasurable - liking it - and finding something motivating - wanting it - are regulated by different brain circuits). This combination - enjoyable to eat without making me really want it - is especially hard to find in long-term shelf-stable snack foods in convenient form factors and calorie amounts that I can carry around in my backpack, stash in my office, etc. So it's the bomb, basically.

DISLIKES:

Pei Wei restaurant in my nearby suburb: Today was it. Robert and I have been eating lunch at this place most Saturdays since we moved here, but this was the last time I'm going there. I have really liked the place because (1) Pei Wei's chai iced tea is delicious, (2) it's easy to eat wheat and corn free, and (3) you don't have a server waiting on you so you don't have to feel bad about using up a table for a couple hours when they're not busy, which they typically aren't. However, I would say that fully half the times we go, the awesome, wonderful chai iced tea is brewed so pathetically weakly that it is like having sex on a boat in a silty river - i.e., fucking close to dirty water. We always complain, and they always brew a new batch. Today, this process took, seriously, over 45 minutes. This ridiculous delay, in combination with an especially too-loud stereo system and an egregiously loud and chatty set of 4 women at the table next to us (who Robert noticed after they left had gotten disposable to-go cups instead of the normal plastic cups yet left them on the table because, what, they enjoy being wasteful), has finally turned me against them. (Coming home and finding out that the lunch was 200 calories more than I remembered it being, and hence not as filling/enjoyable for the calories as I thought, just capped it.)

475 Birds

2012-01-09T16:39:00.001-06:00

Yesterday Robert and I went to the airport in search of a snowy owl that had previously been seen, but with no luck. (We talked to a woman there who had been out every day last week looking for it with no success.) I think snowy owl has officially taken over as my nemesis bird. It was sort of amazing how many partly melted then re-frozen clumps of snow in the general shape of an owl there were out there, though. I also saw some surprisingly bird-like light fixtures and security cameras.

We also went to a park with a lake in the area and took a walk through a grassland-turning-to-marshland that was almost completely bereft of birds. Seeing a few chickadees, cardinals, and house finches was the excitement of this walk. The path ended at a lake but we had to turn back when we hit a marshy area that we couldn't cross.

So we approached the lake from a different place, this time immediately happening to meet up with a big guy dressed in camo and carrying a spotting scope and a camera with a gigantic lens. He showed us two gull species that are usually found in the arctic but that for whatever reason decided to spend some time here. I'm not usually very thrilled by looking at gulls, but it was interesting to see these birds (which were clearly different looking once you knew what you were looking for). It made me think about how Robert's grandmother had a birding friend (appropriately named Martin) who lived on a lake and frequently phoned her to come out and see a 3rd year hybrid whatever gull that he had found - she wasn't into gulls either and so had to gauge how often she had to show up to look at his gulls to ensure that he kept calling her when he saw an exciting non-gull bird.

This experience has not transformed me into a gull lover, but it was with great satisfaction that I added to my life list:
Glaucous gull
Thayer's gull

Self-Control and Maturity in Action

2011-12-21T17:35:00.000-06:00

I am very used to people being wrong on the Internet, but to misattribute the poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" to e.e. cummings instead of Wallace Stevens --- that's just really wrong. And it is, I believe, just about the only assertion in that entire thread that nobody took issue with (and somebody even "liked" it). Of course, I'm sure no other readers were their state American literature champion in high school or, like me, they are just mature and self-regulating enough to avoid pointing out the error. But on my own blog, I have no compunction about obnoxiously observing that making a sort of demonstrative, gratuitous literary allusion but fucking it up = signaling FAIL.

I really like Wallace Stevens' poetry and find it kind of inspiring that he published the majority of his work rather late in life (his first major publication was at age 35) and while holding down a demanding full-time job as a lawyer (and later, a VP) for the Hartford insurance company.

Done for Now

2011-12-21T16:59:00.000-06:00

Had my presentation today so the semester is officially over. I'm not planning to do any more school-related stuff until Dec 28 (unless I get an email from one of my profs to do something for my RA-ship, which could happen). Of course, I got home around 4:30 this afternoon and felt a bit like, OK, jeez, what do I do now? Oh yeah, I need to turn my apartment into a place that does not look like a paper factory exploded so that my visitors tomorrow can sit down. Hmm...suddenly I have the desire to read one of the books I picked up at the public library on my way home.

That's the Spirit

2011-12-20T16:27:00.000-06:00

I've put together my research proposal presentation for tomorrow. It's always nice when it's timely (about gift giving to children), you can mention one of your pet peeves (the "one big gift" swindle that started with the wise men and has become a hated tradition for millions of kids), and you can illustrate not just one but two of your points with lolcats.

No one can question my holiday spirit after sharing these lolcats with you.

Two Down

2011-12-19T16:04:00.000-06:00

I finished my second paper today. Now I only have a 10-slide PPT presentation to put together on my research idea for my third class, and that shouldn't take very long to do. I'll probably start it tonight and finish it in the morning. (Obviously it does not take that long to create a short presentation when you have worked out the content, but my content is not entirely worked out.) We do our presentations on Wednesday, then I'm done for the semester.

One Down

2011-12-16T09:00:00.000-06:00

My end of the semester items (for classes) included two research proposal papers and one research proposal presentation (do you detect a theme here?). I turned in one paper earlier this week, and I'm up to my ears in the other one right now. I'm thinking I might actually survive.

Of course, my three week winter break is already feeling oversubscribed with research projects, but one thing (or maybe two things) at a time.

Hermit Thrush

2011-12-13T20:32:00.000-06:00

Jen bought me a gorgeous hermit thrush painting, so I thought I would share with you this video of a singing hermit thrush. I find the song amazing. The hermit thrush is the state bird of Vermont, where the painter lives, so I'm guessing she knows this bird well.

Lonesome Billy

2011-12-09T08:04:00.000-06:00

The funniest rabbit video I've seen in a while (courtesy Disapproving Rabbits). Who knew the Dutch were so violent?

More Like in Our Dreams

2011-12-06T18:56:00.000-06:00

I dream all the time about my teeth falling out, so I was tickled by the inclusion of that element in this nice Flight of the Conchords song.

A Theory of Dreams

2011-12-04T08:55:00.002-06:00

OK, I'm going to tell you about a dream I had last night, that I woke up from at 5 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep again, but this is going to be relevant and instructive for the greater point I want to make.

Tam and I are in grad school together, and I'm taking a math class with her for which all I have to do is show up and pay attention and I will earn my necessary grade. But I fall asleep during class and when I wake up at the end, Tam's like, Uh oh, you really missed a lot.

After class, I want Tam and me to do something together, but she's going over to a girl from school's house to play doll army instead.

I go home - to my parents' house, where I live in a room that isn't really a room, it's like a tent that doesn't even have solid sheets on the side but mesh where the cold seeps through and I can't be sure if other people can see in. It's been raining, so the wooden door to the room/tent has not only swollen but the rain has worn much of the wood away, and my grandmother comes by at odd hours to stare through the gaping holes at me. It's also cold.

I go to my mom, planning to tell her that I demand that I get a new door, a thick metal one that can't be destroyed by the elements, but my mom is too busy helping my sister with a princess costume [or something I already can't remember...I think I totally am making up the part about the costume, actually].

I go back to my room/tent and lie on the bed/sleeping bag on my back. And I look down at my left side and Tiger is there. "Oh there you are" I say and start petting him, and he purrs. And I accidentally call him "sweet bunny" but he doesn't care, and I call him "sweet kitty" too, and kiss his paw. After a while, he gets up and wants to jump up on shelf at the head of my bunk bed, but it's covered in things, so I move them and he jumps up on the shelf and from it disappears up onto another bunk bed that is both there and isn't.

I notice that the things I've moved for Tiger are unfamiliar. There are lots of little pieces (some pink plastic flowers that vary slightly from each other, a diamond ring, a metal triangle) and I start trying to re-arrange them because if I put them in the right configuration..............

When I woke up, I was smiling and I also had tears streaming down my face because I love and miss Tiger, the BEST CAT EVER, to this day. (My mom's brilliant lover boy cat Belle does not read my blog and is not the kind of cat who would take this obviously completely subjective assessment as diagnostic of anything but my deep and abiding love for Tiger.)

I will now beg your patience to read about the single most important dream of my life, which I had when I was just a kid.

My sister and I are walking through a castle made of grey stone and I don't really know where we're going but I know I need to keep us safe. This goes on for a while [I don't remember what happens]. At one point, we're in a room with two open doorways at either end, and a football team in their uniforms comes running through one door (like teams do when they burst onto the field at the start of the game and the fans cheer them) and out the other. As the last player leaves, that doorway closes up behind them. Then I notice that my sister has disappeared, and I know she got caught up with those football players and won't come back.

When I woke up from that dream, I was sobbing uncontrollably. I was utterly bereft. It was biblical in its intensity. I had the feeling (which I can still weakly recreate and feel in my chest) that people describe as having their heart ripped from their chest. It was unquestionably the worst-feeling experience of my life. I think that I have dreamed that same dream, or a version of it, again several times since then. I know that I have remembered it quite a lot of times over the years, esp. the years right after wards but fairly often even into my early 20's, and occasionally even these days.

One of the mysteries of life is why we dream. Scientists aren't even totally sure why we sleep, though there is good evidence that one purpose of sleep is to facilitate the consolidation of memory. Feel free to read or skip this explanation that I wrote studying for a neuroscience exam:

"Consolidation refers to the processes that continue after learning and stabilize, transform, or enhance the newly-encoded memory trace. Consolidation makes memories more resistant against interference and decay. During system consolidation, neural memory representations undergo a reorganization so that they become represented by different neural networks. We consolidate memory more effectively when we are asleep because we use the same processes for taking in (encoding) information and consolidating memories. Therefore, there is interference in the consolidation process when we are awake (and we are also taking in information) but not when we are asleep. During sleep, the covert reactivation of the networks that were involved in encoding the information leads to improved memory consolidation.

REM sleep appears to be important for procedural memory (skill at a task). Depriving people of REM sleep makes it harder for them to learn tasks, and people who have practiced a difficult procedural task tend to engage in greater levels of REM sleep afterwards. The first stage of procedural memory consolidation, stabilization, appears not to be dependent on sleep, but can be improved with sleep. The second stage, enhancement, might require sleep.

Slow wave sleep (SWS) is involved in the consolidation of hippocampus-dependent declarative memory (explicit memories of facts and events). Studies have shown that retrieval performance is better when tested shortly after a period of night-time sleep than daytime wakefulness, even after controlling for differences in fatigue and eliminating circadian rhythm confounds. However, some studies examining memory over a longer time span, such as one week, do not show a benefit to post-learning sleep. Because consolidation of declarative memory may occur over several nights, sleep in the subsequent nights might compensate for the lack of sleep the first night. During SWS, newly encoded representations are repeatedly activated in the hippocampus in conjunction with thalamacortical spindle activity (which propogates to the entire neocortex). These coordinated activations could achieve a transfer of information and a strengthening of weak memory traces. During sleep, lower levels of ACh (enabling a feedback of information from the hippocampus to the neocortex) and cortisol (reducing interference with memory retrieval) create an environment favorable to memory reactivation and consolidation

People appear to need REM sleep specifically. If people are deprived of REM sleep (e.g., are awakened whenever they enter the REM state) for several days, they experience an REM rebound when they are allowed to sleep undisturbed. They will spend a higher proportion of their sleep time in REM sleep proportional to the duration of their deprivation. However, most studies have not found that REM deprivation causes any physiological harm. Dreaming is a feature of REM sleep that has been addressed by Hobson’s activation synthesis theory. While we are awake, we experience brain activation based on the stimuli we encounter. The cortex tries to synthesize this activation in a sensible manner to make sense of things and tell a coherent story. During REM sleep, the pons activates the cortex via the thalamus, which elicits well-known images or emotions. The cortex tries to synthesize this random activation in a sensible manner, but the result is often bizarre due to the random nature of the information the cortex is trying to make sense of."

So maybe dreams are the result of the brain trying to make a coherent narrative out of random firings of the brain, incorporating recent experiences into well-known images. Let's apply this to my dream from last night:

Tam emailed me about signing up for a class that only involves going to math talks --> the class we were taking in the dream.

It snowed a few inches yesterday. When we got home from lunch, I was momentarily surprised that the floor of the underground parking garage at our apartment wasn't wet. Robert said, If it's wet in here, we've got bigger problems than snow. I'm sure it was also cold in bed last night. As a kid, my actual bedroom door did expand when it was humid and wouldn't close --> my tent/room with the weird door.

My parents replaced their front door with a nice metal one that was sturdier and less vulnerable to break ins/people peering in because it didn't have windows like the old one --> my desire for a metal door.

I watched an episode of Big Bang Theory yesterday morning in which Sheldon and his girl friend broke up and he ended up with 25 cats in his bedroom --> the reappearance of Tiger.

So that's all good. But I can't help but ask the question, But why are we conscious of (at least some of) our dreams? Psychologist John Bargh has famously proclaimed that "99.44%" of our mental life is unconscious, and Roy Baumeister, the King of Consciousness within the social psychological community, has made the case that even if we are unconscious of 95% of what's going on in our heads, that 5% that is conscious is important. (He makes some interesting, pretty compelling claims that it's because we're such social animals.) So perhaps we're talking something in the range of <1% to 5% being conscious. What's up with our awareness of our dreams then?

When I posed the question: Why do we dream? to my evolutionary psych class, people were like, Oooooh. After class, lots of people were talking to each other about dreams they've had, etc. It's a compulsion, isn't it, to share your dreams, even though you know that it can be a tedious, annoying thing to do? And of course it's not just modern Americans who have a fascination with dreams -- lots of cultures have placed a great deal of emphasis on understanding and interpreting dreams. Is trying to make sense of them just a waste of time?

Well, quite possibly, but I'd like to propose (just for fun and under the influence of too much evolutionary psych reading) a functional theory of dreams.

When I think about my dreams (those dreams I remember, anyway, an important caveat), there are two primary features:

(1) They evoke strong emotions that can linger for a time even after I'm awake (and in the case of the famous Football Dream, feel powerful years and years later).

(2) The plot/content of the dream fades very quickly - so that I sometimes forget details immediately as I am trying to remember them when I wake up - and/or are bizarre, magical, nonsensical, impossible, flat-out ridiculous and just clearly not true.

Tam and I going to grad school together, while I'm living in a tent/room thing at my parents' house with holes in it and Jen is still there and Tiger is there but then not there and huh?

Of the many things our brains do, constructing false memories is an impressive one. I can't believe I've never recounted on this blog my stunning false memory: When I was a little kid (under age 4, I think) my parents had a little dog named Sandy. I remembered this dachsund very well. It came up in conversation with my mom a while back and she said, Sally, Sandy was a chihuahua mix, not a dachsund - you're thinking of my friend years later who had dachsunds. And she was totally right. Even if I had resisted believing it, there is clear evidence - for many years, up to this exact moment, I have had a photo of Sandy in a photo collage hanging over my bedroom dresser. He looks like a chihuahua, not a dachsund. I clearly conflated Sandy with those dogs my mom's friend had. But before that conversation with my mom, I would have bet big money that Sandy was a dachsund - I remembered it so clearly! Who knows how many other dozens of memories I have are flawed or wrong or totally made up for that matter. (Research note: Elizabeth Loftus has done fascinating work on false memories in many contexts and became famous/reviled for criticizing the "recovery" of false memories of child abuse during psychotherapy.)

Given how easily we get confused about what has really happened to us, and how powerful the emotions of dreams can be, what if the fact that the details in these dreams are elusive and/or totally bizarre is actually a good thing? Whatever else may happen today, I am not going to get an email from Tam and think, "Oh now she wants to talk to me after shitting me off to play doll army. Screw you, bitch." I am not going to feel angry at my parents and sorry for myself that I had to live in a room that is both a room and a tent with a bed that is a bed and a sleeping bag and a bunk bed with another bunk bed above it that is both there and not there at the same time and had a door that fell apart from the rain such that pieces of wood were suspended in space where other wood surrounding it had rotted away and left me cold and exposed to the elements and my sneaky grandmother [in whose basement I actually did briefly live and where my uncle would irritate the shit out of me by staring in the window in the morning to hassle me into getting out of bed and my grandmother would come down and start the washing machine because my being in bed at 6 a.m. was a sin or something]. As much as I was effected by the Football Dream, there is a 0% chance that I will ever find myself crippled with agony and guilt remembering the time I was walking my sister through a castle and let her get caught up by a football team and taken away.

These emotionally-evocative yet patently unrealistic dreams are kind of interesting. They make us experience these feelings that are extremely realistic and are linked to causes that do make sense -- like failure or abandonment or the presence of the BEST CAT EVER -- and do happen all the time in the real world. But the details are too crazy for us to confuse them with real experiences (usually - I'm sure mistakes are made).

So I will propose that the functional purchase of (this type of) dream is to make us feel things, and make us think about it a bit while we're awake, so we will either know for the first time or be reminded of what these feelings feel like when we have them. Emotions are, pretty much, motivators of behavior, so these dream-evoked emotions can provide us with motivation to act in ways that help us avoid the bad and feel the good. I don't want my best friend to not like me anymore, so I better not take her for granted - I need to keep up the relationship. I feel grateful that my parents didn't abandon me or shit me off when I was a kid and I am going to be good to them, too. When I find something interesting in the world and it seems safe to explore, it's satisfying to try to understand it. Dreams that expose us to the embarrassment of violating social norms (going to school naked anyone), the thrill of power and control (let's fly over NYC and look down on the skyscrapers), the good clean fun of sex, the contentment of eating a feast, etc., provide their own motivation. And above perhaps all other things in the world, this critical lesson: When a very young, small, vulnerable person (who shares with me 50% of the genes that vary among humans) is dependent on me, I will not get distracted and let her be taken away. Fuck.

