My mom's library purges their books on the basis of how old they are and how often they are checked out (except for particular books that the staff have decided are important to keep). I had wondered how the university library systems work, esp. given that so many people use books in the library as a reference but do not check them out. I read quite a few econ and psych books at TSU over the last two years that would never show up as being "used" through the check-out system.
Here's one thing my university tells us to do:
When consulting, but not borrowing materials from the stacks, please do not reshelve. The library keeps statistics on materials used in the building but not checked out by counting materials picked up from red shelves, study tables, copier areas, etc.
Nice to know. I had always assumed that libraries request customers not to reshelve books because we could screw up the stacks (which is true); I didn't realize that these books also are considered in compiling usage stats.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Tam on Food
This title makes me think of the "your brain on drugs" commercials.
Anyway, Tam's got good content on Alethiography this week about why she picks organic food - a topic obviously of no interest to me, but perhaps others care ;) - and her thoughts on the book In Defense of Food. I personally have been too mentally lazy to comment on these interesting posts, but I encourage you to read them. Neat stuff.
Note: I got my university ID today, which means I can start checking out books! In Defense of Food is checked out until the end of this month, so it may be a while until I get around to reading it, but I am looking forward to comparing notes on this book as well as The End of Overeating, which every other person on the planet has read already.
OK, I am now just getting crazily enthused about all the awesomeness of having a college library so close to my apartment. I am going to spend some time on their website now, checking out all the cool features. I'm especially curious how the hold system works, since Austin Public Library sucked so hard with their 5 item hold maximum. (By contrast, Tulsa County Public Library allows the customer to manage a Netflix-like list of books and other media which looks really nice.)
At the TA training, the director of the library came in briefly to tell us about some of the things available to us as grad students and TA's. One of her brochures listed the subject area expert librarians for all the different disciplines and I thought, man, if this whole getting my PhD thing doesn't work out and yet I could stand the idea of yet more school, getting an MLS and becoming a university research librarian would be a lot more interesting (in prospect) than becoming a teacher. Of course, realistically, it seems that I am more likely to just take the psychology masters degree and return to the market research industry making more money. And who knows, maybe those cool-sounding library jobs are hard to get without a PhD.
Anyway, Tam's got good content on Alethiography this week about why she picks organic food - a topic obviously of no interest to me, but perhaps others care ;) - and her thoughts on the book In Defense of Food. I personally have been too mentally lazy to comment on these interesting posts, but I encourage you to read them. Neat stuff.
Note: I got my university ID today, which means I can start checking out books! In Defense of Food is checked out until the end of this month, so it may be a while until I get around to reading it, but I am looking forward to comparing notes on this book as well as The End of Overeating, which every other person on the planet has read already.
OK, I am now just getting crazily enthused about all the awesomeness of having a college library so close to my apartment. I am going to spend some time on their website now, checking out all the cool features. I'm especially curious how the hold system works, since Austin Public Library sucked so hard with their 5 item hold maximum. (By contrast, Tulsa County Public Library allows the customer to manage a Netflix-like list of books and other media which looks really nice.)
At the TA training, the director of the library came in briefly to tell us about some of the things available to us as grad students and TA's. One of her brochures listed the subject area expert librarians for all the different disciplines and I thought, man, if this whole getting my PhD thing doesn't work out and yet I could stand the idea of yet more school, getting an MLS and becoming a university research librarian would be a lot more interesting (in prospect) than becoming a teacher. Of course, realistically, it seems that I am more likely to just take the psychology masters degree and return to the market research industry making more money. And who knows, maybe those cool-sounding library jobs are hard to get without a PhD.
"Interesting"
One of the activities at the TA training today (which was not just my department but all departments) was learning about a constructivist model of teaching. Over lunch, by department, we were supposed to devise our own example of how we could go through the four stages of the model using a subject from our field.
I was wondering how to teach a statistical topic using the method, but someone in my group thought to use the intro-to-psych topic of operant conditioning. (This is the use of strategies like reinforcement and punishment - actions that are taken in reaction to an individual's behavior - to modify behavior. The most well-known example is probably training a rat to push a lever by giving it a food pellet when it does.) After we'd put together our little outline, someone wondered what the leader (a guy from the education department) would think of it, and I suggested that we should hope he doesn't say it's "interesting" (since he'd admitted that he uses that term a lot when he means that something is wrong but doesn't want to say it in such a bald fashion).
