School Stuff

I am quite happy to report that I am starting work on the experiment(s) that will be my first year project. I don't think it's a good idea to discuss the project in detail here, but I will say that it's in the area of persuasion, and that I have a two stage study - I will be bringing people into the lab for a persuasion paradigm, then bringing them back a week later to see if the persuasion stuck and whether I can persuade them again (in the opposite direction). I would be happy to talk about the project in excruciating detail with anyone who is really interested. Consider yourself warned.

Today I started programming the actual experiment in the psychology-experiment-specific software my advisor's lab uses, and it is proving to be easier than I expected. Like a lot of the questionnaire development software I've used in the past, very little genuine programming is needed; the built-in functionality is there for a wide range of experimental designs.

The director of grad studies for the department (who is one of the world's most extremely nice people) gave me a ride from the building to the parking lot this afternoon, and she asked how I was doing, mentioning that I seem...I can't remember the word, something to the effect of relaxed and on top of things. Oddly, I think that assessment is pretty accurate and that I'm not just doing a good job of faking it. I feel like I'm starting to get a decent handle on the workload, but I won't really know that for sure until after midterms; it's too soon to know whether the level of work / understanding I'm operating at is sufficient or not. I am loving the whole "having my own office" thing. When I can get and stay focused, my productivity is good.

I got back my reaction papers for my neuro class and the comments came out to around 5 "good point" or "very good point" (over 3 papers) and 0 "you are a moron." So either I'm being more smart than dumb with my observations or he is pulling his punches. I prefer to believe it's the former. Certainly there was no indication that my level of understanding was woefully insufficient or that I was completely missing the point, which is very good. (These are ungraded assignments, and we only have to do 5 total for the semester, but as I learned from the psych grad course I took a couple years ago, writing these reaction papers is probably the best way to ensure that I understand the material at all. I plan to do one for each week's set of articles.) I am almost entirely caught up with taking notes over the textbook chapters also, which is Step 3 in studying for the exam. (Step 1 is reading the material before class, and Step 2 is showing up to class and taking notes.)

I also got my required presentation of an empirical paper out of the way for social psychology class. It was one of the classics in the area of attitudes, and I think I did a reasonably good job of explaining it. Since the grad class class I took before (which only had 4 students) required me to do an entire lecture period on a topic, including explaining several empirical papers as well as the theoretical foundation, and lead a discussion session, discussing one paper (in my field no less) was neither intimidating nor difficult to prepare for.

Oh, and while my students were taking an exam today in lab, I started reading the journal article for tomorrow's neuro class, but found that I was not able to take the information in very easily since there was some distracting clicking calculator noise. I gave up at this sentence: "Low perceptual load in the relevant task, on the other hand, results in the processing of irrelevant as well as relevant information, and therefore requires some active means of rejecting distractors for maintaining appropriate control of behavior." I settled for desultory web surfing and looking around for roving eyes.

Leopold Update

Robert went to visit Leopold this past weekend and spent about 2 hours petting him. Here's the summary of the Leopold update:

* He really liked being petted and "presented" at Robert for more petting just as he used to do to Katy (for licking/grooming). This is new behavior (he used to not have the patience to sit still for two hours at a time unless he was basically asleep, and he would want to play at some point when humans were around).

* He's skinny but not getting skinner. He is still eating.

* He eats and drinks standing up, but that's about it. He mostly lies down. His hopping looks more like walking. He is generally looking "elderly and shaky."

* The sitter is considering diapering him because he's not using his litter box anymore (too hard to get in and out) so he gets pretty messy in the back. This would also allow them to put in a fleece floor cover in his cage, which is comfier for his feet.

* He does not seem to be in pain. The sitter does give him shots for inflammation which seem to be helping.

* His fur is still soft.

* They looked up his records and determined that he is 10 years old (life expectancy for a rabbit is 8-10 years).

* He started life with the name "Domino." No alternative name was listed for Katy.

Grocery Shopping

Ever since Tam published the photographs of her grocery shopping goodies, I have meant to do the same, and today, I even remembered before I put all the groceries away.

Here is the produce:



You may not be able to tell, but the square item on the right side is a mix of pre-cut melons, strawberries, grapes, and blueberries that is kind of expensive ($7.50) but is an indulgence I let myself get.

Here is the rest:



One thing I've noticed since moving to W-S, where grocery prices are higher than they were in Austin, is that I am more inclined to purchase the store brands and I am willing to consider them for a wider range of products. I surprised myself today by getting the store brand old-fashioned oats, since I've been loyal to Quaker for so many years, but the price differential was pretty large and I only use them for baking muffins (either whole or ground into flour).

I have a large box in which I keep my broken-down paperboard for recycling, which makes very clear what my commonly-purchased boxed foods are:

* Honey Nut Cheerios
* Quaker Instant Oatmeal
* Trisuits - Rosemary flavor
* Saltine crackers (Wal-Mart brand because they really are the best, though I am sure many of you will react to that as I react to the concept of a best English muffin: OK, it's a tastier flavorless lump of dough than the other brands)
* Morningstar Farms breakfast sausage patties

The Honey Nut Cheerios are conspicuous in their absence from today's shopping, but I had decided that I've come to rely too much on them for snacking purposes. (For a while, it was really bad because I'd discovered how delicious it is to eat dry HNC with walnut pieces. I had to stop buying walnuts a couple of weeks ago to put an end to that particular madness.) And there's this odd but kind of awesome thing: if I do not buy food, I do not eat it. So I bought more produce instead.