An Early Start

2011-12-01T12:04:00.001-06:00

Woke up at 3:45 this morning with ideas for one of my research proposals, so I stayed in bed and worked on that for a couple hours before breakfast with Robert. Then I sat in my comfy chair and read journal articles all morning, took a shower, and am now here to present to you these two videos in the spirit of "positive affect replenishes self-regulation" before I eat lunch.

From the brilliant Flight of the Conchords TV show (season 2), following the exploits of a two-man band from New Zealand trying and failing to make it in NYC, supported by the well-meaning but generally incompetent assistance of their band manager, Murray, who is the deputy cultural attache at the New Zealand consulate.

Pathetic

2011-11-30T20:33:00.003-06:00

UPDATE: And of course the second thing I see on the Internet this morning is this interview with Professor Ego Depletion himself. (The first thing was this rabbit.)

Wow, this has been a really pathetic month for blogging. We stand at 3 weeks short of the end of the semester. In addition to normal week-to-week stuff (today my officemate and I pulled our hair at the prospect of reading, as one of five papers for Monday's class, a 73-page paper about how people react to frequency versus percentage information), and a monster data analysis I started today, I have two 20-page papers (research proposals) and a research proposal presentation to put together in my spare time. It's kind of scary.

You can see why I don't have a lot of time for blogging, and that the time I do have I don't want to spend writing about school when I could be reading REAMDE.

So instead, let us briefly (not 73 pages worth) consider a favorite EQ topic - ego depletion.

This past Saturday, I read the book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite by the evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban. Like me (and many others), he does not believe that the performance deficits observed in the second task that follows the initial "depleting" task result from the actual depletion of a resource (though, interestingly, we have different intuitions and a somewhat different evidence base for that belief). In his discussion of the ego depletion model, he makes the following (meticulously referenced) observations about the idea that glucose in the brain is the limiting factor for effortful self-control based on studies that show different performance from people who drink a glass of sugary lemonade versus a glass of Splenda-sweetened lemonade

"Consider that the entire brain uses about .25 calories per minute. If we suppose that the "self-control" task increases overall brain metabolism by 10%--a very large estimate--then the brains of subjects who do one of these tasks for five minutes, who are categorized as "depleted," have consumed an extra 0.125 calories. Does it seem right that you need 100 calories from lemonade to compensate for a tenth of a Tic Tac?" (p. 175).

I thought the glucose idea made a lot of intuitive sense but ... yeah. When you start looking at actual research into brain physiology, not so much. I think the resource metaphor is so immediately plausible and appealing that it's almost "too good to check," even to a lot of psychologists.

I am pretty much convinced by the current evidence base that "depletion" is about motivation, not any actual lack of ability (at least in the typical ego depletion lab experiment - perhaps in some very extreme cases a person could truly not continue a task, though whether that is willpower "depletion" or some other kind of physical or mental fatigue would be hard to distinguish).

It's a strange case: it's a terrifically interesting phenomenon that has been studied a lot, and applied in a lot of different domains of psychology, and yet we don't really know what it is. I guess that means there's lots of work left to be done to understand what's really going on. Stay tuned.

Anyway, next time you're feeling depleted, don't reach for a sugary snack - my best guess is that most any "reward" should do the trick. May I suggest looking at a fuzzy bunny with a Groucho-esque moustache?

My friend in the next cage is so depleted he's flopped. Boring. Are you interesting?

Collecting Questions

2011-11-12T16:38:00.000-06:00

OK, people, share with me -- What are some phenomena that you think are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective? Perhaps the classic examples of this are "Why do people commit suicide?" and "Why do some people have same-sex sexual orientations?" I will be presenting some of these enigmas to my evolutionary psychology seminar.

Rabbit-Style Psychological Science

2011-11-08T17:06:00.000-06:00

From Greenwald et al. (1986):

"Fragile and misdirected though they are, theories are the essential containers of scientific knowledge and the necessary vehicles of scientific progress. As suggested by the metaphors of containers and vehicles, criteria such as storage capacity and speed of progress--criteria that are appraisable without having to speak of proof and disproof, or of truth and falsity--are most appropriate for evaluating theories. The work of science may best be regarded as approving and disapproving of theories, rather than as proving and disproving them" (p. 226; emphasis in the original).

So what do you think, bunnies?

Do you approve?

Or disapprove?

A Beloved Universe

2011-11-05T16:35:00.001-05:00

Thursday I went to the city library web site to request a book my mom recommended, The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, the first Sherlock Holmes novel to be endorsed by the Conan Doyle estate and apparently a most worthy successor -- a "no-shit Sherlock."

And as it happens, this week is Alice in Wonderland week at the library, timed to coincide with the staging of an Alice ballet in town next weekend. So this afternoon, Robert and I walked over to hear a quite nice lecture on the theme of Alice's transformations (both within the text and across different takes of the story) by an English professor at the university (and to see a clip from a 1933 live action version of the story I'd never seen before and that, as the professor pointed out with amusement, showed us a surprisingly early example of people in photographs talking to us, a phenomenon that we of course associate with Harry Potter). I'm really glad that I didn't miss this.

Sherlock Holmes' London and Alice's Wonderland are two universes that I love to spend time in, and despite being huge fans of the original texts, I also enjoy seeing other spins on these worlds. What fictional universes do you love? Do you consider yourself relatively tolerant of different versions or do you take a more purist perspective on them?

Day 1

2011-10-24T22:21:00.000-05:00

Although I'm not getting all neo-paleo like Tam with my diet, I did re-start my old wheat- and corn-free diet today. I've been feeling sick a lot lately, and since I know that my digestive system isn't happy with these foods, and these foods (grains in general) are pretty much not that great anyway, I thought it was worth trying to go without them for a while and see if I improve. Although there are a lot of limits to self-experimentation (and my approach is obviously confounded), I don't really care. I'd just like to feel better and I'd happily give up these foods to do it. I was wheat-, corn-, yeast-, and lactose-free for two years during college (which was NOT an easy environment for weird food restrictions), so it shouldn't be too hard to do. With rice and oats still on the table (so to speak), I won't have to make too many changes to my diet, I don't think. We'll see how it goes.

A Head?

2011-10-15T21:06:00.000-05:00

I have just now emailed my professors my discussion questions/reactions based on the papers for this coming week's classes. They are due on Sunday night and Tuesday night. It feels weird and awesome to be a little bit ahead on that (as well as already having finished my research proposal for the third seminar over a week in advance, though I still need to develop my presentation for the class).

Tomorrow's big job - get my stimuli prepared for my (second) experiment I'm running later this semester. (By stimuli, I simply mean the materials that the participants are going to look at and react to.) It seems very straightforward in my mind what I want to do, but as Robert could attest after talking to me about it for a couple hours this afternoon, it's turning out to be very confusing and tricky when I sit down to actually write the damn things. It's like I know I want to do X and Y, but it's really surprisingly challenging to figure out how to do both of those things at the same time, while worrying about this possible Z confound in the back of my head.

Roast 'Em

2011-10-14T20:26:00.000-05:00

Now that the temperatures are more like autumn than summer, it's vegetable roasting season! Today I made this lovely salad--I roasted half a can of chickpeas and a red bell pepper in olive oil for 20 minutes at 425 degrees, served over 2 cups of raw baby spinach with about 1/2 T. of balsamic vinegar and salt/pepper to taste. Delicious. (I ate it with a cold hamburger patty on the side.)

Right now I'm roasting a bell pepper and a handful of baby carrots for a snack. It has yet to be determined whether it is even possible for me to get tired of roasted vegetables, but I'm thrilled to discover that roasted chickpeas are amazing in texture and flavor and a way to liven things up.

Neuro Word Cloud

2011-10-13T19:04:00.000-05:00

Apparently I never did make a word cloud for my neuroscience paper last year. So here it is. All about food and rats, it seems.

One Thing Done

2011-10-11T19:18:00.000-05:00

Yay, I have just now finished my research proposal that is due in the last half of October. Next I need to produce a brief presentation for class. Here's what the proposed study is about. (Note that the words "depletion" and "monkeys" do not appear in this proposal!)

Getting Old

2011-10-09T17:54:00.003-05:00

I'm starting to run out of comments for (or perhaps patience with) my research methods class readings, which frequently involve a couple of papers from a long time ago, more recent papers addressing the same fundamental issues, and in general researchers talking past each other or disagreeing but getting nowhere with it. Each week we have to submit 2 (or more) substantive discussion "questions" (usually a paragraph each) on the readings.

This week I pretty much want to say, "You know what [other woman in the class] wrote about the first set of readings -- that these issues seem more relevant to the discipline as a whole than to individual researchers? Ditto. While it feels nice to have grad students reading about these philosophical debates, they never seem to be resolved decade after decade, and in any case they seem quite far removed from the issues that are of primary concern to graduate students, post-docs, and assistant professors - to any academic without tenure who is attempting to get it. What we do is what is rewarded, i.e., what gets us published as much as possible in top journals (and/or what gets us grant money and/or what gets us the attention of policy makers, depending on our specific field and orientation). Who controls publication? The current crop of tenured academics who are editors for these journals. Why don't you guys make up your friggin' minds and let us know what's what here or just admit this is all for funnies or something. In the meantime, we have our hands full with the many throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks, underpowered, under-thought studies that our advisers are pushing us to complete this semester to use the warm bodies (undergrads) who are easily available to us in the lab."

The prof is pretty much great - enthusiastic, smart, inviting of energetic discussion, all that. But there are moments like today when this stuff seems about as relevant to my actual work over the next 10-15 years as taking a course in ancient Greek philosophy.

[Note: in case it's not obvious, research methods does not equal stats. Although there is a great deal of knowledge of stats necessary to understand both the framing of and the details of various debates - e.g., over how various methods lead to biased estimators under various conditions, the issues about Bayesian versus null-hypothesis-testing approaches - we are not learning how to do stats, we don't have math-type homework of any kind, or that kind of thing. This is all at a higher conceptual level regarding how to do science, if that makes sense.]

Bizarrely Appropriate or Inappropriate?

2011-09-27T07:51:00.002-05:00

Robert spotted a guy wearing a t-shirt proclaiming

"Polar Bear Plunge for the Special Olympics"

and commented, "Yes, support the Special Olympics by doing something --------."

I suppose this could also be an appropriate/inappropriate fund-raising choice for a psychiatric facility as well in the "support the X Psychiatric Center by doing something -----" line.

Preparing for the Onslaught

2011-09-18T17:26:00.001-05:00

UPDATE: I've received my boots and they are awesome. I'm not exactly feeling all "bring it" about the upcoming winter but at least I have a better chance of surviving with all toes intact.

I spent about $500 today ordering my winter gear - a down-filled coat, down-filled gloves, a bomber hat, silk longjohns (all from LL Bean), and extremely serious snow boots.

These are Cate the Great boots from Sorel, and customer reviews promise that they are warm enough for Minnesota winters. I guess we'll see.

Reading

2011-09-15T18:19:00.000-05:00

Just in case you're feeling all, Man, I wish I were going to grad school in a reading-intensive field, here's an excerpt from what I'm reading today:

"...but a second intrinsic desideratum is the opposite characteristic of internal contradiction, which is an asset from the Hegelian viewpoint that intrinsic contradiction between thesis and antithesis is ubiquitous in the Ding-an-sich being represented and can be a source of creative synthesis both in the actuality and in its knowledge representation" (McGuire, 1989).

The Work of an Academic

2011-09-11T15:43:00.001-05:00

One of my current pet peeves is when people think that college professors don't work very much because they only teach 1/2/3 courses per semester and "have the summers off!" and so forth. A favorite statement on these lines was when I read a commenter on a blog discuss having been to the gym at 2:00 in the afternoon (over the summer) and met another person there who is a college professor -- see! It's the middle of the day and this professor is at the gym instead of working! (The commenter could easily have encountered a waitress, factory worker, nurse, call center supervisor, or other working person who does shift work; would they have drawn the same conclusion? Also, what the hell was the commenter doing there himself at 2:00 p.m. Highly suspicious. Obviously a slacker.)

Clearly, some professors work a lot harder than others. Some certainly do not work enough, such as the many professors in Robert's department who were getting in trouble with the administration because of it. There is also a huge divide between tenured and untenured professors. Assistant professors are under incredible pressure to publish at the same time they are teaching classes (generally 1, 2, or 3 preps) that they do not already have all their lectures, notes, project assignments, exams, etc., written for. Many of them are thrown into serving as advisors for undergrads or grad students undertaking research projects. The typical assistant professor is in the same situation as the grad student of deciding which 60-80+ hours per week he wants to work.

Some academics (professors and grad students) try to accomplish as much of their work as possible in the office. People like Tam basically live there. But a lot of people like to work elsewhere, and the nature of the work is such that it isn't always obvious to others that work is going on.

For example, I spent four hours in a restaurant yesterday with Robert talking about my self-control research project (that I am doing as part of my RAship) and generating ideas that I am presently going to transfer from the napkin I covered in ink to my computer. Then I need to start developing (and completing over the next couple days) the design of five or so experiments to test these ideas. This development will happen while I'm walking to school, riding the bus, eating lunch, folding laundry, etc.

It's too bad people seem think that doing scholarly work always involves typing furiously at a computer keyboard or looks like this.

What We Need Less of is Philosophy of Science

2011-09-09T21:28:00.001-05:00

Today I walked on my treadmill then read 10 articles regarding philosophy of science issues as applicable to psychology.

That really felt like a lot of reading and it took approximately forever. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to maintain this level in the coming weeks so I guess I will have to do what so many of my classmates at My Masters University did in our program - skim and/or just flat not read some papers, start getting some grades below an A. (Fortunately I have reached the point where nobody ever again will care about my grades except to know that I am meeting the minimum GPA required to stay in good standing in my program. I don't remember this standard off the top of my head, but it is clearly below a 4.0. GPAs do not mean squat when going on the academic job market.)

One good thing is that I kept taking notes with ideas for the short paper I will need to write for this class by early October. (And thankfully my writing is faster than my reading. I seriously do not know how people who struggle with their writing do PhD programs in the humanities/soft social sciences.)

I am going to finish one more article (marketing) before bed and go to sleep with the pleasant feeling of being done with the readings for 2 of my 3 classes next week.

The City Bus

2011-09-08T21:32:00.001-05:00

About 6 blocks from my apartment, I can catch the bus - there are three different bus routes I can take from there to within a block of the business school and during most of the day they run every 5 minutes or so. This morning, I got to the bus stop, waited under 90 seconds, got on the bus. The elapsed time from the bus stop to my entering my office: under 8 minutes.

This afternoon I figured out how to catch the bus from school - I have to make a sort of downward spiral around some buildings and down a ramp to the road (the campus is basically astride this major east-west road). I waited for less than a minute and got on the bus. The place where I get off the bus is even closer to my apartment - about 2.5 blocks.

So far, I'm loving the bus thing. Of course, once the winter weather hits, I might want to take a different bus that picks up and drops off about one block from my apartment, but it runs much less frequently, so I'll have to actually consider the timing of it. (Right now, with 3 super-frequent buses to choose from, I pretty much can get on a bus immediately from that other bus stop so at any normal time of day, thinking about timing is utterly unnecessary.)

No classes today. I sat in on the undergrad CB class again and met with the second prof I am RAing for (who also teaches that undergrad class) to talk about research ideas. Let's call her B. As opposed to the other prof (let's call her K.) who is putting me to work on an idea she's been interested in for a while, B. is encouraging me to come up with my own project (with her input, of course). I have several very general ideas for things that would fit with the work she does and one in particular that I want to consider first. There is an extensive lit review in my near future as I try to figure out what the state of the science is, so to speak, in this area.

Tomorrow, I have nothing taking me to school, so I am looking forward to spending the day churning through as many as possible of the very many articles I need to read for next week's classes.

My officemate is a quant, so her life is about pushing her way through problem sets in econ (which is basically math and is especially grueling at a top-10 econ program like ours). As a CB person, my life is like those in the "soft" social sciences and humanities - astonishingly long reading lists. So even though we're both in marketing, our work is very, very different. (We will both be taking the core seminars in marketing, of course, which will sometimes play to her strengths and sometimes to mine. This semester, it's mine.) It might seem like reading some articles is a lot easier than doing a bunch of proofy math problems (and the gods know I prefer it) but in grad school, professors often assign a nearly impossible amount of reading, and the reading is generally not easy because of the content or the poor writing or both (and the readings are especially grueling at a top-5 psychology program like ours). And because my classes are at least nominally seminars, we have to show up ready to discuss the papers (and we have to submit response papers in advance every week).

So, basically I guess I'm saying that grad school is tough all around. That being said, it's also awesome.

Day 2

2011-09-07T16:57:00.000-05:00

I calculated that yesterday I walked to school averaging over 4 mph. Today, I left about 15 minutes later and took the same (river trail) route a little bit slower, about 3.6 mph. I wore a pair of the cheap, cushy backless mary jane shoes I am hoarding and was surprised by how comfortable they were. No rubbing, no soreness on the bottom of my foot. (I did notice when I got home that my feet are turning into two gigantic calluses from all this walking, but I guess that's OK.) I got to class with time to spare.