After our group spokesperson presented our model, he said... indeed... "Interesting." We, and everyone else in the class, laughed, and he said oh no, that he didn't mean that, but that it was interesting since classical learning approaches often use behaviorism but that constructivist/pragmatist learning is cognitive in nature and rejects behaviorism. So it was "interesting" that we used a non-behaviorist teaching style to teach something about behaviorism.
And yes, he did use the model to teach us about constructivism. We got to categorize rocks. It was fun; my partner and I tried color, weight/density, and crystal size to create categories in the "exploration" phase. (That part was oddly reminiscent of my free classification of cartoon faces project, actually.)
I was wondering how to teach a statistical topic using the method, but someone in my group thought to use the intro-to-psych topic of operant conditioning. (This is the use of strategies like reinforcement and punishment - actions that are taken in reaction to an individual's behavior - to modify behavior. The most well-known example is probably training a rat to push a lever by giving it a food pellet when it does.) After we'd put together our little outline, someone wondered what the leader (a guy from the education department) would think of it, and I suggested that we should hope he doesn't say it's "interesting" (since he'd admitted that he uses that term a lot when he means that something is wrong but doesn't want to say it in such a bald fashion).
After our group spokesperson presented our model, he said... indeed... "Interesting." We, and everyone else in the class, laughed, and he said oh no, that he didn't mean that, but that it was interesting since classical learning approaches often use behaviorism but that constructivist/pragmatist learning is cognitive in nature and rejects behaviorism. So it was "interesting" that we used a non-behaviorist teaching style to teach something about behaviorism.
And yes, he did use the model to teach us about constructivism. We got to categorize rocks. It was fun; my partner and I tried color, weight/density, and crystal size to create categories in the "exploration" phase. (That part was oddly reminiscent of my free classification of cartoon faces project, actually.)
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Chinese Menu
This week I got my first restaurant menu stuck through my door, for a nearby Chinese restaurant. It was pretty much like any other such menu except for the curious information on the right-hand side of the front page.
I'm familiar with New York Style pizza, but I really don't have a conception of what "Authentic Health Food - New York Style" means, particularly in the context of Chinese takeout. Add the logo of pandas eating bamboo (which is healthy for pandas, of course) and it's even more confusing.
I'm glad they let us know that the food is authentically healthy because it can't be authentically Chinese - an admittedly cursory look over the menu revealed no spelling or grammatical errors in the English. The closest I found was the item "Chicken with Mix Vegetable," while typically this was written "Mixed Vegs." I was fond of the description of "Shrimp & Scallops in Garlic Sc.": "Always a smashing hit."
I'm familiar with New York Style pizza, but I really don't have a conception of what "Authentic Health Food - New York Style" means, particularly in the context of Chinese takeout. Add the logo of pandas eating bamboo (which is healthy for pandas, of course) and it's even more confusing.
I'm glad they let us know that the food is authentically healthy because it can't be authentically Chinese - an admittedly cursory look over the menu revealed no spelling or grammatical errors in the English. The closest I found was the item "Chicken with Mix Vegetable," while typically this was written "Mixed Vegs." I was fond of the description of "Shrimp & Scallops in Garlic Sc.": "Always a smashing hit."
Monday, August 17, 2009
Late Night
My mom told me this evening that she ran into my first 1st grade teacher Mrs. M (I was in her class for about 6 weeks before being transferred) at the library again. She told Mrs. M about my having successfully moved to NC, having been at a party this weekend to meet my new classmates, and enjoying it enough that I stayed until the very end of the party at 2:30 a.m.
Mrs. M said something to her about whether or not she had told me that I had a curfew.
My mom replied that it's kind of hard to tell your 35 year old daughter that she has a curfew.
Mrs. M said that she would not have been able to resist telling me (were I her daughter) that I should have been home by midnight.
My mom and I got to share a huge laugh over this. I told Mom that as long as I am living under my roof, I have to live by my rules. Maybe it's a good thing Mrs. M didn't realize that I also consumed alcoholic beverages at this party; surely she would not approve. (Although I really did limit myself - I had about 2 glasses of wine, none after midnight, at which point I switched to ice water.)
