It was a little bit difficult to read this blog post about commitment contracts (e.g., Stikk.com) and its comments and inhibit the impulse to post a response like:
"Read Deci & Ryan (self-determination theory) on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (and the sub-types within these categories).
Read Higgins on regulatory fit.
Read about the differences among goal initiation, goal achievement, and maintenance (note: maintenance is hard, even for people with high commitment, due to the self-regulatory complexity).
Read about behavioral economics so you do not mistakenly characterize it as claiming that "people respond to carrots and sticks" (that's behaviorism in psychology, and it works more consistently with lower-order animals) (but a finger-gun shot at commenter #9 for calling you on this already).
Etc. Etc."
Fortunately, I'm also motivated to not be an asshole to random people on the Internet to their face (so to speak) and I have my own outlet.
I am trying and failing to imagine the kind of blog post that would evoke a similar response (i.e., wanting to point out "dude this is a hugely complicated issue and you don't know what you're talking about") from my mathematically-focused readers.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Dosed
This afternoon, I told my mom that I needed a dose of bunny. Tam sent me one this evening. Isn't he ravishingly adorable?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
A Few Random Notes
Latest numbers from the CDC: 30% of American adults are obese and another 38% are overweight. (I am writing an NIH grant proposal for two studies about self-regulation, identity, and eating habits as a class assignment.)
In unrelated news, I think I ate my ("normal") weight in macaroni and cheese this week.
Today I briefly wished I was wearing long pants. We'll see if this feeling continues at all as October looms before us.
An Economist article about management and biology used the phrase "the rigor of biology." (It's only in the social sciences that biology would be so characterized.)
Most amusing thing heard today on the bus: "The axioms in topology are way weirder than the ones in abstract [algebra]."
Tomorrow, I don't have to teach, so I'm staying home to make chicken and rice soup (a long process when you start with 5 pounds of skin-on, bone-in chicken). One of the benefits of academia is, as they say, that you get to pick the 80 hours per week you work. Tomorrow, I also get to pick where I work them. Not having to commute to and from school saves me about 40 minutes (more if you include booting and shutting down my computer, which takes an age), so that's nice.
I defend my major area paper next Thursday. I will have to re-read the thing (and take notes, like it's somebody else's paper) to remember what the findings were. They've changed too many times over the many rounds of data collection. My paper is 15, 160 words long.
We didn't have neuroscience class today, and that was awesome. (Class itself is fine; it's all the work that goes into preparing for class that sucks.)
I've been sleeping 8 hours per night this week. It's bliss. Serious bliss. I'm going to do it again right now.
In unrelated news, I think I ate my ("normal") weight in macaroni and cheese this week.
Today I briefly wished I was wearing long pants. We'll see if this feeling continues at all as October looms before us.
An Economist article about management and biology used the phrase "the rigor of biology." (It's only in the social sciences that biology would be so characterized.)
Most amusing thing heard today on the bus: "The axioms in topology are way weirder than the ones in abstract [algebra]."
Tomorrow, I don't have to teach, so I'm staying home to make chicken and rice soup (a long process when you start with 5 pounds of skin-on, bone-in chicken). One of the benefits of academia is, as they say, that you get to pick the 80 hours per week you work. Tomorrow, I also get to pick where I work them. Not having to commute to and from school saves me about 40 minutes (more if you include booting and shutting down my computer, which takes an age), so that's nice.
I defend my major area paper next Thursday. I will have to re-read the thing (and take notes, like it's somebody else's paper) to remember what the findings were. They've changed too many times over the many rounds of data collection. My paper is 15, 160 words long.
We didn't have neuroscience class today, and that was awesome. (Class itself is fine; it's all the work that goes into preparing for class that sucks.)
I've been sleeping 8 hours per night this week. It's bliss. Serious bliss. I'm going to do it again right now.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
How Appropriate
Today I'm feeling like crap - fever, headache, body aches, sniffles, the works.
So I just now decided to see if I am capable of playing a game of Word Mojo. The first word I put together? "sick"
Thanks for rubbing it in, universe.
UPDATE: And no, I'm not much capable of playing the game. I lost at 4,000 points (compared to a more typical 28,000).
UPDATE 2: I just realized it was even worse - the letters were (in another order) "sickeee."
So I just now decided to see if I am capable of playing a game of Word Mojo. The first word I put together? "sick"
Thanks for rubbing it in, universe.
UPDATE: And no, I'm not much capable of playing the game. I lost at 4,000 points (compared to a more typical 28,000).
UPDATE 2: I just realized it was even worse - the letters were (in another order) "sickeee."
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Perceptions of Grad Students
"Consider anecdotal evidence about why undergraduates at Stanford University hesitate to wear bike helmets when they ride across campus. Many bike accidents occur every year, and numerous injuries could be prevented if more undergraduates just wore helmets (indeed, they are well aware of this hazard). But although this safety failure could be due to a number of factors, many undergraduates explained their reluctance to wear helmets based on concerns of identity communication - they chose not to wear helmets because graduate students wore them. Graduate students were not disliked by undergrads, but they were seen as socially awkward and overly intense. Thus, some undergraduates avoided helmets to avoid giving others the mistaken impression that they were akin to this social group."
Socially awkward and overly intense?
I think that phrase describes about 83% of my friends during undergrad, but they were all just graduate students in the making.
Source: Berger & Rand (2008). Shifting signals to help health: Using identity signaling to reduce risky health behaviors. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 509-518.
Socially awkward and overly intense?