This "seminar" has about 18-20 people in it, several of whom are also in my class from yesterday (including the woman from the psych department whose first + last name is the same as mine only without the leading "S" and the two second-year marketing students). Our first set of readings is "And monkeys" in a big way. For example, did you know that rhesus macaques, like humans, automatically distinguish between members of their own social group and others, spontaneously associate novel objects with specific social groups, and implicitly evaluate ingroup members positively and outgroup members negatively? And did you know that capuchin monkeys, like humans, show different levels of risk tolerance depending on whether the outcomes are framed as gains or losses?

This afternoon, I printed approximately 3 gazillion articles (and read about 1.5), but my office was unbearably warm and stuffy, so I left at about 3:00 and walked home the shortest route (down the major street) with a short side trip to the public library to pick up the last two books I requested before school started. (The rest of my request list is on a Netflix-like "hold" for now.) It was extremely sunny and warm (in the upper 70s) and I was glad to get home, change some of my clothes, take off my shoes, turn the A/C fan from low to high, and crack open a cold can of Diet Coke.

This evening I have a bunch of reading to do so I can meet with the other professor I am an RA (research assistant) for this year. Good times.

First Day

2011-09-06T17:10:00.000-05:00

Today was the first day of classes in my PhD program.

I walked to school this morning in the very pleasant weather (sunny and temp in the 50's) - I was about 20 minutes early (class starts at 9) and easily found the room. But nobody else showed up. About 5 minutes before 9, a fellow marketing student (a 2nd year) came by and I found out that the professor emailed us that the room had been changed. And when we went to the new room, we found out from a psych student that the email also said that on this first day, we were meeting at 10 instead of 9.

I went outside, sat at a table, and started reading an article for another class and was soon joined by a guy in my marketing cohort. We chatted about the fact that the stats courses at the university are basically all using R as the statistical package instead of SPSS, SAS, Stata, etc. (The aforementioned 2nd year student told me later that this switch in the educational psychology stats courses is extremely recent; her course used SPSS.)

So anyway, the class (research methods) sounds like it will be interesting but a lot of work - there is a significant amount of reading of sometimes very difficult articles. (This course neither teaches stats nor provides information about various experimental design options, but is more of an overview of current controversies in the field.)

This afternoon, I also sat in on the first lecture of the class I'm going to be TAing for next year. I finished up printing some things in my office and decided to try taking the bus home, but I wasn't able to easily find the bus stop, so I walked instead. (I've now looked at it on google maps and think I understand where it is; I'll try again tomorrow or Thursday.) Rather than take the scenic route I used this morning, I walked down a major street through downtown for a change. It's about 5.5 miles round trip, and it was pretty easy (though my shoulders do feel a little tight after carrying the backpack so long and I rubbed a spot on my left foot so it's a bit sore).

Now I'm home so I can start doing some actual work.

When Winter Comes

2011-09-01T21:09:00.000-05:00

How will I like Snow City once winter comes? A fair question. I don't think I can even imagine how cold it's going to be.

I am collecting characterizations of Snow City winters - like that it's snot-freezing cold or gasoline-freezing cold. I also like the comparisons people make between the winter here and other places. It's already been established from several people that it's colder here than many places in Canada, for example. This week, a guy told Robert and me that he used to live in the Swiss Alps and it was cold there, but it wasn't as cold as it is here. I am still waiting for the person who used to live in Siberia to tell me that the winters there are not nearly as bad as they are here.

A Big Shop

2011-08-30T17:57:00.000-05:00

Now that the weather is starting to turn cooler here (sorry readers in TX and OK), I have been dreaming about snow and thinking about needing to pull together actual fall and winter wardrobes. To get a sense of what I'm talking about - Robert found out that if you take the coldest day of the year in Austin, on average, we will have days colder than that for over 6 months of the year.

So today, we went to Goodwill to start getting some fall weather clothing. Here's what we got:

1 pair of boots
1 heavy jacket
2 light jackets
6 pairs of pants
1 pair of jeans
2 skirts
10 sweaters
7 long-sleeved shirts

For a total of 30 items. Any guess on the total price?

2 @ 8.99 and 1 @ 6.99

Calvin Klein jeans, Target jacket for Robert, Mystery boots for Robert

5 @ 5.99

Beige Kenneth Cole pants for Robert, grey Eddie Bauer wool pants, striped Target wool sweater, black Ann Taylor pants, grey J Crew wool sweater

6 @ 4.99

Strange stretchy/fleecy black Studio Works pants, brown Casual Corner pants, brown quilted jacket, grey Point Zero skirt, grey Charter Club cashmere hoodie, black Sanskriti tunic

And perhaps the coolest thing about this Goodwill store? Tuesday is 1.49 day for items with a particular color of tag.

16 @ 1.49

Red Vanity Nordic Gear sweater, green Eddie Bauer sweater, fuschia St Johns Bay sweater, salmon Eddie Bauer cardigan, blue Express sweater, burgundy Liz Claiborne sweater, green Mod-O-Doc cardigan, blue Target fleece


Red Target shirt, black striped Worthington shirt, red Style Co tunic, blue American Eagle shirt, plaid TDK pants (men's but they fit me), brown Apt 9 skirt, black Ann Taylor shirt, green Lands End shirt

Plus, I purchased a pad of unlined recycled paper for $1.

With tax, it was under $110 (e.g., the cost of two new items from Ann Taylor).

There are still some expensive items we'll need to purchase for when it gets seriously cold -- the guy who checked us out said that it gets cold enough to freeze gasoline so you always want to make sure you don't have just a couple gallons in the tank -- but this should help get me through the first couple months of school.

Quote of the Day

2011-08-24T16:33:00.000-05:00

"Ego depletion makes people stupid in complex ways but leaves them intelligent in simple ways."

Baumeister, Schmeichel, & Vohs, Self-Regulation and the Executive Function: The Self as Controlling Agent

Central Library

2011-08-08T17:46:00.000-05:00

Robert and I walked to the central library (1.2 miles, round trip) to pick up some books that I had requested. Unlike the execrable Austin public library system, Snow City lets you create a request queue with a reasonable number of items (100 at SC versus 5 at Austin). On the screen with the item details, it tells you what number you will be in the queue if you request it. This weekend I put about 25 books in my queue, several of which I could see were immediately available.

This morning, I got an email from them announcing that 8 of my books were ready to be picked up. When we got there, the entire experience was self-service. There is a holding area where you find your items on the shelf, then you check out using a self-service scanner like at the grocery store (which I fumbled around with quite a bit, actually).

The library is pretty neat looking, too.

Faaaaaaaaaate

2011-08-05T17:48:00.000-05:00

The last couple of days have been spent mostly playing Fate: The Traitor Soul. I would like to finish it before school starts (Sept. 6) because it and grad school are not compatible (as I discovered during the summer after my first year at My Masters U). It's been so intense that one day this week I didn't even look at the Disapproving Rabbits web site.

But I have fit in a couple minor non-Fate accomplishments this week, like getting my local bank account set up and starting to organize information about the bus routes between here and the various places on campus I'll need to get to. I've also figured out the route to math camp (which is on a different campus from the main one where my office and classes will be), but I hope Robert will be able to drive me most days.

You Have No Free Time

2011-07-29T12:48:00.000-05:00

A very short, useful description of the "free time myth" for my readers not currently in grad school. Allow this to help guide your expectations for my availability outside the 9-month academic year.

Readers still in grad school - you know the score.

At My Masters University, the professors were very upfront about the fact that they spent most of the summer trying to catch up on all the writing they did not get done during the school year, when they had to manage classes, advising undergrad and grad students, data collection, meetings/committees/service work, etc.

Understating the Case

2011-07-27T20:20:00.005-05:00

The numbers presented in this blog post (on the interesting "100 reasons not to go to graduate school" site) are only part of the reason that I don't personally worry about the horrible prospects for newly minted PhDs on the academic job market.

The average salaries for new assistant professors in 2009-2010 were:

My relevant categories have been highlighted above (inadvertently in the colors of the local football team; perhaps I was unconsciously influenced by this recent post from a local fashion blogger -- who is not me). (Also, I am very amused by how my clueless PrtSc method of moving this Excel chart to Blogger allows you to see that "plot area" box. Yep, this is just another fine example of the high production values we at Empirical Question bring to you.)

The other reason, not shown here, is that there is also a lot of variation in the average number of job offers received by the graduates in different disciplines -- in some disciplines, over half of grads don't receive even one job offer (not even in a state where they have no interest in living). So that new assistant professor of English, who spent 10 years getting her degree at Ivy League University and is now teaching at Podunk College or a regional branch of Directional State University for $51,000 per year, is among the luckiest English doctorates around.

The situation for marketing PhDs is pretty damn good (though not quite as good as for those finance and especially accounting PhDs entering the academic market). The 2011 survey of new grads reports that marketing PhDs received an average of 2.6 job offers (from 78 applications and 15 interviews). Actually, that report is a wealth of interesting information, and looking at previous years shows that these numbers are not a fluke.

I think the comments on the post are wonderful. You can check out my (anonymous) contribution on the comment with today's date and 6:01 p.m. (I initially wrote that the comments are "priceless" - hah!)

Hat tip: Robert, who sent me the link to this Slate article, from which I found the 100 reasons site. I particularly liked this proposal from the article:

"Disrupt the graduate-school labor scheme. Independently verified information about individual graduate programs should be made freely available online. That information should include acceptance rates, financial support, teaching requirements, time-to-degree, attrition rates, and, most important, job placement, accounting for every graduate with specific details. (No more claiming that a visiting assistant professor—an academic temp—is "successfully placed.") This cannot be a one-time report; it must be updated continually. Even though college fundraisers keep tabs on alumni easily enough, many graduate programs will resist it, saying that the data are too hard to gather and that they don't have the time. (Also, the results will probably be damaging for most of them, including the most prestigious.) But pressure from the boards of accreditation, disciplinary and professional organizations, and, ultimately, the students themselves should bring most programs into compliance."

Feed the Freezer

2011-07-23T12:18:00.002-05:00

On Thursday, Robert and I put 32 servings of chicken-based meals into our big freezer (as well as cooking another 10 servings for us to eat right now) using the Frozen Assets mini-session methodology. We used our own recipes for this - chicken tetrazzini, chicken enchiladas, salsa verde enchiladas, and chicken & broccoli. We packaged the (strategically under-)cooked and fully cooled servings in plastic wrap with an outer covering of heavy-duty aluminum foil. In the past, we've used plastic (ziploc-type) containers but it seems that the tightly wrapped plastic/foil combination should do a better job of keeping out moisture and thus preserving the quality of the food.

Because I am cutting back a lot on my wheat intake, I made a tetrazzini for myself using rice spaghetti, which is not as flavorful as wheat pasta and tends to break down more easily and is thus just generally less desirable in every way. However, a taste test of the tetrazzini demonstrated to my satisfaction that it is a reasonable substitute in this context. The other recipes are wheat-free.

This kind of bulk cooking is obviously more time-efficient than cooking one recipe at a time, and it was also a bit cheaper because we purchased the boneless, skinless chicken breasts in the large packages at $1.99 per pound as well as a large (6 c.) package of shredded cheddar cheese.

Next: a beef mini-session.

Frugal Beauty, Eh?

2011-07-20T20:15:00.001-05:00

This post about "looking good on a budget" on Get Rich Slowly cracked me up. For example:

"I’ll tell you a secret: I haven’t washed my hair in weeks. I rinse it with water every morning when I take my shower (in my fancy, newly-repaired shower that now features hot and cold running water!). But I only shampoo and condition it about once a month. When I do, I use a 50-percent solution of shampoo and water. This means I’m using about 1/60th of the shampoo I used to use when I washed my hair every day with full strength shampoo. Needless to say, one bottle of shampoo lasts me a whole lot longer."

Where to begin?

(1) This really saves very little money. Yes, reducing shampoo usage to 1/60th is a large reduction, but shampoo isn't expensive. I really don't know how many bottles of shampoo I use in a year, but let's say a person uses one bottle per month, which seems like a lot, at a cost of $5 per bottle - that's $60 per year. So this barely-shampooing tactic saves $59 per year, or 16 cents per day. That's pretty damn trivial, in my view.

(2) OK, so you save your 16 cents per day (or whatever) but at what cost to your personal hygiene? I do not find it plausible that any but the very smallest proportion of people (if any) will have hair that is no oilier, dirtier, smellier, more unmanageable, or more generally disgusting when left unwashed 30 days out of 31. If you live a normal working-class or up existence in the US in the 2010s (and are not some kind of freak in the tail end of the distribution of scalp-oil production who never sweats, etc.), you do not have walking around in unwashed hair as a serious option. And if you send your kids to school this way, the school will (at least they did when I was a kid) do an intervention.

(3) Does giving herself such an infrequent, low dose of shampoo actually do much good beyond the even cheaper option of never shampooing at all?

(4) And how about other needless expenses - deodorant, body soap, laundry detergent for cleaning clothes? Why not eliminate all of these. And live on the street while you're at it (I mean, you already will have the look for it).

It is not hard to write frugal living advice when all you're saying is, Don't spend money. Period. Even on things that all the people around you think are basic necessities of modern life. You know, like soap.

I admit that I think the idea of not shampooing is pretty much crazy, but I understand that some people argue that all this shampooing is screwing up the body's natural ability regulate oil production and whatnot. (I don't know if this is an extension of popular heuristics like "natural is good" and "ancient practices [e.g., like before people started shampooing regularly] are good" or what. I mean, yes, people used to not wash their hair (or bathe or whatever) as often as they do these days, but that doesn't necessarily mean squat regarding how clean they were. Maybe standards for cleanliness have changed and what was acceptable in those days is not acceptable now - you know, like dumping shit into the gutters to be washed away after a rain.) Whatever. If that's the case, the argument for giving up (or greatly reducing) shampooing should be about hair health and/or appearance, but the argument on that blog post is about the expense, and I don't get it.

I would also like to question the usage of the term "no poo" for the no shampoo movement. Is the "poo" = "shampoo" equivalence intended for us to view shampoo in a negative light? Cause it's hard to see this without laughing when people who don't wash their hair have hair that looks like shit.

Registered

2011-07-12T11:40:00.000-05:00

I am happy to report that I have registered for my classes for the fall semester, 3 seminars --

Attitudes & Persuasion (marketing dept) - Monday afternoon (time not finalized)
Research Methods in Social Psych (psych dept) - Tuesday 9-11
Social Cognition (psych dept) - Wednesday 9-11

I have not yet heard which professor(s) I will be working with as a research assistant.

Welcome to Snow City

2011-07-12T11:33:00.002-05:00

I've been in Snow City since Friday, and the weather has been unusually warm (highs in the 90s; readers in TX, OK, etc., can bite me) and very sunny, but today is wonderful. Today Robert and I took our second morning walk along the Mississippi River on the hiking/biking trail (which is 2 blocks from our apartment) and the sky was overcast, the temperature in the upper 60s.

Our move was pretty easy and straightforward (if such terms can apply to moving everything you own over 900 miles in a truck, including across a mountain range). We're still unpacking, though I'd say that the living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and both bathrooms are about 80% - 90% ready. My office is still a disaster zone, and we are waiting for the maintenance people to figure out our phone line situation downstairs (where the bedroom and office are) so we can set up my computer.

It's going to take some getting used to being in an apartment that is both smaller than the previous ones (we've downgraded in size on our last two moves) and is a townhouse. We're also on a kind of interesting climate control system - the building generates A/C or heat (depending on the season) and each apartment can turn on a fan (with 3 levels of air) to bring it in. The nice part is that we only pay for the electricity that powers the fans, not that changes the air itself, but we also have less control over the temperature. On the warm days this weekend, it got up to about 83 degrees in the dining room (where our thermostat lives) in the late afternoons. The downstairs is distinctly cooler than the upstairs (as you might expect).

The apartment building is of that style I associate with urban areas - you go into the building, then down the hall to the specific apartment, like in a dorm or hotel. We are on the fourth (top) floor but are very close to the elevator. (The climate-controlled parking under the building is an open plan, but we have been parking in spot K-9, which is close to the elevator.) The trash situation is pretty much awesome. There is a trash chute next to the elevator where you stick in your trash and it gets sucked away. Large trash and recycling you can take down to bins next to the elevator in the parking garage. The mail box is on the first floor of our building, though for some reason the mail drop off is only in the other building (so far as we can tell).

Some specific pluses, minuses, and oddities about our apartment:

Kitchen: The refrigerator is surprisingly small. The top shelf is too short for a bottle of beer (i.e., Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout) to fit, so our Brita pitcher is on the bottom shelf. We do not have a pantry, so I set up my metal shelves from my old bathroom in the dining room, and this seems to be working. There is a lot of counter space and there is a microwave pre-installed above the stove. The stove top has two large burners (our previous one had only a single large burner, and it was annoying).

Dining room: This is a combined Robert office / dining room space (luckily, it's pretty big). Its most salient feature is the overhead light, which is a big metal monstrosity that Robert and I have both hit our heads on multiple times because it hangs so low.

Living room: The living/dining areas have large windows as well as a skylight. In keeping with our vampiric habits, we leave the blinds on the windows closed, but we can't do anything about the skylight, which being oriented to the west allows a bright shaft of light to cross over the dining area during the late afternoons. The vaulted ceiling is really high.