And of course, even if we assume that somebody has the right to tell me when to get home, by my reading of Jane Austen novels, etc., it would be my husband, not my parents, at this point.
By the way, the drive home from the party was insane. It was all of five minutes away, but I saw only one other car on the streets during the drive, and I think that was one of my classmates. It reminded me a lot of driving home from Sonic at 1:30 a.m. after working the closing shift during high school. Very quiet and peaceful and not much in the way of street lighting. Utterly unlike coming home to an apartment with an I-35 street address in Austin.
As for the party itself, I met many of the 2nd year grad students and 4 of the other 1st years. I am the oldest person in the group (who attended the party, anyway), though there is a guy (coincidentally, from the Austin area himself) in the 2nd year who is 30. The rest of the people I met are, I believe, 25 or younger - just out of undergrad or only a few years out. This didn't seem to make any difference to anybody other than for moments like somebody asking me about gaming systems of my youth; I got to say that I got my first computer in 1981 and explain the entire phenomenon of typing in lengthy BASIC programs from PC magazines, getting my sister to help me debug them only under duress, and recording the programs on regular cassette tapes that easily took a half hour to load later.
Four of the five first years have an interest in social or social/personality psychology (one guy was only there briefly and I didn't talk to him about his research interests). When I mentioned this to Robert, he said that it makes sense that the social people showed up at the party. Indeed, I suspect the cognitive people were still thinking about it, the perception people didn't see the benefit, the industrial-organizational people thought a party to be inefficient, the clinical people were too depressed, the neuro people were too nervous, and the development people weren't ready.
Mrs. M said something to her about whether or not she had told me that I had a curfew.
My mom replied that it's kind of hard to tell your 35 year old daughter that she has a curfew.
Mrs. M said that she would not have been able to resist telling me (were I her daughter) that I should have been home by midnight.
My mom and I got to share a huge laugh over this. I told Mom that as long as I am living under my roof, I have to live by my rules. Maybe it's a good thing Mrs. M didn't realize that I also consumed alcoholic beverages at this party; surely she would not approve. (Although I really did limit myself - I had about 2 glasses of wine, none after midnight, at which point I switched to ice water.)
And of course, even if we assume that somebody has the right to tell me when to get home, by my reading of Jane Austen novels, etc., it would be my husband, not my parents, at this point.
By the way, the drive home from the party was insane. It was all of five minutes away, but I saw only one other car on the streets during the drive, and I think that was one of my classmates. It reminded me a lot of driving home from Sonic at 1:30 a.m. after working the closing shift during high school. Very quiet and peaceful and not much in the way of street lighting. Utterly unlike coming home to an apartment with an I-35 street address in Austin.
As for the party itself, I met many of the 2nd year grad students and 4 of the other 1st years. I am the oldest person in the group (who attended the party, anyway), though there is a guy (coincidentally, from the Austin area himself) in the 2nd year who is 30. The rest of the people I met are, I believe, 25 or younger - just out of undergrad or only a few years out. This didn't seem to make any difference to anybody other than for moments like somebody asking me about gaming systems of my youth; I got to say that I got my first computer in 1981 and explain the entire phenomenon of typing in lengthy BASIC programs from PC magazines, getting my sister to help me debug them only under duress, and recording the programs on regular cassette tapes that easily took a half hour to load later.
Four of the five first years have an interest in social or social/personality psychology (one guy was only there briefly and I didn't talk to him about his research interests). When I mentioned this to Robert, he said that it makes sense that the social people showed up at the party. Indeed, I suspect the cognitive people were still thinking about it, the perception people didn't see the benefit, the industrial-organizational people thought a party to be inefficient, the clinical people were too depressed, the neuro people were too nervous, and the development people weren't ready.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Home
I am completely unpacked. Even the art is up on the walls. (I have a lot of art.) My landline telephone is connected and my wireless Internet is functioning. I have groceries in my kitchen. Robert has just finished assembling my new file cabinet.
It is 4:20 p.m. and 86 degrees outside.
