First thing on my agenda is Thursday's class. This was the day we learned how to find lecturers/professors on academia.edu (kind of like an academic facebook), and researched different scientists on twitter/blogs/webpages/etc. It would have been a pretty fun task (and the lecture beforehand was engaging) if not for one thing: the so-called "mentoring" session this project turned out to be.
The HOC told us to find psychologists who interested us, preferably ones whose articles we'd been reading for our reviews/theses. Then, he said we would each give a short presentation about what we'd found. So when he said "work in pairs" I was slightly confused. Why should we work in pairs if we're each going to look up whoever interests us anyway, and our presentations have to be individual, as well?
I asked the question and got this response: "Think of working in pairs as a mentoring session, for those who may not understand the task."
What he meant, of course, were the foreign students.
All right, so let's get this clear-- as part of the course requirement, we have to learn how to analyze psychologists' webpages and create our own. The HOC wants us all to pass. The solution? Have the English-speakers do the work for the non-English speakers.
Actually, 2/3 non-English speakers did well finding researchers that interested them on their own. The one that didn't, of course, was my "partner". I spent 15 of the 30 minutes alloted to us probing this woman who obviously did not have any firm grasp of the language with questions such as, "Who have you been reading about?" "Which researchers interest you?" and "What are your research interests?" for even a place to start with this person. She couldn't name a single name, and finally muttered, "I don't look online for researchers." REALLY?
So I spent the last 15 minutes hurriedly finding TWO researchers and looking up all their webpages/personal accounts/etc. I let my "partner" copy one person's information word-for-word on notebook paper. When it came time to give our presentations, I obviously talked about the person I had found the most information on-- and made quite a good presentation, too, flipping from webpage to webpage, indicating the researcher's strengths and weaknesses in her online presence. My "partner" then stuttered through disjointed words such as "her", "Ba-ba-behr...mm.." and could not even form a complete sentence as I feverishly pointed at webpages for reference, which she promptly ignored. After she finally gave up, she whispered to me in her best English yet, "I was going to talk about the person you talked about."
OH REALLY? I let you copy my (needless to say) disorganized/bullet-point-like notes, and you think you could have made something of it? You didn't even ask what this researcher studies! This is one of my favorite psychologists and you have to gall to say you could have given any sort of coherent summary of the work I did on her, using the information I gave you. I think not.
So the "mentoring" service seemed to be a big waste of time ANYWAY and thankfully the rest of the class seemed to be on my side, and heatedly expressed their disdain for having to drag (some of) the foreigners along when they shouldn't even be on the course if they have such limited knowledge of English that they can't even do simple tasks-- this was after the HOC left, naturally.
Right, I just had to vent about that cos I didn't have a chance to do it on Thursday or Friday-- I've been so busy!
I was running subjects all day on Friday, and it was all just OK. One person showed up 10 minutes late for the study and threw everyone else off, one person stupidly quit out of the experiment because she "made a mistake" and had to start the block of trials ALL OVER AGAIN which she had the nerve to sigh exasperatedly about. Another girl WASTED my time trying prove she was a bloody genius by indicating she saw the Gabor every single trial when it only appears half the time-- had to throw out that participant completely for fudging so badly. And SHE had the nerve to give me this smile afterwards like "Aren't you going to tell me I did the best out of everyone?" NO! In fact, you scored worse that everyone-- you scored the worst in the history of my experiment, and I wish I could have told you that then to wipe that smirk off your face.
But in the end, I got the data I needed and got out of there. But it looks like dominant eye has nothing to do with which side people prefer on the task. So if it's not hemisphere, and it's not eye, then what is it? I've found a clear effect in my experiment where most people will show much better performance on one side over the other, but what side that is doesn't seem to be dependent on anything. There doesn't seem to be a pattern in the data other than "there is a dominant side for most people"-- but so far I can't figure out what that means, and there's no pattern for right-handers or dominant right-eyes, same goes for left. I e-mailed my adviser for advice on what to do next. I guess we shall see.
All righty, so this post is supposed to be about today's hike in Sherwood Forest! What can I say? It was an easy walk on dirt paths, no real hills or anything. It was raining most of the time, so we all got pretty wet-- which is a new experience for me since it hasn't rained on a hike this year until today. I was wearing my raincoat though, so I was dry on the inside.
Our first stop, of course, was the Major Oak-- one of the oldest trees in the forest and probably the oldest oak tree in the world-- over 1000 years old, it's estimated. If you would like to see a picture of it, I took one last time I saw it 2 years ago, so I'll post that for you here:
Eh, okay, not a very good picture, but if you want a better one, google it.
Anyway, the walk was nice-- I talked to a PhD student in economics and learned he studies decision theory!!! SO COOL. When he first told me he studies economics a few hikes ago, I was afraid it was going to be something boring, but he's actually collaborating with decision-making researchers in the psych. dept. for his thesis on individuals' over-confidence in financial decisions. Have I already said SO COOL? Maybe I'm just a nerd, but this is the kind of thing that fascinates me about statistics. How it's used to predict how people think-- and for the most part, stats can't really predict that because humans are irrational and do not follow logical models in coming up with the "best" solution to a problem.
He's the same person who recommended The Magician's Guild to me months ago, and I bought it, read half of it, and gave up 200 pages in when nothing seemed to be happening. Jana assured me this is how all sci-fi/fantasy novels are, and promptly read the whole series feverishly within a couple of days.
Maybe one day I'll pick it back up.
Maybe I'll ask this guy to coffee or something-- despite his poor taste in fiction, he's quite a pleasant person, and not to mention easy on the eyes. ;)
Well, now it's time to change gears for the last time before I end this post: my goals for the remainder of the weekend (which is to say, tomorrow).
1) To write 1000 words (to make up for having done no work today, seeing as I hiked). These 1000 words are going to encompass (a) the brain areas involved in perception, (b) the brain areas shared between perception and imagery (and areas involved in imagery that are not involved in perception), and (c) the brain areas involved in hallucinations and those shared areas with regards to perception and imagery.
2) That's it. If I can write my 1000 words on those things, I'll be good to go. I think I can. I think I can. In the words of Dwight and Ryan:
Dwight: Do you think you can handle it?
Ryan: Yeah, I think I can handle it.
Dwight: Do you think? Or do you know?
Ryan: I think.
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