Office: Hard to say until we unearth it from the 6 gazillion boxes.

Bathroom: It comes with no storage space at all, but the combined bath/shower with the molded plastic interior (much better than tile) and the sliding doors are nice.

Bedroom: The closets are on either side of a short hallway that leads to the master bathroom, and they have sliding doors, so it creates a sort of dressing area. The bizarre thing about the closets is that in the longer closet, there are two rows for hanging things (that combined hanging rod + shelf typical in new apartments) but the top row is so low that you can't actually hang shirts, pants, etc., from that rod without it bunching up on the bottom shelf.

Master bathroom: All the storage is in this bathroom, but it has only a shower stall, which is a bit cramped.

A cool thing about the townhouse layout is that we have what Robert calls a Harry Potter room under the stairs to use for extra storage space.

Oh, we also have a "powder room" upstairs but we have used it to store our packing boxes and other stuff. Because the door is set back from the wall, we can close the door and use the inset space for our upright, stand-alone freezer.

Successful Experiment

2011-06-29T11:58:00.000-05:00

I've been wanting to try some different necklines on my t-shirt refashions, so I made this one with a square neck. It took several re-adjustments (because I was working without a template, just measuring myself and making it up as I went along) but I was pleased with the final result. (I wore it yesterday with a black skirt rather than the denim skirt shown here.) I am still using up "scraps" so I didn't have a lot of big pieces to work with, but fortunately I had the bottom half of a big white t-shirt my mom got from the library that I could use as the main body of the shirt. I supplemented it with basically the entirety of another too-small shirt I had incorporated into the giant baby shirt - it's serendipitous that the orangey-pink portion makes up a bit over half the front.

The cheap white t-shirt is kind of sheer, but I think it's OK for the back of the shirt. No wearing a purple-and-pink zebra print bra without people knowing it, though.

I think I will make this style again (given enough fabric), and it should be pretty easy now that I have a working model to use.

Registration

2011-06-28T18:36:00.000-05:00

After several days, dozens of web pages, about a dozen phone calls, and multiple online forms, I am now registered for my marketing PhD seminar for the fall! It was amazingly complicated, but I feel great to be an officially registered PhD student. Even better, the seminar is in attitudes and persuasion, a topic that I am very interested in, of course, and which provides a nice point of entry into the program for me (compared to, say, an econ-heavy modeling course).

The funniest of the many convoluted aspects of this process was that to register, you have to give your health insurance information. (If you do not have other insurance, you will automatically be signed up for the university insurance.) My health insurance is about 95% subsidized through the grad assistant plan at the university (this is different from that default, much more expensive insurance that is available to all students), and I will be filling out all the forms for that in August at the department orientation. The insurance plan is only available to graduate assistants registered for a full-time load. You can see the dilemma: I need to register, so I can qualify for the health insurance, so I can register. And the registration page warns us that misrepresenting ourselves on this question can result in disciplinary action according to the university rules of conduct. But the guy at the registrar's office said it was fine to give the grad assistant plan details now so I did. (I only had the details because I thought to look up a url given in my notification of acceptance/funding from the department.)

One thing that I was happy about -- I could fill out the immunization information online and did not need to provide hard copies from a doctor's office confirming the information, nor did I need to get a physical exam. So it was a simple matter of typing in the information from the physical exam form my doctor completed for My Masters University (which I was pleased to find almost immediately in my file cabinet in a file labeled Health Info so I didn't have to call my mom and ask for my ancient vaccine records like I did last time).

Of course, I do not plan to take only one class in the fall. Oddly enough, we don't have any specific courses other than the 5 marketing seminars that we have to take, nor are we required to get the department to sign off on the courses we select. Course selection is very surprisingly laissez-faire. In fact, the DGS (director of grad studies) told me that I should just start signing up for psychology classes that look relevant. At first, this hands-off approach kind of bothered me, but I have come to see the advantages of this (e.g., ain't nobody gonna make me take neuroscience again).

I asked about transferring credits from my masters program and that doesn't happen until the end of my second year, when my advisor looks at the courses I have taken so far and makes sure I've hit the requirements (the dept seminars plus a certain number of credits in methods/stats, a certain number in my minor [psychology], and an overall of 40+ credits). But the PhD program contact person (who is awesome, btw) said that we could sit down with the DGS and look at what classes I plan to transfer. I'm definitely doing that before school starts because if nothing else, I'd like some thoughts on the stats classes from my masters program. It's devilishly hard to figure out what their equivalents are at U. of Snow, especially given that stats programs are offered in a bunch of different departments and not much detail is available on these classes on the university web pages (though this varies a lot from dept to dept).

So, I also want to take one methods/stats course and one social psychology course in the fall but I've run into some roadblocks (surprise!) in signing up for additional classes. The psych course was easy to pick, but it's full and is technically only open to psych PhD students, so I have emailed the department to see if I can get an override number that will allow me to register. (In a series of email exchanges with an incredibly helpful 4th year student in the program, I found out that it is usually not a problem to get permission to take courses in the psych department.) If that one doesn't work out, there is another one with a couple open slots that would also be fine as a substitute.

Picking the stats/methods class was a lot harder. Actually, there was one course in the stat department (on regression) that after many, many hours of slogging through all the options (and talking to the 4th year) kept rising to the top for me - unfortunately, this is a course that a LOT of people want to take so it's full and the department said they do not give overrides for this course when it fills. So I've decided to defer taking that stat course until next semester and instead want to sign up for a psychology research methods course. (In case it's not clear, in this context, you can basically think of "methods" as being about how you design your studies and "stats" as being about how you analyze your data.) And because that class is also only open to psych PhD students, I've had to request permission for that one, too. (Fortunately, it's not full...yet.)

Registration for grad students started on May 6 or something, so obviously most students - returning students and first year students in programs with more rigorously defined course requirements - registered a long time ago. I don't have any reason to believe that I'll be facing this problem of classes already being filled up in the future because I too will register right away rather than 6 weeks late.

I am really, really hoping that one of the benefits of the laissez-faire course selection process is that nobody is going to say boo about my taking 3 rather than 4 classes this semester. The 4th year student says that people typically take 3-4, so I should be fine, esp. given that I will have courses to transfer too.

The psych department apparently likes to schedule their social psych PhD classes at 9 in the morning, which surprises but kind of pleases me. I'd rather avoid classes that run into my doldrums period (about 3-5 p.m.), though I think the marketing seminar is likely to end up happening during or close to that time frame. The social psych seminars are also set up just like the seminars at My Masters University (weekly response papers, presentation of articles, discussion, term papers), only without exams. Nice. It'll be interesting to see whether I agree with the typical finding of My Masters grads that their PhD classes seem kind of easy compared to the ones at My Masters. (In part, that may be because we're taking classes in our own area of psych, where we have more interest and knowledge, in the PhD program rather than all areas like in the masters.)

Crafty Inner Child Continues

2011-06-27T10:26:00.000-05:00

I made a safety pin bracelet after watching the video on this blog post. It was fun and easy, though I would change at least two things with the next one - alternate the direction of the pins (because putting them all the same direction causes the bracelet to fan out a bit) and use more pins. I used a few more than mentioned in the video and it still wasn't quite enough to go all the way around. (I also used only seed beads because that's what I have, but using bugle beads - i.e., longer ones - as well would be fun, too.) But I enjoyed making it and think it's shown proof of concept at least. (And it's relatively easy to make more pins and restring these pins.)

And notice that it's NOT PINK.

Speaking of pink, I laughed when I saw this photo of Sir David Tweedie, the Scot head of the International Accounting Standards Board, in The Economist. That dude so did not buy that tie for himself.

Disapproving Rabbits Montage

2011-06-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

I simply can't get over these photos from Disapproving Rabbits. The expressions on the lionhead rabbit in the first photo and the tiger-striped cat in the second are amazing. (Lionhead rabbits are kind of crazy looking in general, but that top photo is an absolute killer. I would be totally "My god what the hell is that, that is no rabbit" if I were that cat.)

Plus, a bonus Dutch rabbit sporting very attractive color blocking. The Dutch is all about the simple, clean lines. And I absolutely love the way the white back foot looks up against the black body.

I'm glad that the blogger is continuing to document the diversity of gorgeous disapproving rabbits after the recent loss of her beloved Rex rabbit Cinnamon.

T-Shirt Scarf

2011-06-26T14:16:00.000-05:00

As part of my continuing quest to use up my fabric stash, I put together this scarf from knit fabric - it's about 5' long and 3" wide. (The configuration shown leaves skin on the front exposed but I was arranging it to maximize your view of the scarf rather than to maximize warmth.) It has a bit of a "Barbie goes to Hogwarts" feel about it to me.

Finishing Up Refashions

2011-06-24T09:00:00.001-05:00

One of my goals for the move is to not bring my stash of old t-shirts and stuff with me to Snow City. It's not like I'm going to have much time to spend sewing while in my PhD program so it's sort of pointless to bring it with me. Yesterday morning, I completed two relatively easy projects.

I made the world's simplest short-sleeved jacket to wear over sleeveless shirts. I loved the blue-red color of the shirt but it was too short to wear by itself. I just cut the t-shirt down the center and hemmed the two exposed edges. I like the color-blocking effect of wearing it over another single-color shirt (here, a blue shirt I just happened to already be wearing). I think I am going to leave it very plain, but I might want to do something to hold the two sides together at the top (like a sweater-clip type thing) if it doesn't want to lie flat on its own. (I realize the red shirt looks no shorter than the blue shirt so what the hell, right? But what happens when a shirt is cut into a "jacket" is that it shifts forward a bit, so it is longer in the front and shorter in the back than when it was a t-shirt.)

I also turned a big boxy t-shirt I purchased on our trip to the Outer Banks into a Sally-sized t-shirt using my usual methods. I surprised myself by how quickly I did it and by how everything went nearly-perfectly in its execution. (It was not absolutely perfect, so God need not be offended.) Even setting in the sleeves worked like a dream.

The Looming Move

2011-06-24T08:38:00.000-05:00

We're now about 10 days away from The Move, and things are getting a lot busier. We got several big things done this past week. I'm probably happiest about two furniture-related events.

First, we gave away our futon (in recent years, Leo's futon) on Craigslist. I didn't realize how many people closely watch those free listings - Robert got a ton of emails almost immediately and the first-responder guy showed up right away at the storage unit to take the thing away. I'm glad we didn't try selling it. I mean, a new one like ours you can buy at Wal-Mart for about $150, and ours is pretty scratched up after moving (I think we calculated) four times. It was great to have somebody take it away so we didn't have to deal with it. The difference between "FREE" and even "$25" is huge, and the monetary difference didn't seem worth screwing around with given that we would have to meet the buyer at the storage unit (and a buyer is more likely to flake out / change his mind).

Second, we sold our washer and dryer, also on Craiglist. I'm going to miss our awesome front-loader, but the apartment in Snow City comes with a washer and dryer, which has two major benefits: we don't have to move or install our own machines and if the machines break, the apartment people will fix or replace them. Robert did an analysis of our estimated costs per load using the washer and dryer (including the costs of the machines, the water, and the electricity). We spent about 78 cents per load to wash and 72 cents per load to dry. (And those costs have not been offset at all by the couple hundred bucks we got when we sold the machines - again, we sold at a price to sell right away, not to maximize our price.) Given that it costs about $1.25 - $1.50 to wash a load of laundry at a laundromat, 78 cents is a good deal, and that does not even account for the tremendous added convenience and eliminated risk of laundry theft that comes with doing laundry in your own house. And these costs are based on our keeping the machines for only 6 years, not for their entire life (which I really do hope last for several more years for the nice people who bought them and took them away). So...yeah, investing in your own machines really is a money-saver long-term. It's always interesting to see these basic economic truths work themselves out.

Getting the washer and dryer out of here means that we have an empty laundry area that we can start moving boxes into, which we desperately need. We've got a good amount of stuff packed already (including all that wall art that took four people a day to pack in Austin), and packing is going into overdrive this week. Some things I haven't packed not because I still need access to the stuff but because there wasn't any room for the boxes.

Things are also heating up for Robert on the job interview front. He has two phone interviews today and is flying out for an interview in Snow City next week (for a job he's already done two phone interviews for, so *knock wood*).

Quick Shirt Refashion

2011-06-12T15:32:00.000-05:00

2 things:

(1) I absolutely love this square-necked knit shirt I have, but it's too short and perhaps a bit tight across the chest.

(2) I have something of a dearth of short-sleeved shirts and an abundance of sleeveless shirts for the Snow City climate.

So I made the knit shirt into a "jacket" that can be worn over sleeveless shirts.

This was one of the easiest refashions I've done (lately). I just cut the shirt down the center, added two contrasting stripes to broaden the width of the shirt and provide some overlap at the neck line, and voila!

Yay, more color blocking!

Wearing two layers like this in Texas or NC spring/summer might be too warm, but I think it will work very well in Snow City (where it is currently 3:30 p.m., partly cloudy skies, and 64 degrees). I have an identical knit shirt that is olive green that I think I will give the same treatment (though with a different color of stripes - white perhaps).

(Why the hell does my left arm - on the right side of the photo - look creased? Bizarre.)

Holier-Than-Thou

2011-06-12T11:27:00.000-05:00

It seems impossible to find an online article about topics like bicycle commuting, watching less television, or vegetarianism that do not inspire comments from people who claim that the authors (or other commenters or other people who perform the behavior) are taking a "holier-than-thou" attitude toward people who drive their cars, watch TV, or eat meat. And while it's certainly true that there are people who both (1) feel virtuous because they perform these behaviors that express moral values and (2) are happy to share their opinion that they are morally superior to others who do not perform these behaviors, I believe that a lot of the sanctimony is in the eyes of the reader.

I've noticed several themes in these articles that some readers claim to exhibit a holier-than-thou attitude:

* Discussions of the benefits (e.g., financial, psychological, physical - not moral) of the behavior

* Discussions about how the behavior is easier than the reader might think

* Stories of personal conversion to the behavior

Some of these articles are intended to be persuasive, but some are not (at least, not consciously). In particular, personal conversion stories are sometimes full of very positive evaluations of the behavior because the author is extremely excited and happy with this change in their life, and this enthusiasm can be read as proselytizing.

Of course these articles provoke counterarguing (including the consideration of costs that off-set the benefits) and other defensive strategies in people who do not perform the behaviors. But it's interesting to me that the primary form of source derogation (and what I personally view in a lot of cases as the last ditch effort of the individual who cannot generate counterarguments that even the individual herself believes are convincing) is that the author of the message is taking a morally superior tone. It's one thing to say that you reject the argument because the argument itself is not convincing or because the author is untrustworthy or lacks relevant expertise. It's quite another to say that you reject the argument because the author presents it in a morally superior way.

Why do people use somebody's "holier-than-thou attitude" as a basis for rejection? Maybe others buy into the idea that people who are not “nice” (e.g., make even an implicit suggestion that their own behavior is better than yours) should be shunned or publicly defamed (with an attendant devaluing of their opinions) more than I do. Maybe others are not as adept at constructing convenient rationalizations for the discrepancies between their values and their behavior as I am. Maybe others think that somebody rubbing them the wrong way really is a legit reason for ignoring what they have to say.

Whatever the case, I just want to say to these people who are quick to make accusations of sanctimony:

The fact that some people who perform this behavior believe they are morally superior to those who do not is not, in itself, a valid reason to reject the idea that people, including you, should perform the behavior.

The Joys of Packing

2011-06-07T21:14:00.000-05:00

Things are starting to come together on the moving front. This week, we packed my books and the wall art. We have a lot of wall art. Robert commented that the rooms look a lot smaller in their current, bare state. I agree, but moreover, it really makes me feel like our residence in this place is temporary. Well, that and the fact that we have boxes (full and empty) and packing supplies all over the apartment.

This weekend, we attacked Robert's stamp collection. He has basically three - a world stamp collection he inherited from his grandfather, a US stamp collection he inherited from his grandfather (which was actually started by his great-great grandfather and which Robert has added to over the years, up to 1989), and a first-day cover collection of his own. Oh, and the US collection is actually two collections - one of individual stamps and one of plate blocks. We've now cannibalized the plate block collection into our own US collections and have a bunch of leftover postage; more than enough to last us the rest of our lives, I think. Robert is planning to (try to) sell much of his first-day cover collection on eBay in the next few weeks.

I am finishing up Day 11 of my new lower wheat diet. Over the trip to Snow City, I was feeling pretty bad, and Robert observed that I had been eating a lot of wheat, which is easy to do when you're living on hotel breakfasts (raisin bagels, people), restaurant meals, and peanut butter sandwiches eaten at rest stops. I know that my system doesn't like wheat, but over the years I've let the fact that taking enzymes allows me to eat (some) wheat lead me to eat it freely (or in rat study terms, ad libitum). This has been a mistake.

So I decided that I would get serious about reducing my wheat intake again. I am not intending to avoid wheat completely (which is, after all, quite difficult) but I have cut way back. For example, my wheat consumption today consisted of whatever is in 1/2 of a Morningstar Farms breakfast sausage patty (made from texturized vegetable protein), the small amount of wheat flour used to thicken the white sauce in my chicken/broccoli/rice casserole...and that's it. This is very vague and impressionistic, but my intention is to keep my wheat consumption at or below the equivalent of 1 slice of wheat bread.