I am slowly learning how to navigate to various places in town, though my dad said that my earlier comments on how screwy the streets are in W-S were an understatement. For instance, figuring out that something is at the corner of X St and Y St doesn't help as much as it should since Y St curves around and intersects X St twice. There are also a lot of weird exits that are not precisely cloverleafs but some other kind of shape that was not covered in my math courses to date and that require memorization of counter-intuitive processes like exiting left when you want to go to the right. Major intersections aren't marked, perhaps with the assumption that everybody must know what these streets are. Streets change names all the time, and though this occasionally makes for an easy mnemonic device, it's usually just source of confusion. But the drive to campus takes approximately 2 minutes.
Next week, I will be pretty busy. The week after that, school starts and I will be even busier.
I miss Leo. A lot.
It is 4:20 p.m. and 86 degrees outside.
I am slowly learning how to navigate to various places in town, though my dad said that my earlier comments on how screwy the streets are in W-S were an understatement. For instance, figuring out that something is at the corner of X St and Y St doesn't help as much as it should since Y St curves around and intersects X St twice. There are also a lot of weird exits that are not precisely cloverleafs but some other kind of shape that was not covered in my math courses to date and that require memorization of counter-intuitive processes like exiting left when you want to go to the right. Major intersections aren't marked, perhaps with the assumption that everybody must know what these streets are. Streets change names all the time, and though this occasionally makes for an easy mnemonic device, it's usually just source of confusion. But the drive to campus takes approximately 2 minutes.
Next week, I will be pretty busy. The week after that, school starts and I will be even busier.
I miss Leo. A lot.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Review of Nutrient Content in Organic vs. Conventional Foods
There is interesting coverage of a new (and controversial) study from Britain's Food Standards Agency in the popular press (as well as a press release from the FSA). In a review of peer-reviewed studies dating from 1958 - 2008 (the study looks scarily long, but the main body is only 30 something pages; the rest is references), researchers compared the nutrient value of organic and conventional foods and determined that for the majority of nutrients, there were no significant differences between the two. Further, for the few nutrients where differences were found, the amount of the difference was considered to be too small to have an effect on health. It is also unclear that all these differences were in the favor of organics anyway, since organic produce was higher in sugar and organic meat was higher in trans fats, for example. However, conventional products were shown to have higher levels of nitrogen, on average (a bad thing, though how bad, I don't know).
By design, the study did not purport to assess other dimensions along which organic and conventional food may differ, such as pesticide residue, effect on the environment, or animal welfare. However, this did not stop many organic food advocates from challenging the researchers for excluding these other issues and attempting to invalidate the study in the minds of the public on this basis. Of course, I truly relished reading this paragraph in the Yahoo article:
"Now the healthful-eating crowd is up in arms. Not only did researchers reach the wrong conclusion, advocates say, they didn't even ask the right questions. Such as: Why, exactly, do people buy organic?"
How sad it is that no one is doing this kind of research...well, almost no one. Ahem. But consumer perceptions are not the same as scientific reality. So knowing why people buy organic does little to answer questions about biology, which is the brief of nutrition and public health researchers.
Apparently these findings contradict those of an earlier study from The Organic Center, which found some nutritional differences, and it appears that organic advocates are choosing to place more importance on those results. What's interesting about that, to me, is not that they are more inclined to believe research that supports the position they already have; it's the hypocrisy of valuing research conducted by an interested party over that of a government agency (research which is being published in a peer-reviewed journal) in this case while so often lambasting research funded by "corporations" and other partial groups. To me, the salient difference here is how invested the researchers (or their funding source) are in getting a particular result, not whether the researchers involved are on the "good" side versus the "bad" side of the issue.
(One obvious difference between the Organic Center study and the FSA study is the timeframe involved. It could be the case that conventionally grown food used to be higher in nutrients than it is now, and that the non-significant findings in the current study could arise from lumping "old" conventional products with "new" and inferior products. However, on page 16 of the report, the researchers show that very few of the studies included in the review dated before 1989 and 74% were from 2000 or later. To me, this mitigates somewhat against the possibility.)
As for this person's response, though I was not actually surprised that she believed it, I was surprised that she said it, though I shouldn't be: "I don't see it as a matter of taking sides," [Diana] Crane [of PCC Natural Markets] added. "I see it as being informed, knowing what's reputable, and in some cases what just makes common sense. ... Organic has intuitively to be better for you."