I sometimes have trouble remembering that I have bought produce, and I think it's largely a function of the out of sight, out of mind phenomenon that arises with putting items into the crisper drawers. Today, I reorganized my crispers so that the left contains stuff I bought for specific recipes and the right contains snackable stuff. (I also typically leave berries, baby carrots, and leafy greens on the shelves themselves.) I hate it when I'm cleaning out the drawer and find bell peppers that I've forgotten long enough that they've gone bad - roasted bell peppers are the bomb and I can eat them with pretty much any meal or as a snack.

Book/Life Congruence

Friday is my "light" day, on which I don't have any classes of my own to go to; I try to get a jump start on the crushing work for the next week, though, and this is easier when I get to school early and stay later, even though my only commitments are from 11-1. I have a pretty good handle at this point on what work I am more efficient with / find it easier to make myself to do when I'm at school and what kind of work I do well with from home.

I got to my office by about 8:30 and worked solidly until 11:00 on re-reading and takes notes on my computer from my neuro book, catching up to the chapter we just did this week! This was great, beyond my expectations and goals for the day, and I planned to do the readings for next week's neuro class when I got back at 1:00.

Today's undergrad research methods lecture was not particularly boring, but since I had (for the first time in a little while) an unsatisfactory quality of sleep last night, and I was suffering a bit from a low-pressure-system headache, I had the worst time just trying to stay awake. (Thankfully I sit in the very back row and thus do not set a bad example.) After class, I went back to my office to do the reading.

Still feeling almost overwhelmingly sleepy, I opened the book to the chapter, topic: attention, and tried really hard to focus on the material but not as successfully as I would have liked. I had to read the section on the reticular activating system and its role in arousal and alertness a couple of times since I kept half-dozing off while my eyes went through the motions of reading. The irony of the situation was not, however, lost on me. Eventually, I did become slightly more alert and I decided that it was an appropriate time to bust out one of the 45-calorie mini-packs of raisins I carry around for emergency situations (as Sun-Maid tells us, they're good for "quick energy," whereby energy = calories from sugar). Whether the infusion of sugar helped or it just had a placebo effect, I can't say, but I did manage to work my way through the material with a reasonable level of attention.

Then I came home and took a delicious, rather long nap, though I screwed up my eating schedule a bit and woke up with a stomach ache that didn't go away for some time after eating dinner.

Anyway, the odd congruence between my reading material and the immediate conditions of my life this afternoon reminds me of a story I don't think I've told on this blog:

Last year some time, during that period when I was going to the college library every morning and reading through books on psychology / economics / etc., I was in the library reading when I heard a girl scream from somewhere in the stacks behind me. The approximately 8 of us seated at tables in the immediate vicinity all looked up with surprise and then looked at each other with confusion. About 15 seconds later I'm guessing (though it felt like minutes), the girl came out from the stacks laughing really hard into her cell phone, and everyone realized, "OK, she was shrieking with laughter" and went back to their work.

At this point, I resumed my reading of what must be, at this point in my life, my dozenth description of the bystander effect, which refers to the tendency for people to be less likely to offer help in an emergency when there are other people present, and felt sort of dismayed that even being not only knowledgeable about this phenomenon but having this knowledge as the most salient thing in my brain at the time of this girl screaming, I still reacted this useless way. And I could definitely feel that it was not a diffusion of responsibility issue (I did not just assume that somebody else would help) but that I wasn't sure what the situation really was and so fell into the trap of social proof (since nobody else was doing anything, action mustn't be warranted). Ugh.

What's with the Kink?

The last two British mystery programs I watched had kinky sex elements central to the plotline.

This included a Wire in the Blood episode in which a serial killer, who picks up submissive women online and then kidnaps/rapes/murders them, is revealed by his casual use of the term "vanilla." Ah yes, linking this stuff to psycho killers does great things for the public perception.

But it also included an episode of Midsomer Murders that ends with the policeman's very straight-laced wife commenting, as they are lying in bed and she is lowering her sleeping mask, apropos of the case that he just solved that involved three women who offered sex fantasies for sale, that though she has no interest in playing the "good wife" or the "damsel in distress," dishing out discipline she could do. The policeman, clearly surprised, says "Really?" and, smiling, enthusiastically snaps his book closed. Joyce and Tom Barnaby's marriage has hidden depths.

I also want to give a shout out to the British actor (Stuart Milligan, says IMDB) who played the American customer of the dominatrix on this show who also was the magician Jonathan Creek worked for in seasons 2 through whatever, not to be confused with the actor who played the magician during the first season of JC who was also Giles on Buffy.

Recreational Reading

I checked out Anna Karenina from the school library last week, finally succumbing to Tam's urging that I simply must read this book. Fortunately grad students get to keep library books for three months because I am making progress along the lines of a handful of pages per day and this is not a short book. (Note: this handful is a number that can be counted on hand, so 1-5.)

This week I watched the movie Scenes from a Marriage (by Ingmar Bergman) and strongly recommend it to Tam if she hasn't seen it already - it's a must for people interested in complex adult relationships.

Where Am I?

Walking down the hall today from my office to the bathroom, I was surprised and confused when I heard a bunch of students (undergrads) talking on the floor below, then I remembered, "Oh, right, this isn't merely my place of work; it's a building with rooms for students to come take classes in." (I take classes in the building, too, of course, but they feel enough like work meetings I have to prepare for that it trips me up.)

It's actually a pretty building. This is the atrium. My office is on the 4th floor (the lower of the two in this photo).