I guess the increased attention to wheat gluten intolerance in the past 15 years or so has led to a lot more wheat-free substitutes being available at normal grocery stores. Whereas I had to shop at health food stores in those days for wheat-free crackers and the like, I was able to choose from 3 or 4 different rice crackers and a couple different rye crackers at Wal-Mart this week. (I haven't actually tried any of them to know if they're good.) They also had wheat-free pasta but instead of spelt or rice, it was made from corn. Hmm. I am skipping this for the time being.

One side benefit of a low wheat diet is that it immediately puts all kinds of easily available, delicious, yet junky prepared foods off the list - cookies, cakes, muffins, bread/rolls, the aforementioned raisin bagels, crackers, etc. For example, when we had dinner at Cracker Barrel on the way home from Snow City, I looked at the dessert menu and the only low-wheat option was an ice cream sundae, and I don't like ice cream sundaes, so it made my decision extremely easy. It's simple enough to use another flour (I like oat) in making quick breads and such at home, and I believe even Wal-Mart sells a gluten-free brownie mix, but nixing wheaty treats does make it easier to resist unplanned dessert consumption.

T-shirt Drama

2011-06-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

Refashioning a too-big t-shirt is easy; things get a lot tougher when you have shirts that are too small. I recently cleared out my closet of all the too-short t-shirts that I no longer much like wearing and wanted to do something with them. I decided that I would try making another color-blocked t-shirt from the various pink/magenta t-shirts, striped this time.

(1) Because the t-shirts were already too short, I needed to make the stripes longer than the shirts. I cut out and sewed together two strips of each t-shirt to make long strips.

(2) I sewed the long strips together to make 2 pieces of striped fabric. In doing this, I chose to line up the seams on the different stripes in a specific pattern.

(3) I used another t-shirt as a guide to cut out front and back pieces from the striped fabric and then sewed them together.

(4) I added sleeves made from another white shirt.

(5) I hemmed the neckline.

(6) In the process of preparing to sew the bottom hem, I cut a gouge in the bottom of the shirt. Damn.

The gouge was toward the bottom of the shirt, but just high enough that I couldn't cut the gouge off and shorten the shirt without making the shirt as unwearably short as the t-shirts from which I made it. I spent like 2 weeks thinking about how to proceed and considered and rejected many different fixes. Finally, a couple days ago, I decided to use a classic technique - the decorative patch.

(7) I hemmed the bottom of the shirt.

(8) I put a small patch on the inside of the shirt and sewed it and the gouge together using overlapping zigzag stitches (to keep the fabric from fraying any more).

(9) I cut out a decorative patch and secured it to the shirt over the gouge using fusible web (i.e., a heat-activated sticky stuff that allows you to "glue" one piece of fabric to another).

(10) I hand-appliqued the patch with a whip stitch.

And voila -- I have produced a cute color-blocked t-shirt for a gigantic baby!

When I showed it to Robert and commented on its toddler-esque quality, he said, "I guess you're not wearing that on the first day of school." And indeed, I am not. Somehow wearing a cutesy t-shirt does not quite communicate the message I want in that environment. But I am looking forward to wearing it as casual/lounge/sleep wear.

As for the asymmetrically positioned rabbit -- the kind of odd placement works for me. Typically, a real baby garment would feature the rabbit patch centered on the chest or belly. But people, this is a rabbit.

If the rabbit is not loafed...

Or sphinxed...

Or flopped...

But instead is on his feet, you just can't make him stand where you want him to stand. These rabbits move fast. Truly, I'm lucky to have this fancy-free rabbit not be just a blur at the bottom of the shirt.

Sharing Attitudes

2011-05-29T21:28:00.000-05:00

While my parents were here for graduation, my mom mentioned that she and another person working at the library discovered early in knowing each other that they both have the same favorite soft drink and thus they predicted (laughing) that they would have to like each other. I told her that this was consistent with balance theory, which (roughly) holds that if two people share the same attitude (i.e., both have a positive or a negative evaluation toward something) that they will be in "balance," which facilitates liking or closeness between them.

A 2006 study put an interesting twist on this (Bosson et al.). Participants formed a favorable or unfavorable attitude toward a person called Brad they heard talking in a taped conversation, and then were told that a stranger with whom they were soon going to interact either shared or did not share their attitude toward Brad. (Note: I believe it's important to point out the design of the study was such that participants had no reason to believe that the supposed stranger was told what the participant's attitude was prior to expressing their attitude. In other words, the stranger was not and could not be purposefully offering a matching opinion in this situation.)

The researchers found that strong positive or negative shared attitudes were equally effective at creating liking for the stranger. However, when attitudes were weak, shared negative attitudes were more powerful at creating closeness between two strangers than were shared positive attitudes. The idea here is that expressing a negative attitude is more revealing about someone's personality than is a positive attitude. A person expressing a positive attitude might do so because (1) that is her true attitude or (2) positive attitudes are more socially desirable / normative. However, expressing a negative attitude is risky because people tend to view these criticisms unfavorably so the person has no incentive to lie about their attitude - thus, this negative attitude is judged to be an expression of the person's true position.

In a recent series of follow-up studies examining the shared attitudes about specific professors held by college student participants, the same basic pattern of results was found, but the researchers also investigated why shared attitudes have this effect on closeness. They examined 3 possibilities: (1) similarity - sharing an attitude makes the other person seem more similar to the self; (2) favorability - sharing an attitude makes one view another person more favorably; and (3) familiarity - sharing an attitude makes the other person seem more like a known entity. They found evidence for increased familiarity, but not similarity or favorability, as the mechanism by which shared attitudes increase closeness.

Thus this research suggests that shared attitudes engender a feeling of familiarity toward a stranger and therefore increase a sense of closeness to the person. When the shared attitude is weak, negative attitudes are more effective at producing this sense of closeness than are positive ones.

Learning something ahead of time about another person you want to get to know and impress is a classic approach to making yourself seem likeable to that person. (This was rather well-demonstrated on the Burn Notice episode "Family Business," in which our ex-spy finds out everything about his target - his hopes and dreams, the kinds of wine he's crazy about - so as to get close to him and position him to betray his family.) But when you don't have access to this kind of information, perhaps it's worth offering some strategic, weakly negative opinion of a third party to your would-be friend in the hopes that this attitude will be shared, make you feel familiar to the person, and ultimately bring you closer. Of course, this is a risky approach (you might say you sort of dislike Groucho Marx or Kate Winslet to me) but that's why it works when your target shares your attitude.

Hey, Mom - you know what, I kind of dislike Mark Wahlberg....

Source: Weaver & Bosson (2011). I feel like I know you: Sharing negative attitudes of others promotes feelings of familiarity. Personality and Social Psychology Journal.

Birding by the Numbers

2011-05-18T19:54:00.001-05:00

Robert and I updated our bird lists, which we used to produce the following factoids about my birding history.

Life birds in the American Birding Association area - 472

Top States For Life Birds:
1) Texas - 323 (68%)
2) Colorado - 64 (14%)
3) Washington - 41 (9%)
4) California - 16 (3%)
5) North Carolina - 15 (3%)

Top Sites For Life Birds:
1) Hornsby Bend (TX) - 72 (15%)
2) Town Lake (TX) - 57 (12%)
3) Westport pelagic trip (WA) - 18
4) Balcones Canyonlands (TX) - 13
5) Captain Ted's pelagic trip (TX), Lemon Lake (CO), Rocky Mt NP (CO) - 10

Total number of birding trips - 534
(Note: This means unique combinations of date and location; some may not be "trips" in a conventional sense)

Top Species By Number of Birding Trips:
1) Northern cardinal - 182 (34%)
2) American crow, Turkey vulture - 156 (29%)
3) Mourning dove - 150 (28%)
4) Northern mockingbird - 147 (28%)
5) European starling - 139 (26%)

Top Sites By Number of Birding Trips:
1) Hornsby Bend (TX) - 59 (11%)
2) My mom's yard - 13
3) Town Lake (TX), Bethabara Park (NC) - 12
4) Bastrop SP (TX), Longhorn Dam (TX), Reynolda Gardens (NC), Webberville Park (TX) - 7

Opportunistically birding Top Site #2 in PJs

Average Number of Species Seen Per Visit:
Hornsby Bend - 28.0
Town Lake - 20.0
Bethabara Park - 16.6
Bastrop SP - 11.7
Longhorn Dam - 26.3
Reynolda Gardens - 27.7
Webberville Park - 21.0
McKinney Falls SP - 20.2
Falcon SP - 36.0

Top State Lists (total number of species seen per state):
1) Texas - 358
2) Colorado - 129
3) North Carolina - 119
4) Washington - 99
5) Oklahoma - 88
6) California - 82

Top Species By Number of States:
1) American crow - 14
2) Red-tailed hawk, Rock dove - 12
3) Turkey vulture - 11
4) Mourning dove, House sparrow - 9

This Week

2011-05-09T19:51:00.000-05:00

Now that I'm totally finished with all my paperwork needed for graduation (which happens this weekend), I've been catching up on some things:

* Birding again - this time, the highlight was seeing several species of vireo.

* Picking Robert up from the accident he was in while driving to the community college to give his final exam (which didn't happen because it took us so long to get there). It was a classic "person in front of you brakes suddenly so you crash into the back of them on the highway" situation. Nobody was hurt, but his car is in a bad way. My car gets to be the hero for a while, including our upcoming road trip to Snow City to find an apartment for the fall.

* Dealing with our new roommate Squeakers the mouse, who was extremely scared when Robert went into the pantry for his cereal box early Saturday morning. Today the pest control people came to set up traps, and they said that it is getting to the end of mouse season (apparently, mice come inside more for warmth than food).

* Going through my own stuff and Robert's storage unit to find stuff to trash or donate.

* Putting together another crazy 60s / mod striped shirt (which I plan to finish tomorrow).

* Reading War and Peace. Seriously. I'm feeling kind of sick, currently have no access to a library, and by my recent (and near-future, like the next five or twelve years) standards, I have an unbelievable amount of time on my hands, so the timing is right for me to finally read it (Tam gave me her copy a while back). This afternoon, I finished Part I. It seems silly to say this about one of the great classic works of literature but it's really good - I mean, it's not just "good" in some kind of exalted sense but it's an enjoyable and compelling read. I did not expect to find myself laughing out loud.

More Elitist Crap

2011-04-29T17:50:00.000-05:00

I see Tam one Brooks Brothers ad and raise her one Patek Phillipe watch advertising campaign with the slogan "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation."

When people tell me my son looks like me, I am nonconsciously relieved to hear evidence that is inconsistent with the boy being the chauffeur's bastard

I hate this campaign, which runs constantly in The Economist. The two ads above aren't even the most annoying of the lot. I think I hate the one with the woman and her daughter, who look like twins only Mom has been dieting extensively for a couple extra decades and has had more work done, the most. Ah, here it is.

You can never be too rich or too thin or too prone to awkward, obviously-fake cross-generational synchronized giggling...and did I mention rich?

This whole buying your own heirloom vibe smacks of a weird and disgusting aspirational elitism.

Weekend Warblers

2011-04-25T18:11:00.000-05:00

This past weekend, Robert and I went out looking for migrants (and summer birds). Robert really wanted to see some warblers (as did I), and I had a special hankering for orioles and tanagers. We spent 3 hours on trails near the university and saw a total of 35 species. I was disappointed on the tanager front, but we did see four species of warbler and one oriole:

Yellow-rumped warbler (myrtle subspecies)

Black and white warbler

American redstart

Ovenbird

Baltimore oriole

I also had an eerie precog thing going with birds. Several times, I commented that we hadn't seen a given species of bird that we expected to see (e.g., ruby-crowned kinglet, wood thrush, carolina wren, white-eyed vireo) and one appeared within a couple of minutes. We were also doing surprisingly well (by our standards) at identifying birds by sound. So all and all, a fun and successful outing.

The weather was cloudy and in the 50's/60's, which felt absolutely wonderful. Today it's up to the mid-80's, to which I say BAH.

Small World

2011-04-21T19:35:00.000-05:00

Today I got an email from the U. of Snow sent to the four of us who are entering the marketing PhD program. One of the other students is currently getting her MBA at ... yes, My Masters University. Weird, huh?

Another one is in a masters program at Arizona and the fourth is currently at USC (in some capacity I couldn't easily figure out), so both warm humid places and warm dry places will be well-represented in my cohort. We need the Groupon for a discount on snow boots. I'm feeling partial to the Keen ones featured on this Snow City blogger's round-up - they're like the boot equivalent of mary janes. (I've started reading her blog for useful information on how people dress places where it gets really, seriously, snot-freezingly cold.)

Does Money Buy Happiness, Revisited

2011-04-19T18:06:00.000-05:00

I enjoyed reading this two part series about the money-happiness link based on research by Dan Gilbert (the author of Stumbling on Happiness) and colleagues.

The researchers put forth 8 principles for spending money wisely to increase happiness:

1. Buy more experiences and fewer material goods. You won't adapt to experiences as quickly as you do things. You'll be more likely to anticipate and revisit your memories of your experiences, providing enjoyment over a longer period of time. You'll feel engaged while doing - "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind, and one of the benefits of experiences is that they keep us focused on the here and now." Experiences are also more likely to be shared with others, which is itself a source of happiness.

2. Use money to benefit others rather than yourself. It influences social relationships positively and gives you the opportunity for positive self-presentation.

3. Buy many small pleasures rather than a few large ones. You're less likely to adapt (due to novelty, surprise, variability, and uncertainty.) Small pleasures are less suceptible to diminishing marginal utility. Taking a large pleasure and breaking it up into pieces, separated by time, gives you more "bursts of delight" than having the entire experience at once.

4. Avoid extended warranties, generous return policies, and other forms of overpriced insurance. You'll adapt to a negative experience (e.g., your camera breaking) quicker than you think you will. Even if it's your own fault, the powers of rationalization, shifting blame, and other forms of motivated cognition will help minimize your feelings of regret.

5. Delay consumption. Not only does it keep you out of financial trouble, the anticipation of your pleasure is itself a big source of happiness (and anticipation provides a bigger emotional bang than does reminiscence). It also alters your choices to things that provide more long-term well-being (e.g., a healthy snack rather than junk food) and creates a pleasurable kind of uncertainty.

6. Consider how peripheral features of purchases affect your daily life (e.g., the maintenance requirements of owning a vacation home). We usually construe these big purchases at a high level and do not think about the annoying concrete details.

7. Beware of comparison shopping. It often makes you focus on the attributes of a product that allow you to differentiate between the gazillion choices available rather than the attributes that really matter to you. The context you're in when shopping is not the context you're in when consuming; by the time you're using the product or having the experience, the other options will no longer have as much effect on your enjoyment.

8. Pay attention to the happiness of others - i.e., follow the wisdom of the crowd. Heed how other people enjoyed a particular product or experience and listen to the advice of others about what you seem to like. Other people can read a lot into your nonverbal signals of liking or disliking that are not apparent to you yourself.

There's a lot of good stuff here. Where do you stand on these principles?

I am good about buying experiences (e.g., bird trips) not things (e.g., matching furniture).

I sort of miss buying presents for other people (though the stress reduction during the holidays kind of offsets the loss of enjoyment).

I enjoy the weekly small pleasure of eating out for lunch with Robert. It's a highlight of my week and I really look forward to it. (I'm already looking forward to eating outside and drinking iced tea on Saturday, with projected sunny skies and 79 degrees.)

I think I delay purchasing too long, if anything. I wish I could get better at delaying my consumption of yummy treats.

I have avoided the major hassles associated with things like home purchases and plan to do so for a while.

I'm more of a satisficer than a maximizer when it comes to purchases and do a rather limited amount of comparison shopping. Of course, I have the advantage that Robert likes doing that sort of thing, so I deploy him to do comparison shopping for many things (most recently, health insurance). I certainly don't comparison shop after the fact, which some people do (e.g., my mom's best friend) and which seems crazy to me.

I could do better in using the recommendations of others in making my purchases; to too great an extent, I believe that I'm a unique snowflake with idiosyncratic preferences (as most of us do - see, I'm not even unusual in that!).

One thing that really interests me is the way that uncertainty can lead to more happiness than certainty in some situations, even though ample research demonstrates that most people have a strong desire to achieve and maintain certainty. (Certainty is considered one of the primary human motives that underlies many other particular motives; e.g., Kagan, 1972). I've spent a lot of time with the (un)certainty literature for my thesis.

However, I suspect that this effect depends upon the uncertainty being more along the lines of "Will we go to the awesome Thai restaurant or eat at the Italian place I love?" and not "Will my biopsy show this tumor as benign or malignant?" I was a bit surprised during my long PhD application period that I was not more impatient about making a decision and gaining certainty about where I will be living for the next 5 years (bad forecasting on my part). Once I had a good acceptance in hand, it was a matter of which good-to-wonderful program I'd be attending and not, like other anxious applicants, a matter of getting into a program (that I could afford, etc.) or not. Before the wave function collapsed (if you will excuse a questionable quantum physics metaphor), I got to pseudo-experience-in-anticipation all of the possibilities, and that was kind of fun.

Personality Research Round-up

2011-04-16T16:29:00.000-05:00

"After three-quarters of a century of research on traits the catalog of basic facts concerning the relationships between personality and behavior remains thin. If, for example, one were to go to the literature and look for a list of contextualized behaviors that had been shown to be robustly associated with, say, extraversion, one would find surprisingly little. There would be no shortage of hypotheses tested concerning extraversion (e.g., do extraverts respond less intensely than introverts to lemon juice on the tongue), and an outright surplus of data concerning the correlations among extraversion questionnaires and other similar measures, but as for what extraverts have been observed to actually do, beyond some indication that they speak loudly (Scherer, 1978), little would be found. Even less information is available about the behavioral correlates of other personality traits." (Funder, 2001) [My personality psych professor does studies looking at real-world behavioral correlates of traits.]