I think that phrase describes about 83% of my friends during undergrad, but they were all just graduate students in the making.
Source: Berger & Rand (2008). Shifting signals to help health: Using identity signaling to reduce risky health behaviors. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 509-518.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Dutch Sweets
"In our experiment, each category was represented by four different food stimuli that were adapted to the general taste of the Dutch population and that represented snack foods in eatable portion sizes."
For the category high-calorie sweet, they used:
As for the bonbon issue, I prefer my bonbons from the eastern bloc but I'm just picky that way.
[Source: Ouwehand & Papies (2010). Eat it or beat it. The differential effects of food temptations on overweight and normal-weight restrained eaters. Appetite, 55, 56-60.]
For the category high-calorie sweet, they used:
- Chocolate
- Wedge of apple pie
- Treacle waffle
- Bonbon bloc
As for the bonbon issue, I prefer my bonbons from the eastern bloc but I'm just picky that way.
[Source: Ouwehand & Papies (2010). Eat it or beat it. The differential effects of food temptations on overweight and normal-weight restrained eaters. Appetite, 55, 56-60.]
The Kidney Method of De-cluttering
In this post about clothes shopping, the blogger talks about his clean slate method/fantasy of starting with nothing and then adding in the things he wants rather than just eliminating items from his hoard of Stuff.
Coincidentally, my neuroscience professor today advanced his kidney method of cleaning (or de-cluttering) during a lecture on drugs. Despite widespread belief that the kidneys work by filtering bad stuff out of the blood into urine, what actually happens is that the kidneys move everything out of the blood into the urine-holding area, then let the good stuff back in to the blood. (Drugs are lipid soluble and move through the membrane back into the blood stream.) He recommends cleaning your room/house like this at least once a year.
This jives with the recommendations of people like my mom that the way to clean a closet is to first remove everything from it, then put back the things that you want to keep.
If you really want to seriously get rid of a lot of stuff at once, I think it's smart to do this. You put all the work into removing things at the beginning, so deciding to keep something means you have to move it into place again. This makes getting rid of the item (e.g., tossing it into the Goodwill box/bag) the default option, so your laziness works for you. (As long as you don't get so lazy that you just dump everything back into your closet/under your bed/etc. in one large undifferentiated mass of junk.)
I admit that I tend to use the weeding method myself. The first time through, I get rid of the obvious stuff (big weeds). Then I go through again a little later and eliminate some more things (the medium-sized weeds that now look big in comparison to the rest). I keep repeating this process until I've winnowed things down considerably. The trick is that you have to keep after it because you are not necessarily eliminating many items at a given time. However, sometimes the idea of parting with 50% of your wardrobe feels aversive even if you rationally know that it will leave you with plenty of clothes. Getting rid of a few items at a time is not nearly so traumatic, and it can become kind of a game to figure out which 4 items you will eliminate this week (or whatever). It helps that I love actual weeding (my favorite part of gardening; I'm a freak), so thinking of it as weeding makes the process more appealing to me. Of course, it's sometimes hard to distinguish a "weed" from a "flower" while doing this, but I have that problem with literal weeding as well.
Coming back to the neuroscience thing: It's quite fortunate that I started watching House, M.D. long enough ago that I am now able to read, hear, say, and write the word "blood" without feeling faint because I would not be able to remain conscious in class without having experienced this inadvertent exposure therapy. Today's class was particularly "blood"-intensive.
Coincidentally, my neuroscience professor today advanced his kidney method of cleaning (or de-cluttering) during a lecture on drugs. Despite widespread belief that the kidneys work by filtering bad stuff out of the blood into urine, what actually happens is that the kidneys move everything out of the blood into the urine-holding area, then let the good stuff back in to the blood. (Drugs are lipid soluble and move through the membrane back into the blood stream.) He recommends cleaning your room/house like this at least once a year.
This jives with the recommendations of people like my mom that the way to clean a closet is to first remove everything from it, then put back the things that you want to keep.
If you really want to seriously get rid of a lot of stuff at once, I think it's smart to do this. You put all the work into removing things at the beginning, so deciding to keep something means you have to move it into place again. This makes getting rid of the item (e.g., tossing it into the Goodwill box/bag) the default option, so your laziness works for you. (As long as you don't get so lazy that you just dump everything back into your closet/under your bed/etc. in one large undifferentiated mass of junk.)
I admit that I tend to use the weeding method myself. The first time through, I get rid of the obvious stuff (big weeds). Then I go through again a little later and eliminate some more things (the medium-sized weeds that now look big in comparison to the rest). I keep repeating this process until I've winnowed things down considerably. The trick is that you have to keep after it because you are not necessarily eliminating many items at a given time. However, sometimes the idea of parting with 50% of your wardrobe feels aversive even if you rationally know that it will leave you with plenty of clothes. Getting rid of a few items at a time is not nearly so traumatic, and it can become kind of a game to figure out which 4 items you will eliminate this week (or whatever). It helps that I love actual weeding (my favorite part of gardening; I'm a freak), so thinking of it as weeding makes the process more appealing to me. Of course, it's sometimes hard to distinguish a "weed" from a "flower" while doing this, but I have that problem with literal weeding as well.
Coming back to the neuroscience thing: It's quite fortunate that I started watching House, M.D. long enough ago that I am now able to read, hear, say, and write the word "blood" without feeling faint because I would not be able to remain conscious in class without having experienced this inadvertent exposure therapy. Today's class was particularly "blood"-intensive.
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