Study Break

Thanks, Tam, I needed this. There's even a zipper-bun.

Correction: Make that two zipper-buns.

Duh

It's not a great sign when you check a blog to see if there is any new content then realize, Wait, this is my own blog.

Well, OK, I've not been blogging in my sleep, so...that's good.

I spent too many hours today reading VM-PFC vs DL-PFC, neuroimaging studies of the AX-CPT, the PRP paradigm, the WCST, the ERP brain wave known as the ERN or Ne, ACC-PFC interactions, and other notable acronyms.

A Happy Result, p < .05

My advisor and I are pumped today because after our final round of data collection for our second study, we have the desired statistically significant three-way interaction and statistically significant mediation to follow-up the findings from the first study. (This does not count the first, first study with the failed manipulation that I can find no evidence of having blogged about before.)

I will be presenting results to the social psychology group in two weeks, then to the entirety of the department faculty and grad student body about two weeks after that, and it's nice to (1) have a coherent set of experiments completed and the data analyzed and (2) have "good" results with a story to tell rather than "I tried this, then I tried this, and nothing seemed to really work."

Even better is that I am really interested in the research, and that there are a bazillion different things that I can do to continue in this line (including revisiting the failed early study with the manipulation that is now working), so it's easy to see how these two experiments serve as a stepping stone for the thesis. I very much like how this research balances the social and the cognitive (and the meta-cognitive) aspects of social cognition.

I really needed this victory to energize me toward the next 7 weeks of 70 hour work weeks.

Science Fair

A few people in my class participated in the university-wide graduate research day this week, in which students did poster presentations of their projects. One person, mentioning how weird it was to be surrounded by people doing medical research, referred to the prototypical study as "The Effects of Cigarette Smoking on Rabbits." This prompted someone else to remark on the sadness of poor little rabbits, puff-puffing away.

I do not need to see the results of any empirical research to state with confidence that mixing bunnies and cigarettes is not going to lead to anything good.

A lit cigarette in the mouth of a rabbit will be flung dramatically away within moments (probably to a place where a fire can start, thus burning down the house: rabbits, humans, and all).

UPDATE: Walking to my car after writing this blog post, it struck me how bizarrely appropriate it was for someone to talk about cigarette smoking research in Winston-Salem, NC.

Countdown

I am now entering the 7 week period in which I have a major deadline (exam, paper, presentation) every week, except for the weeks when it's two or three deadlines. And yet I am expected to continue with all the things that have been keeping me busy on a weekly basis up til now. Sigh.

It's kind of a bad sign when my thoughts about Robert coming to W-S this weekend are:
(1) Oh god, I have no time to have a life,
but then:
(2) Oh good, I can get him to go grocery shopping for me while I work on this paper / study for this exam / beat my head against this wall (wait, scratch that last one).

And there's this sucky synchronicity between the intensity of my own work schedule and that of the students in my research methods class, most of whom (but not all!) insist on writing papers and taking exams that need to be graded. (But thankfully, unlike my dad's unfortunate experience one year, not big book-report mobiles that have to be transferred by the hundreds from classroom to home for grading.) As many a grad student has observed (or, worse, experienced but not observed), teaching can have a high level of immediate gratification, so it gets easy to mis-allocate time to teaching-related work that should be used for research and (possibly) classwork. I am trying to resist the urge to be Totally Awesome instead of just Good.

Fortunately, I am starting to get into the big paper I'm working on now for one of my seminars, but I wish I had about four days to dedicate to doing no other work but this project. Oh wait, I had that; it was called Spring Break and I used it up feeling wimpy and reading paperback novels I recently purchased from a good, cheap used bookstore nearby and thinking vague thoughts about my first year research project. (How sweet it is to live somewhere that has not been utterly taken over by that spawn of satan called Half Price Books. Or at least not yet.)

Quote of the Day: Do Not Try This at Home Category
"It would make her twitch like a bunny on crystal meth." - House, M.D.

I'm loving that program, by the way (I'm part way through season 1). 50 British Actor Hugh Laurie brings the awesome. And for me, it's about 85% entertainment, 15% desensitization therapy. (No, he's not sticking that needle in the kid's eye.... oh god that's a lot of blood... don't tell me that's an image of an actual beating heart...ahhhhhhhh!)

Fruit and Veg

On an episode of Wire in the Blood, the homicide detective's son has drawn a picture of Adam and Eve, which he offers to Tony the forensic psychologist because his detective mom "doesn't believe." The detective tells her son, "Tony doesn't believe either." Tony looks at the picture, hems and haws a bit, and decides that if he sticks it up on his refrigerator, it'll be a "good reminder to eat more fruit."

This weekend, I bought a lot of produce since I've decided to try to improve the healthiness of my eating through a goal that focuses on doing something healthy rather than avoiding something unhealthy. I'm sort of even looking forward to the challenge of eating all the fresh fruit and veg before it goes bad - I have fresh bananas, strawberries, baby carrots, zucchini, spinach, salad greens, and broccoli slaw (as well as many bags of frozen sweet peas and peaches).

In the spirit of unusual produce advertising, I offer this reminder that eating veggies makes you gorgeous:

That's Prophetic

A couple weeks ago, during a period in which I'd been listening to a lot of Alex Chilton, I dreamed that he died (of a drug overdose). I woke up with this odd confusion about whether he was alive and got curious about what he was up to these days. Turns out, he had reformed Big Star and was touring.

Last night, Alex Chilton actually did die (of a heart attack).

While this is clearly coincidental (like how a couple years ago I was dreaming nightly for a couple of weeks that I had been out in a canoe and discovered a previously-believed-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker and I woke up one morning to find that someone had just done it), and I obviously had no role in either foreseeing or causing this to happen, it does feel creepy nonetheless.

It's a sad thing. I'm tuning into the KROB Alex Chilton station now.