"The idealized scene that I am now envisioning involves my wife and me leaving the dinner party sometime around midnight, getting into our car, and finding nothing worth listening to on the radio, beginning our traditional post-party postmordem. Summoning up all the personological wisdom and nuance I can muster at the moment, I may start off with something like, 'He was really an ass.' Or adopting the more 'relational' mode that psychologists such as Gilligan (1982) insist comes more naturally to women than men, my wife may say something like, 'I can't believe they stay married to each other.' It's often easier to begin with the cheap shots." (McAdams, 1995 - "What do we know when we know a person?")

"The authors investigated measurement of chimpanzee 'happiness' based on the human trait of subjective well-being (SWB). Zoo workers at 13 zoos used a 7-point scale to rate 128 chimpanzees on four items related to their SWB. The items included assessment of pleasure derived from social interactions, balance of positive and negative moods, success in goal attainment, and the desirability of being a particular chimpanzee [this last measure was called Bechimp in their analysis]....Chimpanzee SWB varied positively with Dominance, Extraversion, and Dependability factors. SWB was negatively correlated with frequency of submissive behaviors. Age and sex were not significantly related to SWB." (King & Landau, 2003 - "Can chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) happiness be estimated by human raters?")

"We assert, without providing evidence, that most people care about their own health and well being, care about their marital relationships, and care about success and satisfaction in their career. These may not be outcomes understood as universally important across time and culture, but neither are they concerns unique to our own venue of southern California at the start of the twenty-first century." (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006)

"...There is no 'physics of carpets.' Although carpets may have characteristic physical components, what makes something a carpet is its relationship, at a much higher level of analysis, with the world of human beings. No amount of physics would ever lead to an explanation of why some objects are carpets." (Turkheimer, 1998)

"With goal-setting theory, specific difficult goals have been shown to increase performance on well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants in at least 8 countries working in laboratory, simulation, and field settings. The dependent variables have included quantity, quality, time spent, costs, job behavior measures, and more. The time spans have ranged from 1 minute to 25 years. The effects are applicable not only to the individual but to groups, organizational units, and entire organizations...Isn't it time that psychologists took consciousness, including conscious motivation, seriously?" (Locke & Latham, 2002)

"We examined the relationship between subjective well-being and the ethnic/racial homogeneity of the Facebook friendship networks of first-year college students...Among European American participants, having a more homogeneous friendship network was associated with higher life satisfaction and positive affect, as well as lower felt misunderstanding." (Seder & Oishi, 2009)

Also, disappointingly, the "Jackson-5 Scales" (Jackson, 2009) have nothing to do with 1970's music.

Developmental Research Round-up

2011-04-15T15:40:00.001-05:00

As part of the Big Clean Out of Spring 2011, I'm throwing away hard copies of articles I read for classes and that I don't have any reason to keep (i.e., they are outside my research areas). Here is a dabbling of quotes from articles in developmental psychology for your edification and/or amusement.

"There is extensive work, for example, documenting the change in patterns of gene expression associated with learning and the formation of new memories. It has also been demonstrated that exposure to enriched environments induces changes in patterns of gene expression associated with neural structure, plasticity, and transmission. Additionally, there is recent evidence that early experience can have differential effects on carriers of different alleles of the same gene and that those differences in early gene-environment interactions have long-term effects on behavioral outcomes such as propensity to depression and IQ. Even something as simple as exposure to the smell of coffee has been shown to induce differential gene expression in rats, particularly under conditions of stress. Indeed, there is so much evidence for behavioral effects on gene expression that a neurobiologist would likely counter the question about whether behavior can influence gene expression with the possibly more interesting question of whether there are any behaviors that do not influence gene expression and activity." (Stiles, 2009)

"As Gottlieb (1997) relates, ducklings hatched from eggs incubated in isolation show a species-appropriate preference toward the maternal call of their species, and this auditory bias facilitates imprinting to associated visual cues. Lorez was quick to attribute this preference to innate, species-specific auditory recognition governed by genes. Gottlieb, however, experimentally demonstrated that the preference was not expressed by hatchlings that were incubated in isolation and devocalized, and therefore deprived or all prenatal auditory experience (i.e., maternal and sibling vocalizations as well as their own vocalizations). Indeed, self-stimulation from embryonic vocalizations tunes the auditory system and establishes a bias that shapes the later preference for the maternal call. In this way, embryos - so-called talking eggs - help create their own species-specific environment." (Spencer et al., 2009 - "Short arms and talking eggs: Why we should no longer abide the nativist-empiricist debate")

Title: "Theory of mind may be contagious, but you don't catch it from your twin" (Cassidy, Fineberg, Brown, & Perkins, 2005)

"Moffitt concluded that adolescent delinquency 'must be a social behavior that allows access to some desirable resource' and suggested 'that the resource is mature status, with its consequent power and privilege' (p. 686). GS [group socialization] theory suggests a different explanation: Adolescents are not aspiring to adult status - they are contrasting themselves with adults. They adopt characteristic modes of clothing, hairstyles, speech, and behavior so that, even though they are now the same size as adults, no one will have any trouble telling them apart. If they truly aspired to adult status they would not be spraying graffiti on overpasses, going for joyrides in cars they do not own, or shoplifting nail polish from stores. They would be doing boring adult things, like figuring out their income tax or doing their laundry." (Harris, 1995)

"Older individuals may indeed be more psychologically mature than younger people and may be happier as a result." (Sheldon & Kasser, 2001)

"The term cognitive reserve is frequently used to refer to the ubiquitous finding that, during later life, those higher in experiential resources (e.g., education, knowledge) exhibit higher levels of cognitive function. This observation may be the result of either experiential resources playing protective roles with respect to the cognitive declines associated with aging or the persistence of differences in functioning that have existed since earlier adulthood....Results suggest that cognitive reserve reflects the persistence of earlier differences in cognitive functioning rather than differential rates of age-associated cognitive declines." (Tucker-Drob, Johnson, & Jones, 2009)

UVA

2011-04-15T13:28:00.000-05:00

Today I finally got my official notification that I've been rejected off the wait-list at Virginia (psych). Me and about 27,000 other applicants, it seems.

Beginning the Purge

2011-04-14T19:58:00.000-05:00

One (huge) thing I want to do before our move is edit my possessions down to a smaller quantity. This is a journey of 2,000 steps, at least. I'm starting with my clothes closet. Tonight, I tried on every short-sleeved shirt and sweater that I own and made a decision to keep or ditch. This seemed like a good place to start because the weather here is finally turning short-sleeve-worthy and I've sort of forgotten what shirts I have, like, fit, are not losing their color (damn you, blue t-shirts!), etc.

My final tally:
Keep 27 (63%)
Ditch 16 (37%)

I learned a few things from this process:
(1) I am not really a fan of most shades of pink. There is the occasional deep pink or salmon that's okay, but I don't like the other shades, especially near my face. And the difference between a pink that looks okay on me and one that makes my face look like that of a big ol' pink baby is astonishingly slight.
(2) Most woven shirts aren't nearly as comfortable as knit shirts. (Duh, news flash, right?) I ended up keeping only two woven shirts, including an ancient (circa 1997) brown, sort corduroy shirt that I bought for like $5 at K-Mart and that is kind of hard to wear (short-sleeved corduroy, you know) but that I just love. I will make this work!
(3) I really love the way olive green shirts match my eye color. It almost killed me to get rid of an olive green sweater but it was too short (remember when short tops was really the thing?).
(4) Sheer white shirts made for spring or summer are pointless. If you have to wear a camisole under it, it's probably going to be too warm (or just too uncomfortable) to wear. White woven shirts are the worst.

In addition to the crushing loss of the olive green sweater, I also got rid of every fuschia or red short-sleeved shirt I own, and I love those colors. While 27 short sleeves shirts is really overly adequate in number, I still want to find a good deep red knit shirt. I might find other needs once I get to my shorts/skirts collection.

I'm saving shoes for last because shoes are my favorite. I do not expect that I will do as well decluttering the shoes as some people, but I know that I can get rid of a few.

On this note, it's occurred to me that one advantage of moving from Texas/the South to Snow City is that I will have a great excuse to purchase boots. And the people around me are going to be wearing boots a lot, and infrequently wearing sandals...or the atrocious flip-flops that every person under the age of 40 wears in Austin, seemingly year-round. (If I had a dollar for every college kid wearing a coat with flip-flops in December.)

The Countdown to April 15

2011-04-14T17:18:00.001-05:00

While other Americans furiously try to finish their taxes, PhD program applicants are on pins and needles because tomorrow is the day when PhD acceptances become binding (i.e., you would need to get a release from the program if you wanted to attend elsewhere) and thus is the day people basically finalize where they are going. I'm looking forward to the experiencing this excitement vicariously through the various online PhD forums I follow.

This evening, I got a call from the University of Mountains marketing program, where I interviewed several weeks ago but had not heard from again, wanting to update me on their situation and find out about mine. It was extremely satisfying to be able to report that I have accepted a position at the University of Snow [a higher ranked program]. I mean, it's pretty satisfying to be able to say that to just about anyone, because I'm super happy about the situation, but it was especially satisfying given that I was clearly Mountain's third or fourth choice, who they're now having to talk to because one of their earlier choices has not yet given them a decision (and thus they're having to figure out their Plan B/C/etc.). I don't mean to sound like I hold a grudge about them not selecting me first (the fit is not as ideal for either party) or that I think they mistreated me somehow with their silence since the interview. That silence generally means you've been wait-listed, and it did in this instance as well. But yeah, there was some small petty part of me that felt pleased to say I already have a date for the dance.

Thesis update: I'm printing out copies for my committee members tomorrow and hope to have my defense ASAP (it has to be a minimum of a week after they get the document so they have time to read, criticize, rip to shreds, mock, post embarrassing typos or logical inconsistencies from to their own blogs, etc.). My advisor was satisfied with it after seeing only two drafts, which feels like a world record.

So what will I do with myself next week, as my committee chews at my thesis in preparation for the defense? I want to spend some time tomorrow and over the weekend setting out a plan of action so that the time is not merely lost in a haze of reading crime fiction, playing Fate, and generally wasting time. (Don't get me wrong - I love leisure time. It's just that without taking some time to consider what I want to do, I will spend more time on idle junk leisure and less on interesting / useful / effortful leisure than I would prefer.) One thing already lined up: grading research reports that are due from my lab students on Monday.

The Fate Diet

2011-04-05T18:29:00.000-05:00

I'm extremely surprised to discover that I have never blogged about the Fate Diet. As you may recall from my very first post (!), Fate is a dungeon crawler / role-playing game in which you and your pet kill underground-dwelling creatures (as Robert notes, always non-humanoid ones - it's family-friendly!) with magic and brawn for fun, profit, and fame, becoming increasingly bad-ass until you defeat your chief nemesis and eventually retire, leaving an heirloom for your descendant, so she can start in a more advanced position (by far the most realistic part of the game).

The Fate Diet, however, does not involve eating the carp, grouper, perch, snapper (etc.) that you fish out of the lakes or the bodies of bugbears, wyverns, salamanders, zombie kings (etc.) that you kill in the dungeon. Nor does it require magic.

The Fate Diet is simple. Instead of eating an unnecessary snack (e.g., due to boredom or simple availability), you play Fate, which is a fun distraction and uses both hands (one to move and slay, one to deploy spells and potions).

This seems to work rather well for me, but I haven't come across research linking distraction with better eating behavior. Typically, distraction has been associated with overeating among dieters / restricted eaters in lab studies, and paying attention / monitoring one's behavior is often presented as a way to improve eating behavior (including in this recent, rare empirical study on the popular topic of mindful eating). And of course, let's not forget the importance of thinking of a pretzel as a stick or a marshmallow as a cloud to foster self-control. So I was pleased to read about the research going on in Traci Mann's lab:

"Most people think that the more attention they can place on their goals and behavior, the better they will be at controlling themselves. Our work shows that there are certain situations in which people are better at controlling themselves when they are distracted. First, we have found that there is an optimal amount of distraction that leads to exceptionally good self-control. We think that amount of distraction keeps people from noticing, and therefore being tempted by, whatever they are trying to resist. Second, people are also able to control themselves when they are distracted more or less than that optimal amount if they are surrounded by very noticeable reminders of their self-control goals. Our next step is to see if we can teach people to use these distraction techniques as self-control strategies in their daily life."

For me, Fate hits a sweet spot. It's challenging enough to be engaging and distracting, but not so difficult as to be stressful or depleting (both of which have bad implications for self-control of eating).

But by the time my last character (Leopold) retired, he was so bad-ass that the game had gotten boring. So I gave his awesome magical ring not to his own descendant (Olga), but to the descendant's pet cat (Vlad). Playing a character on the highest difficulty level without a powerful artifact has been tough but really enjoyable.

Sadly, however, the advantages of the Fate Diet have been offset in the last few weeks by the myriad disadvantages of the Stuck in the Airport Diet, the Wined and Dined by Marketing Programs Diet, the Watching Live Sports for Hours at a Time Diet, the Feeling Sick and Wanting to Eat Crackers Diet, the I Guess I'm Bringing Another Peanut Butter Sandwich on the Plane for Lunch Diet, and the I Ate Dinner at 4 PM and Now I'm Going to Die if I Don't Eat More Diet.

Decided

2011-04-04T09:11:00.000-05:00

I just emailed the University of Snow that I am accepting their offer of admission. This afternoon I have to contact the other universities about my decision (not as fun). After thinking about this literally for years, I'm surprised by how much I feel like, "Wow, this is all happening so fast!" I guess there's a difference between thinking about the process and thinking about the outcome of that process. Now I will be switching from obsessing about the application process to the process of becoming a U. of Snow PhD student (moving, etc.) and very soon after that, embarking on the journey of 28,000 steps toward earning my degree.

On an unrelated note, I absolutely hate the fact that my current university email account has been moved to a full-fledged google gmail account. It shouldn't be a problem, but google doesn't have their shit together. I was able to change the settings so I can be logged into my personal gmail and my school gmail at the same time. But upon logging into Blogger to write this post, both my school and personal gmail accounts automatically logged out, and now both screens are prompting me to log into my personal account again (i.e., the account linked to my Blogger account). I just checked the google web site, and it states that Blogger does not support multiple account log ins. This is annoying in the extreme. I think logging into Blogger with a different browser window will work, but it's stupid that such a thing is necessary.

Who Looks Like a Genius Now?

2011-03-28T14:34:00.000-05:00

In reading this blog post, I was struck by a disconnect between the author's description of the "genius effect" (as used in social psychology, he adds) and the abstract of the journal article he links to. Specifically, he says that people exaggerate the performance of others ("to grandiose, unobtainable levels") as a way of preserving self-esteem, but the abstract of the article states, "we suggest that the genius effect is not an attempt on the part of individuals to protect or enhance their self-esteem...but is instead due to the pervasive tendency of individuals to use the self as a standard of comparison in their dispassionate judgments of others."

It's true that the genius effect has been discussed in terms of motivated cognition, and I'm not in a position to say which interpretation is right (or right-er); social comparison theory isn't really my area. My point is, it's quite weird to attempt to provide evidence for your claim by linking to an article that shows empirical support for an explanation that is not just at odds with your own, but that reports the results of a series of experiments that were purposely designed to refute this claim.

Also, I'm not convinced that the genius effect is really the applicable concept here. He's talking about people being impressed by successes that seem magical (i.e., it's difficult to mentally simulate how the person did it) and that other people assume must be due to natural talent, but I don't see any reason why the genius effect (whether it be motivational or informational in nature) would be limited to those types of activities.

Two Pieces of News Today

2011-03-22T16:12:00.000-05:00

(1) Finally got my rejection letter from a social psych program with an 11/15 deadline. About time.

(2) I have been offered a position at the marketing program I interviewed with onsite in January. I have until April 4 to make a decision. That means I'll be visiting the U. of Snow, then determining which of these two programs I prefer right away. Works for me.

Making a Stranger's Day

2011-03-16T20:12:00.001-05:00

It's my understanding that all of the programs I applied to (and most PhD programs in my two fields) have made their first-round offers by now, and it's just a matter of applicants making decisions, accepting/declining offers, and waiting to see if they move off wait-lists. I am wait-listed at 5 programs (4 marketing, 1 psychology). (I also have 3 programs - 2 psychology, 1 marketing - where I am 99% confident I am being rejected.)

Good news - I have received my official acceptance offer (with funding info - $25,000 per year) from the graduate school at University of Snow, so I emailed the psychology program from which I've been holding an offer to decline admission to their program. This is a very good program, and I know that there are a couple people who post to the grad cafe psych forum who have been wait-listed there. My decision is going to make somebody very, very happy. I also have an acceptance from the U. of Rain marketing program that I have not yet declined (it's my current back-up in case I visit Snow City and decide I don't want to attend the program).

Things are looking good with my thesis. I spoke to my advisor today about timing, and we decided that I will send him my draft of the introduction, method, and results section before my visit at U. of Snow. I am finished with the method and am 90% finished with the results. So it's mostly a matter of getting my literature review and overview of my study written up. The lit review is something that I could work on practically forever, so it's good to have a deadline in place to work toward.