The idea that things that are natural "must be" better for a person is extremely common, and people habitually use a sort of "intuitive" reasoning without facts (or, indeed, in the face of facts) that relies heavily on heuristics. Yet this is all disreputable to me to the extent that I feel like her willingness to admit this publically, as the spokesperson for her organization, should be embarrassing for her and her company. It's one thing for consumers to use this kind of reasoning in making their own purchase decisions (we all do for various things, if some people more than others), but I guess I expect more rigor from someone who is playing the role of an expert or influencer of others. This expectation is itself pretty much unreasonable, of course.
I basically find the whole organic vs. conventionally grown food argument endlessly interesting because it touches on so many issues that are near and dear to me yet I don't have a strong personal commitment to believing specific things about these food products nor do I tend to favor one over the other in general.
I do, however, believe that people should (i.e. would be better off individually and as a society) eat more fruit and veg than they do, full stop. Organic, conventional, fresh, frozen, whatever. I am extremely turned off by that segment of the pro-organic movement (activists, organizations; it does not seem to me to be individual people) that wants to demonize conventional produce, portray it as the next thing to poison, etc., so as to increase the demand for organics.
By design, the study did not purport to assess other dimensions along which organic and conventional food may differ, such as pesticide residue, effect on the environment, or animal welfare. However, this did not stop many organic food advocates from challenging the researchers for excluding these other issues and attempting to invalidate the study in the minds of the public on this basis. Of course, I truly relished reading this paragraph in the Yahoo article:
"Now the healthful-eating crowd is up in arms. Not only did researchers reach the wrong conclusion, advocates say, they didn't even ask the right questions. Such as: Why, exactly, do people buy organic?"
How sad it is that no one is doing this kind of research...well, almost no one. Ahem. But consumer perceptions are not the same as scientific reality. So knowing why people buy organic does little to answer questions about biology, which is the brief of nutrition and public health researchers.
Apparently these findings contradict those of an earlier study from The Organic Center, which found some nutritional differences, and it appears that organic advocates are choosing to place more importance on those results. What's interesting about that, to me, is not that they are more inclined to believe research that supports the position they already have; it's the hypocrisy of valuing research conducted by an interested party over that of a government agency (research which is being published in a peer-reviewed journal) in this case while so often lambasting research funded by "corporations" and other partial groups. To me, the salient difference here is how invested the researchers (or their funding source) are in getting a particular result, not whether the researchers involved are on the "good" side versus the "bad" side of the issue.
(One obvious difference between the Organic Center study and the FSA study is the timeframe involved. It could be the case that conventionally grown food used to be higher in nutrients than it is now, and that the non-significant findings in the current study could arise from lumping "old" conventional products with "new" and inferior products. However, on page 16 of the report, the researchers show that very few of the studies included in the review dated before 1989 and 74% were from 2000 or later. To me, this mitigates somewhat against the possibility.)
As for this person's response, though I was not actually surprised that she believed it, I was surprised that she said it, though I shouldn't be: "I don't see it as a matter of taking sides," [Diana] Crane [of PCC Natural Markets] added. "I see it as being informed, knowing what's reputable, and in some cases what just makes common sense. ... Organic has intuitively to be better for you."
The idea that things that are natural "must be" better for a person is extremely common, and people habitually use a sort of "intuitive" reasoning without facts (or, indeed, in the face of facts) that relies heavily on heuristics. Yet this is all disreputable to me to the extent that I feel like her willingness to admit this publically, as the spokesperson for her organization, should be embarrassing for her and her company. It's one thing for consumers to use this kind of reasoning in making their own purchase decisions (we all do for various things, if some people more than others), but I guess I expect more rigor from someone who is playing the role of an expert or influencer of others. This expectation is itself pretty much unreasonable, of course.
I basically find the whole organic vs. conventionally grown food argument endlessly interesting because it touches on so many issues that are near and dear to me yet I don't have a strong personal commitment to believing specific things about these food products nor do I tend to favor one over the other in general.
I do, however, believe that people should (i.e. would be better off individually and as a society) eat more fruit and veg than they do, full stop. Organic, conventional, fresh, frozen, whatever. I am extremely turned off by that segment of the pro-organic movement (activists, organizations; it does not seem to me to be individual people) that wants to demonize conventional produce, portray it as the next thing to poison, etc., so as to increase the demand for organics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