I've really spent less time on schoolwork this semester than I have all the others ones of the program. And fortunately, this has not come at the cost that I am now scrambling/praying to finish my thesis to graduate in May or making plans to graduate in August. I truly believe that I am on schedule. Not having classes this semester has been great. It's been nice to not be quite as busy as I was before. I guess this is the calm before the PhD (snow?) storm.

Basketball

2011-03-15T17:07:00.001-05:00

Robert and I went to a bunch of the ACC men's basketball championship games this past weekend. (He attended four games by himself on Friday while I stayed home and worked on my thesis, which now has a methods and results section 31 pages long.)

It'd been a very long time since I had seen a live basketball game, and it was awesome. It's nice to watch people play a sport that you yourself have played (even if at a much lower level) - not only are you likely to know a lot of the rules (I called about 150% of the fouls the refs called), you can you appreciate the athleticism and skill involved (and the fuck-ups, too). It's also great to watch sports with other people, especially in person - there's just a tremendous amount of energy and excitement.

The part that sucks - it's really expensive. We got our tickets cheap ($100 for a pass to the entire tournament) because Robert won a lottery at his previous employer (a corporate sponsor), but the value of our tickets (on the back row, where the view was still very good, however) was like $600 total. And it was an extra $15 to park each day and a bottle of water was $4.

Still, it was a really fun way to wrap up Spring Break without traveling very far.

Stipends

2011-03-11T10:16:00.000-06:00

I did a little comparison between the stipends at University of Snow and University of Mountains at White People Like City -- in terms of where I'm living now (and receiving a stipend of about $9,000 for 9 months), University of Snow's stipend is $18,500 (with additional summer support) and University of Mountains is $11,500 (with additional summer support, I believe). So my questioning how people can live as grad students in such a rich, touristy town as White People Like City appears to be a very reasonable one, even without factoring in the wonderful extras like $29.99 sushi nights and ski trips.

Status Update

2011-03-11T10:01:00.001-06:00

Marketing:

2 acceptances (University of Rain, University of Snow -- 95% sure I will attend there)
2 wait-lists (University of Cockroaches, Yuppie University of NC)
2 flyout interviews with no word yet but not likely (University of Steel City, University of Mountains at White People Like City)
1 that is surely a rejection by now

Psychology:

2 acceptances, withdrew from 1 (with the other to follow when I get official offer from U. of Snow)
1 "shortlist", withdrew
1 waitlist
4 rejections (including my top psychology choice)
2 that are surely rejections by now (including my second psychology choice)

Most Likely Scenario

2011-03-10T18:26:00.002-06:00

This past weekend, I visited a school in Colorado for an interview at a marketing program - along with two other applicants. It started with a dinner Sunday night with two faculty members and one of the other applicants. Then Monday, I had 30 - 60 minute sessions with faculty members (individually) and current grad students (in groups). A grad student also took me out to dinner. I felt that it went "fine" but not great - everyone was very friendly, but it seemed to me that I was having difficulty clicking with people, hitting my stride, whatever metaphor you want to use. Also, even though the location is objectively awesome, I'm not sure I actually want to live there, especially as a relatively broke graduate student. 2-bedroom apartments close to campus are like $1500+. I had to control the urge to laugh many times as we walked around the pedestrian mall area on Sunday evening and the professors kept pointing out things like the restaurant that has all-you-can-eat sushi one night a week for $29.99, the vast number of independent coffee shops, etc. It was refreshing the next day when a different professor remarked that there are a lot of good restaurants in town because the residents are mostly rich and it's also a popular tourist town. I was overall beset with this feeling of being in a place dominated by stuff white people like to a crazy degree, such as:

Organic food
Yoga
Snowboarding
Vegan/vegetarianism
Whole Foods and grocery co-ops
Dogs (oh god, their love of dogs)
Bicycles
Outdoor performance clothes

It's probably just as well that the program/location didn't feel like a terrific fit because they have already offered a position to one of the people I interviewed with but not me.

However, by Sunday night, this totally didn't matter to me because I got a phone call from my dad's nemesis school with the news that I am their top choice for their program! This is the program that in my first foray into thinking about marketing PhDs, when I looked at the websites of all US-based programs, I liked the best. And I definitely felt when I did my phone interview that I had a great interview and really was talking to like-minded people. The prof told me that they were going to give me, in addition to the regular funding, an extra research stipend of $7500 to be used for attending conferences, paying participants, etc., which is awesome. She then asked me what they could do to help me make a decision to come there. I said that my only reservation about the program was that I feel a little intimidated by the winters in [this infamously cold and snowy place], so maybe if I visited the campus, I would be able to get over this psychological barrier. I'm currently arranging to visit around April 1 (no foolin'), at their expense.

Coming back from my trip was an adventure. The plane from Washington Dulles to home should have left at 6:29pm but did not actually leave until about 11:30pm. It was annoying, but on the plus side: (1) I got to meet a lovely group of people who were all waiting for that same plane and (2) I had Obama-approved burger and fries from Five Guys for dinner.

But on the downside, I have gotten sick again. I'm feeling a bit better today than yesterday, but still just totally worn out. Robert and I went to see My Masters University's basketball team lose in the first round of the ACC tournament this afternoon, and I was exhausted by the time I got home.

Still in Limbo

2011-03-03T21:26:00.000-06:00

So it looks like I am on an unofficial wait list at the highly-ranked ACC marketing program I applied to. Once again, I was beaten out by some quant types (though reading between the lines, I think I was a favored but not favorite choice on the CB side so they gave the limited number of CB offers to other people). We'll see what happens in the next couple weeks - it's possible some of those people will choose to attend elsewhere (come on, y'all - Wharton and Stanford are excellent programs so take their offers!) and open up a slot. My "champion" within the department is going to do what he can.

In any event, I have an onsite interview on Monday and am hoping that in the next couple weeks I will be getting some good news from my father's nemesis school, with whom I had a good phone interview. There are also two other marketing programs that haven't interviewed anyone or made any decisions, to my knowledge, where I assume my application is still in play.

And most importantly: I have already been admitted to a marketing program at a school I'm willing to attend, in a city I'm willing to live in (and where Robert can get a job), and with enough funding that I won't be dumpster diving behind the McDonald's! Things are good, people.

Reject

2011-03-01T18:37:00.002-06:00

I racked up my fourth social psychology rejection today - woo hoo! (This was expected because I did not get invited to the mid-Feb interview weekend.)

Also, my mom's hypothesis that the marketing program I interviewed with early finally found a quant student appears to be right from what I've read on the business PhD forum. (I refrained from answering this person's query about the program with something really negative to scare them off.)

Word on the street (or web) is that my close-by super high ranked marketing program (with whom I did a phone interview) and another top 15-ish marketing program I like but nobody seems to have been interviewed for are both supposed to make decisions today. I'm actually feeling a bit antsy about it and hope these decisions do materialize (with good news, of course) this week.

Oh, and I forgot to mention -- Tam alerted me that the marketing paper I was an RA for has finally come out, but even though I'm a co-author, I can't access it yet through My Masters University's online system. It isn't showing the content for the Spring 2011 issue yet.

Construal Level and Confidence

2011-02-27T18:46:00.000-06:00

...or Why Tam's Confidence in Her Math Mojo Might Be So Variable

Construal level theory addresses the issue of psychological distance and proposes that events, objects, individuals, etc., can be close or distant from oneself in time, space, social distance, and hypotheticality. Higher levels of construal are associated with a more abstract mental representation while lower levels of construal involve more concrete mental representations.

To take an example from my own life these days, when considering "going on an interview visit at X university" at a high level of construal (e.g., when thinking of it as something in the future), I am apt to think of it in terms of its meaning or purpose (such as making progress in my career). When thinking of it at a low level of construal (e.g., as something happening in the next couple of days), I am likely to think of it very concretely in terms of the detailed aspects of the experience (such as dealing with the hassle of air travel).

"At higher construal levels, being a math student is construed at an abstract level, and confidence assessments center on the desirability of the outcome. When people assess their confidence in obtaining a desirable outcome, they often intuit that their chances should increase with effort put forth or level of investment in the outcome. This positive association of effort and confidence in outcome desirability aligns with the conventional wisdom reflected in idioms such as 'Good things don't come easy,' 'The early bird catches the worm,' 'No pain, no gain,' and so forth. Hence, we propose that at higher construal levels, ease is interpreted in terms of the effort or, more specifically, in terms of the relationship between effort and outcome desirability. Confidence therefore results from feeling as if she did or did not put in enough effort to ensure a desirable outcome. For example, experiencing difficulty when reading the textbook would be interpreted as thinking carefully, and we hypothesize that the student would feel more confident, believing she had worked hard at the task. By contrast, subjective feelings of ease might leave the student with misgivings, as in 'I did not put much effort into this task, so I am not so confident.'

"At lower construal levels, however, being a math student is construed as a concrete task, and confidence is based on the feasibility of completing the task (e.g., "Do I have the ability?"). In this case, subjective feelings of ease indicate that the task is going smoothly without hindrance. This sense that the task is 'coming off without a hitch' signals that it is feasible to do the task well, thereby fostering confidence. However, subjective feelings of difficulty signal that the student is running into rough spots in the process or is lacking the ability to complete the task, and so indicate lower feasibility of completing the task, thereby reducing confidence. For example, experiencing difficulty in reading the textbook might be interpreted as a hindrance and a signal of low ability. It is as if the student thinks, 'That was a breeze, so I must have gotten it right' or 'That was hard every step of the way, so now I'm not so sure.'"

Adapted from:
Tsai, C. I., & McGill, A. L. (2011). No pain, no gain? How fluency and construal level affect consumer confidence. Journal of Consumer Research, 37, 807-821.

Yet Another PhD Update

2011-02-22T16:46:00.002-06:00

Today:
Number of official acceptance offers received: 1 (social psychology; a program I interviewed with on the phone and was emailed by my potential advisor that I was being accepted)

Number of rejection emails received: 1 (social psychology; I expected it since I did not get an invite to the interview weekend that happened a couple weeks ago)

Number of rejection emails sent: 1 (social psychology; the program I had only received an unofficial offer from)

Number of telephone interviews conducted: 1 (marketing; a school my father resents but that has a seriously kick-ass consumer behavior program)

So my current status is:
Official acceptances - 1 psych, 1 marketing
Waitlists - 1 psych (almost assuredly will become a rejection)
Rejections - 3 psych
Interviews scheduled - 1 marketing
Interviews done with no follow up yet - 3 marketing
Withdrawals - 2 psych (was 1 acceptance, 1 shortlist)
No contact - 3 psych (2 almost assuredly rejections), 2 marketing (both in play, I believe)

Oh, and the update on the thesis front - all hope is not lost; adding an additional moderating variable appears to make the model at least possibly reasonable.

Developments Du Jour

2011-02-16T21:12:00.000-06:00

(1) Unofficial acceptance to a Big 10 psychology program from my potential advisor (I had interviewed with her a couple weeks ago on the phone.) This helps salve my ego from the Northwestern and Ohio State rejections.

(2) Email alerting me to a phone interview with a different Big 10 marketing program.

(3) Initial data analysis from my thesis experiment is not promising. I hope I do not have to figure out a way to elaborate on the statement "It didn't work" for a gazillion pages, but it may come to that.

(4) Campbell's savory chicken and brown rice soup isn't half bad by the standards of canned soup.

Political Ideology and Social Psychologists

2011-02-15T16:13:00.002-06:00

I have really been enjoying the discussion about Jonathan Haidt's presentation at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology about the astonishingly lack of conservatives (and really, any form of non liberal) within the ranks of academic social psychologists. I first read about this presentation at Megan McArdle's blog in a post about the liberal slant of academia (responding to this NY Times article about Haidt's talk), and she published a follow-up post today.

However, one thing that irked me about McArdle's discussion of the presentation / article is that she failed to acknowledge this (quoted from the article):

For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.”

So while being a social psychologist obviously does not render one immune to prejudice and bias, it appears that these psychologists reacted in a relatively non-reactive, non-defensive way to having this prejudice pointed out. I can imagine a lot of conferences where this sort of presentation, accusing the membership of some profession or organization of being discriminatory, would not go down well at all. I thought she wasn't giving the audience enough credit for being open to these ideas.

Anyway, I especially recommend the presentation (25 minutes long). It's thought-provoking, even if rather light on empirical evidence. Personally, I suspect that the skew toward liberal ideology amongst social psychologists is due in large part to self-selection bias, but I think it's an issue worth thinking about.

It's Official

2011-02-11T17:30:00.000-06:00

Today I received a letter from the dean of the graduate school sealing the deal on my previous marketing program acceptance offer. So, basically, I'm golden. The good news is that I can now inform two other programs - in social psychology - that I will be rejecting/withdrawing from consideration. This will mean that two other psychology applicants will be made very happy as I open up these slots.

Reject

2011-02-11T15:02:00.000-06:00

I have now gotten my first rejections: Ohio State and Northwestern social psychology programs. In both cases, I saw other applicants reporting that the online status update on the application web site had been updated with no email prompting them to check their status or anything. I have joined a large cohort of rejects from these programs.

Good news - I received a call this afternoon to arrange an onsite interview with another marketing program. I seem to be doing surprisingly well with my marketing applications, especially compared to my psychology ones.

Tam wins the prize for guessing the program I would hear from next, I take 2nd place with the Ohio State rejection, and Robert's suggested program remains a possibility.

Not So Fun

2011-02-09T15:50:00.000-06:00

It's definitely the illness season at school. Last week, 4 students were too sick to attend research methods lab, for example, and I've had a bunch of sniffly, coughing freshmen coming into the experimental lab to participate in my thesis study over the last two weeks. I was feeling pleasantly surprised that I have seemed to avoid catching whatever bugs are going around, but this afternoon, I've changed my mind - I'm clearly getting sick and am longing to go home, lie down, and mew pathetically. Fortunately my last lab session ends at 6, and I don't really have any other work I must do tonight. I'll be through with data collection early tomorrow afternoon (yay!) and then I get to the more fun and exciting part: analyzing my data and evaluating just how much crack I was smoking when I put this experiment and these hypotheses together. But unlike collecting data, I can crunch data from home, and though I do not favor the "working on my laptop while reclining in an easy chair" mode of working from home, I do sometimes take the advantage of mid-afternoon nap opportunities.

So, yep, my life lately is all about obsessing over PhD applications, avoiding illness then succumbing, and engaging in laboratory subterfuge. Oh, and looking at cute photos of rabbits and other animals on the Internet. Check out Louie: he really disapproves of laboratory studies!

Another Update

2011-02-08T15:20:00.000-06:00

Social psychology:

3 - Losing hope (based on other people having interviews/offers)
1 - Wait list (little chance)
1 - Short list
1 - Phone interview
1 - Unofficial acceptance
3 - No news

Marketing:

1 - Onsite interview
1 - Phone interview
1 - Acceptance!
4 - No news

The marketing acceptance happened last night. I've been offered an extra stipend to attend the program (increasing the stipend about 37%). It's in a large, semi-expensive city so the additional money is especially welcome. I am well pleased.

I almost had a heart attack this morning (OK, not literally, but my heart did seem to stop for a moment) when I heard a person in my program (Overachieving P.) telling his advisor that he's been admitted to my #1 psychology program and that they are putting him up for a fellowship, while I've heard nothing. Of course, with a marketing admit in hand, I am less concerned about my psychology program outcomes. Anyway, later today I found out that he applied to developmental, not social (though many of his other apps are in social) so it has no implications for me.

Not Very Much about PhD Applications

2011-02-04T18:07:00.000-06:00

I keep wanting to post about something other than my PhD applications, but things really heated up this week. I had two phone interviews and then right before bed, I had an email from a tip-top marketing program (like, #2) wanting to do a phone interview on Monday (which I have scheduled). I lay in bed last night for a while feeling just flat stunned before I fell asleep - I hadn't had any expectation of hearing anything from them except for a rejection letter. I'm also juggling visitor weekend invites from a couple of psychology programs.

The conference I attended last weekend was good. I had a fun time with my poster presentation - it's kind of like a science fair in that you stand there and wait for people to come by and take an interest in your research. (I even felt like I sort of had a "fan" based on this one guy's reaction, although maybe he just wanted to have an excuse to talk to me for a while.) I enjoyed many of the sessions where people talked about their research and was super impressed by the hour-long talk on the purpose of consciousness. I was also pleased to discover that Ringo Starr is alive, well, and doing psychological research at the University of Texas. I learned that you should really find out how much things cost before ordering in an expensive hotel - I enjoyed the breakfast buffet the morning I left town, but not $23 worth. (I had peanut butter on a slice of bread, ingredients I packed from home, the other mornings consistent with Operation Cheap Ass.)

This week, I spent most of my work time in the lab, collecting data for my thesis. If all goes well, I should be done with data collection next Wed. and can start getting down and dirty with my analysis. I can hardly wait to see if what I attempted to do worked at all.

Tomorrow morning, Robert and I are watching the very last episode of Lost. It'll be strange to be through with this show. I wonder whether I will have the same kind of mild ennui that I suffered after watching the last episode of Buffy. I hope the new Doctor Who is good so that we can use it as the Robert-compatible replacement for Lost in our Netflix TV line-up.

Meanwhile, my haircut continues to be a disaster. I keep finding new places that need to be trimmed, straightened-up, etc., so it's a constantly evolving mess. In a couple weeks, it should be long enough that I can get it re-cut.

Angie's Too Short Hair

2011-02-01T13:43:00.000-06:00

It made me smile to read that fashion consultant and blogger Angie is handling a too-short-haircut with aplomb: "I also had my hair cut yesterday and it’s very, very short. But that’s okay because after two weeks of growth it will be back at the perfect length."

Also, those boots rock.

Unofficial Acceptance #1

2011-01-31T16:05:00.000-06:00

I have just received an email from a professor I talked to at the conference that I should be receiving official notification of my acceptance to their PhD program soon. This program is also putting me up for a fellowship, which is nice because it would mean not having to TA, thus leaving more time for research. Yay!

Yep, it feels good.

Contact #4

2011-01-26T06:13:00.001-06:00

I now have made arrangements to meet another potential advisor (i.e., interview) at the conference this weekend, another top 20 social psychology program in the Big 10 (actually, the same state as the other one). It's shaping up to be a busy weekend.

To recap my position:

Marketing - 1 interview (completed)

Psychology - 2 interviews (this week); 1 wait-list; 2 likely-to-be-rejections (because invitations appear to have already gone out for their interview weekends coming up very soon and I didn't get one)

Official vs. Real Position

2011-01-22T14:30:00.000-06:00

My official position on the PhD application decision process by programs is that I am in no big hurry to find out the results of my applications, that mid-to-late January is still early days yet, and that I have plenty (i.e., my thesis) to keep me busy over the coming months so I needn't worry about what is going to happen in the summer or the fall.

In reality, the wait is sort of driving me crazy and it's very easy to get distracted from schoolwork by thinking about the outcome of my applications, checking various online forums where people report their results, etc.

If these forums are accurate, three psychology programs to which I've applied but heard nothing from have contacted other applicants with interview requests or acceptances. Two of these I feel pretty confident about, because multiple people have reported being contacted, but the other one (an acceptance without an interview) I'm not so sure about. I can't quite tell how I feel about hearing this news other than I am feeling a bit anxious. Of course, I would be feeling anxious about all of my programs if I didn't have access to this information, so I think it's been a good thing on net.

Appropriately enough, I've been spending the day looking up articles for my thesis on the topic of how certainty affects information search and information processing. I'd say my own experience here supports the general finding in the literature that uncertainty is associated with greater information search and more extensive, systematic processing of information.

New & Improved Mental Schema

2011-01-20T20:11:00.000-06:00

Tonight I have been re-reading some articles for my research (that I initially read up to 18 months ago) because I am trying to both (1) finish the manuscript based on my first year project, and (2) work on the literature review for my thesis, which covers similar topics but in a different way (as well as entirely new topics). My plan at the beginning of the week had been to complete (1), then proceed to (2), but I'm finding that difficult to do because my advisor would like me to include a brief head's-up about my thesis idea in the manuscript's "future research" section. That means I need to develop a short, straightforward, and clear paragraph about the purpose of my thesis and the evidence from existing literature that supports my hypotheses.

Even though I've done my thesis proposal, my proposal wasn't all that great in terms of telling a compelling story, based on previous theory and research, that makes my hypotheses seem intuitively obvious. This is because in reality, the hypotheses are kind of crazy, convoluted, and not obvious at all, and I had not (and still have not) done the thorough reading, thinking, and writing necessary to either justify them or make them easy to understand. (When developing this thesis project with my advisor, I did not realize at first just how many new literatures I would need to read up on or how much I would need to reframe and/or refocus the literatures I had already discussed in my first year paper. In other words: Damn, this is a lot more work than I expected! Let's just hope that the hypotheses are supported so I won't have to dig around to find other theories etc. that my results are consistent with instead. Hey, I'm in psychology - you don't like this theory, I've got others.)

So I'm finding myself both reading new articles and going back to familiar articles. I've really surprised myself this evening with how differently I am thinking about these articles the second time (or the third or fourth or whatever for some of them). I'm surprised even though I know that my schema (organizing knowledge structure or mental framework for understanding things) for this stuff must be much more complex and awesome now than it was when I first started my program.

In this respect, I feel a bit like a nutritionist in one of those calorie-estimation studies who's all like, "Yeah, everybody drastically underestimates the calorie content of large servings" and guesses that the chocolate cake has 800 calories only to find out that it has 1200. "What?! Get out of town!"

Anyway, it's good that it's getting easier to understand this stuff because I have a lot to understand, synthesize, and then (the great challenge) write about in a way that people (other psychologists) can make sense of without reading it five times and without wanting to bash their heads against a brick wall.

Contact #3

2011-01-17T16:25:00.000-06:00

This afternoon I received an email from a top 20 social psychology program in the ACC that I have been wait-listed for their program. I had assumed I was out of the running at this program because some people received their acceptance or wait-list notification a week ago, but I guess it's just taking them some time to get emails out to all of us. They are aiming for an incoming class size of 4 students out of over 160 applications.

Another Contact

2011-01-16T13:14:00.000-06:00

I got an email this weekend from a psychology professor who wants to meet with me at the conference later this month to talk about my application. It's good to have another school in play.

Ominous Birding

2011-01-15T10:20:00.000-06:00

Tam sent this confused, seemingly pointless Slate article about "the ominous rise of amateur ornithology."

It's a surprising compendium of erroneous and/or unsupported assertions, such as:

Interest in birdwatching is "renascent" (i.e., reborn) or "re-emerging." I know of no actual evidence suggesting that interest in birds in general or watching birds in particular was high at one point, then low, and is now high again. (Indeed, I have previously smacked down some bad interpretation of data that suggested an increase in birding's popularity, but even those guys didn't misconstrue the data to posit that this is a re-emerging popularity.) It's particularly odd given that the author later dates the birth of birdwatching to the 20th century.

"To the uninitiated, a bird-watcher's motives can seem puzzling, if not downright suspect." Really? How many people, other than the author of this article, would actually find themselves puzzled or suspicious of this activity? A lot of people would be like, I don't have any interest in getting up early and looking at birds, but I doubt they would find it unimaginable that some other people would want to do so.

"Birding is a steam valve for anxiety about nuclear-age strength and habits." Umm...right. (Back slowly away from the speaker.)

"...the birding community, these days, has moved on to gather, check, and share sightings across great distances using the fruits of technological industry." Exactly! This particular group of people has begun to incorporate technology into their daily lives and let it change somewhat how they undertake and communicate about their activities. Unlike, well... the Amish?

"A birder is a person who enjoys privileged aloneness." Nice spurious use of the adjective "privileged" - but how is this person's "aloneness" more privileged than anyone else's who isn't, you know, in a prison isolation unit? It's also odd that this statement is followed up by a description of the two birders who are taking him on a bird walk at a popular birding location in NYC.

"Some keep life lists (birds they want to see before they die)." Actually, a life list is a list of all birds that a person has seen in her lifetime, not a birding bucket list.

Overall, I think my favorite unsupported assertions relate to the motivations behind birding - that it is a) puzzling or suspect to the normal person, but b) relates to anxious concerns about living in a nuclear age, etc.

This article is a truly outstanding instantiation of the idea, discussed in lecture this week by the professor of the undergraduate research methods class I TA for, that psychological research is not journalism.

I guess I could go all Slate-y here and note that this list of 530 ideas for creating a bucket list includes one entry about birds - "Go bird watching in Costa Rica" - and 3 about golfing, 2 about sailing, 6 about running, 6 about martial arts, and 10 about dancing. And don't overlook the significance of "Dancing with the Stars" and other dance-related reality TV shows (of which there are none related to birding, as far as I know.) Oh my god. Let us all be concerned about the ominous rise of amateur dancing!

Site Visit

2011-01-13T17:24:00.000-06:00

I'm back from my site visit to a marketing PhD program in the Big East and have started my first full, normal day of the semester. Over the break, I didn't think all that much about hearing back from schools, but now I have joined the legions of impatient grad school hopefuls who are semi-obsessed with their applications.

Here's where I stand:

1 site visit (mentioned above). I am expecting to hear back from them in a couple of weeks.

I have also seen "action" reported on the forums for two psychology programs I applied to - one has sent out admissions and wait lists (which puts my chances down to near 0 since I have not heard from them) and another has started conducting phone interviews.

The other two social psych applicants in my program have started hearing from schools, but not any of the ones I applied to.

It's early days, of course, but I'm still eager for news. I just need to settle the hell down and work on remaining details, like my thesis and my poster for the conference I'm going to in a couple weeks. Bah!

A Very Special Holiday

2011-01-07T20:38:00.000-06:00

To my dad:

Happy 14th Day of Christmas!

Here's hoping nobody gets you this University of Minnesota Golden Gopher Christmas ornament set!

Serious Disapproval

2011-01-06T19:45:00.000-06:00

As you may know, I am an avid fan of the Disapproving Rabbits web site, a repository of awesome grumpy rabbit photos. But this photo demonstrates a level of Extreme Disapproval not frequently captured on film.

You can kiss my lily white ...

When your rabbit shows his heels to you, he's really not happy with you. As the amusing and informative Language of Lagomorphs page explains, the foot flick registers on the Offensiveness Scale as a 5 of 7 - "I am shaking your dust off my heels."

I confess to getting this sort of disapproval from Leo (an easily offended dominant rabbit) several times. Robert and I also got the top level of disapproval - "You are the scum of the earth" - from Leo when he would be released from his carrier after a visit to the vet or the bunny sitter. Katy was a much more phlegmatic bun. However, I cannot remember a time that our rabbits were angry enough at us to rebuff the offer of a raisin; their hunger was bigger than their disapproval, I suppose.

Anyway, I thought this was an exceptionally adorable disapproving bun (get it, "bun").

(Note: The Disapproving Rabbits people should not be blamed for the tasteless caption on the photo. That's my fault.)

Baaaack: A Few Numbers

2011-01-04T21:08:00.000-06:00

Drove through 12 states in about 12 days.

Drove through 3 (or 4?) mountain ranges.

Listened to country music on the radio due to non-functional CD player for about 10 million years.

Listened to special bluegrass Christmas music program on a Kentucky radio station for the last 30 minutes.

Saw American crows in 10 states.

Looked for life birds 1 time.

Saw 0 life birds.

Ate lunch at Braum's 2 times.

Ate dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kentucky 1 time.

Ate 2 slices of pumpkin pie, 2 slices of chocolate pie, 1 slice of apple pie, and 1 bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup.

Gained 0 pounds (not sure how that happened).

Petted 4 cats.

Was bitten and scratched by 1 cat.

Have been rejected by 0 PhD programs.

Have arranged a flyout interview (at program's expense) with 1 PhD program (the same one that I spoke to on the telephone before).

Another Kind of Self-Regulation

2010-12-18T20:55:00.000-06:00

Robert emailed me the link to this article about industry self-regulation of fast food marketing to children.

To me, the funniest part of it was the author citing the Catholic church as an authority on the age at which kids develop the ability to reason. (He also links to the UNESCO child learning web pages, though not to anything that specifically addresses this issue). Too bad there is no systematic scientific inquiry into such questions, a field like "psychology" or something, because it would be possible, I think, for such scientists to empirically investigate such issues and then disseminate their results so that other people would know about them.

A sad part of all this emphasis on "What do kids know and when do they know it?" is that there is often an assumption that once children are old / cognitively developed enough to "reason," to recognize selling or persuasive intent, or whatever developmental milestone is selected, they will have a robust cognitive defense against these marketing ploys. But conscious awareness isn't itself all that great of a protection against influence. While people continue to argue over the plausibility of "subliminal advertising," effective marketing techniques dependent on implicit attitude change, prime-to-action effects, etc., are regularly employed among adults as well as kids. In addition, there is a large literature on third-person effects in persuasion - the tendency for people to believe that others are more influenced by persuasive communications than they are themselves. And people with high levels of defensive confidence have been shown to willingly expose themselves to more counterattitudinal information, which does change their attitudes.

This being said, I think the McDonald's rant was way overblown. For example, I don't see any basis for the author suggesting that of course no kid who was not "bioengineered" would ever willingly ask for apple dippers and caramel sauce rather than french fries. (He offers evidence that McD employees automatically include fries with the Happy Meal 90% of the time, but that doesn't speak very directly to the claim he's making.) And what does he mean by bioengineered anyway? (I want somebody to go neuroscience on this guy's ass.)

Robert made the amusing but awesome suggestion that McDonald's should start selling the toy from the Happy Meal independent of the food for the same price. Imagine: Parents who don't have the will to resist the nagging from their kids about the latest crappy plastic little cartoon-movie tie-in but who are concerned about their kid being obese by age 8 can just buy the toy separately. (My former principles of marketing professor was in this category; his kid nagged incessantly for Happy Meals but wouldn't even touch the food most of the time - he just wanted the trinket.)

4.0

2010-12-18T20:02:00.000-06:00

I have now finished my coursework in the program and managed to maintain my 4.0 GPA even through the neuroscience class. Strangely, I ended up doing better in neuroscience than I did in cognitive my first semester - despite starting off the first exam with 36/40 (90%), I finished with a 96% after getting 20/20 on the paper and 40/40 on the final exam. So my big neuroscience push paid off. I also got A's in the two half-semester courses I took, though that wasn't unexpected - but it wasn't certain either, so I'm glad to hear it.

I also spoke to the professor at the PhD program I mentioned earlier this week for about 50 minutes. He was agreeable/friendly, interesting, easy to talk to, offered some good information and advice, and answered my questions. From my perspective, it went as well as I could have hoped, and I think I have a good chance of being offered a more formal interview at the applicant weekend based on what the professor said on the phone - I'm not sure what to call it, actually, but it's typical for several applicants (the top choices) to be invited to spend a couple of days at the school, talking to professors, other grad students, etc. The applicants offered an admit are often drawn from this smallish group (though sometimes people get admitted directly, I understand). Anyway, I'm definitely not counting my chickens at this point because it's early days yet (applications are due in January sometime) and they could receive mind-blowingly awesome applications that move me into the second rank of applicants, this advisor might for some reason decide/find out they're not accepting a student, or a number of other things could happen. But I believe it's a good sign that: a) my application passed any initial screening and landed on a potential advisor's desk; b) the advisor was interested enough in my application to give me a call and spend a not insignificant amount of time on the phone; and c) the advisor is already telling me about the applicant weekend.

So now there's just that pesky little detail that I have to write and defend a thesis before I can graduate this spring. No biggie.

Grocery Spending

2010-12-14T22:38:00.000-06:00

Because it's the winter break, I actually have a bit of time to read articles that are not directly related to my current research project. Here's one I read tonight - a field study in a grocery store - that was pretty interesting:

Grocery store customers were asked to list the items they planned to purchase, the quantity of each, the total amount of money they intended to spend, and their estimated cost for each item. By subtracting the sum of the estimated costs for the planned purchases from the total amount of money, the researchers estimated the "slack" in their budget - i.e., the room in their mental budget for unplanned purchases (forgotten needs and impulse purchases). Participants did their grocery shopping as usual, but they used a hand-held scanner gun on each item as they put it in their cart. By knowing the order in which items were selected, the researchers could then examine purchases of items before and after the participant's "slack" was spent. The researchers labeled an item as on promotion if its current price was at least 10% lower than it was the previous week. They calculated the savings on purchases by subtracting the current purchase price from the prior purchase price.

They wanted to find out how savings (through promotions) on unplanned and planned products before and after the "slack" had been spent affected spending on unplanned and planned purchases.

Savings on planned purchases:

Before the slack was spent (early in the shopping trip), savings on planned purchases led to more purchasing of planned products, but the nature of this effect depended on the participant's income. Lower income shoppers tended to switch to a higher-priced brand on another planned product that offset the savings on the other product. Higher income shoppers tended to stockpile (i.e., purchase more of) the sale item, thus spending more money overall on planned purchases. However, savings on planned purchases did not affect the purchase of unplanned products.

After the slack was spent (late in the shopping trip), each $1 of savings on planned purchases was associated with a $10 increase in spending on unplanned purchases. It appears that participants viewed this unexpected savings as a windfall and thus spent more money.

Savings on unplanned purchases:

Before the slack was spent, savings on unplanned purchases did not affect unplanned spending.

After the slack was spent, each $1 of savings on unplanned purchases was associated with a $6 increase in spending on unplanned purchases.

So a smart grocery store owner will offer price promotions on planned purchases (e.g., yogurt, bottled water, eggs, milk) so that you will spend more money on unplanned purchases (e.g., ice cream, candy bars, cookies). And if you spend money on unplanned purchases that are on promotion, you will spend even more money on other unplanned purchases.

A smart shopper will not use the fact that cat food was on sale to justify purchasing buy-one-get-one-free gallons of Blue Bell ice cream, which justifies the purchase of King Sized Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in the check-out lane.

Stilley, Inman, & Wakefield (2010). Spending on the fly: Mental budgets, promotions, and spending behavior. Journal of Marketing.

The Next Phase of the Process Begins

2010-12-10T14:14:00.000-06:00

I have completed 16/17 PhD applications (though I have not confirmed yet that they all have everything they need from me). I should be able to finish the last one in the next couple weeks, well before the deadline.

Today, I received my first email from a professor who has been referred my application and wants to chat about their program (a marketing program). This is a professor I named as a potential advisor in my statement of purpose.

So now my semester is over and it's time for me to gear up and get ready to start interviewing with PhD programs. They may call it a chat, but in effect, it's a preliminary interview.