Alphabet Dance

The other day, I was in the lab, since I had to be there to do my two-hours weekly duties, running experiments on participants. However, while I was there, there were other things to be done, such as alphabetizing a huge stack of old Informed Consent forms.

There were two folders of old Informed Consent forms. Whenever a participant comes in, we go over the legal aspects of research, and they have to sign an Informed Consent form, in duplicate. One goes with us, the other goes to them. And since this is a big lab with participants coming every day for the whole semester, it accumulates quite fast.

It was funny alphabetizing them. There were post-it notes everywhere in the lab, from the letters A to Z. Three people were there, doing this musical chairs dance, having a pile of papers on their hands and just dumping the papers on the relevant stacks. It was quite an interesting feat, sort of a work out actually, since we were moving all over the room arranging the papers in the different stacks. And once we were done, then they would go in a neat alphabetical pile.

I don't know why, but I found that a little fun. It was different from what we were usually doing, so I didn't mind it at all.

Oh, and some good news. This is the last photograph from my Hirschhorn Museum Series.



(Burghers of Calais, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

9 Degrees

So, after that nice warm weather that we had, right now, we have extreme cold. Currently, it is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Yep, you read that right, 9 degrees. I think it is a double digit negative number if that were in Celsius.

So, if you're in California, do not even bitch about how cold it is there right now, because unless you come to Buffalo and deal with the snow, you do not know what cold is. You would not know cold until you feel that you were injected with cryogenic fluid as a bone marrow transplant.

Anyway, in unrelated yet happier news, I was able to load a new experiment into the lab, and therefore I started posting fliers all over campus again. And yes, people started signing up yet again, and we are starting to run the experiment starting next week. That way, hopefully, we get to have another publication into press.

Oh well, it's the third week, and things have started to pick up. I just graded my first quiz, and I am back into my other lab, running subjects yet again. And guess what? A few more days and it's already February!



(Mechanical Globe, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

I usually do not pick a book that is non-fiction when reading. In fact, if not for a couple of good friends giving me this book as a present, I would not have known that this book even existed. Anyway, so I got this as a present last year, and finally I decided to take it out of my bookshelf and read it.

Well, surprisingly enough, I liked reading non-fiction. It was reading as escape, and at the same time, reading for the sake of being informed. And upon reading this book, I was informed about a lot of things.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is this ten-chapter essay on how various mundane and ordinary things that we deal with everyday are manufactured, and the amount of effort that multiple people around the world put on the product in order for us consumers to partake in it.

What did I just say? Well, take the chapter on tuna fishing for example. The author follows the steps on how a shopper in a London supermarket gets his tuna steaks. First, he flew all the way from London to the Maldives, where fishing boats scour the Indian Ocean for schools of tuna. He joins the fishing boat, witnesses the men bludgeon the tuna to death, and follows the dead tuna to the processing plant that is still in the Maldives.

A couple of hours later, the tuna, which are already sliced and filleted and packaged, are being loaded into freight trays and are loaded in the belly of an Airbus A340 headed for London. Once in London, he follows the cargo into the delivery trucks, and then the trucks deliver the sliced tuna into the supermarkets, where one shopper has all the chance in the world to buy it and consume it. Just a mere 36 hours from the time the tuna was caught in the open sea to the time the shopper cooked it.

Which kind of made me think when I was in the grocery store the other day. I bought a pineapple, as I wanted to reintroduce fruit to my diet (I digress, but I fondly remember my mother cutting apples and other fruit and dividing them accordingly between the four members of my family, basically ensuring that we have fruit in our diet). I looked at the label, and it said that it was a product of Costa Rica. I wonder how much effort people put in that, from harvesting the pineapple from the farms, to shipping it all the way to the United States and finding its way to a supermarket in Buffalo. For 3.99 USD, I can get a pineapple and enjoy it in the comfort of my own home. It is now sitting on top of my microwave oven waiting to ripen.

Anyway, the rest of the book are other essays on other seemingly ordinary things in life that we rarely think about, such as the way electricity gets transmitted to our own homes, and the way our satellite TV gets a reception from that orbiting metal object. It made me think of the various contributions that several unknown people have given in order to live the life I am living right now. The world is indeed small, and more and more instances of living prove that we cannot live by ourselves anymore without the help of tens of thousands of others. 4 out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(Brushstroke, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Back to Regular Cold Programming

January is such a bizarre month. It is basically, unpredictable. How so?

Well, this past week, we had such wonderful thawing that we Buffalonians were rejoicing at it. We had above-freezing temperatures, that it actually melted the snow in my yard, and I saw the green grass again. It was beautiful. It wasn't T-shirt weather yet, but it felt so warm that I didn't mind not wearing a sweater or a jacket when I stepped out of my building to buy coffee from the coffee shop at the next building.

All the while I see my friends and relatives living in California complaining how cold their temperature was, and when I asked them, they were having 50 degrees over there. I was like, are you kidding me? Here in Buffalo, we have 40 degrees, and we think this is warm! Get over it Californians!

Oh well, apparently, our warm weather is over for now. Just this morning, when I looked outside my window, I saw that we had an inch of snow and my green grass is covered again with the white stuff.

I guess that's normal. After all, it's not officially spring yet. But we'll get there.



(Bulbous Sculpture, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Subject Pools

The other day, we finished an experiment that I was running with someone else. Finally. Then, I sat down in front of the computer, and ran the stats. After a half hour, I got my printout. Well, truthfully, I was a little disappointed.

I mean, I was disappointed because the results mean that we need to revise some of our items, since it didn't pass the norming criteria that we had. In other words, some of the items had to be dropped because they were confounded. That means, we have to go back to the drawing board for half of the items and do the norming experiments again.

Anyway, I am looking at it as a learning experience. Nobody said that research was easy. That is the basic nature of research, one sometimes goes by a process of trial and error.

Anyway, the research team is thinking of enlisting the help of another faculty, so that we can gain access to a subject pool. That means, running the experiments would be faster, since there is a pool. Instead of the way we currently run it, where we are posting fliers all across campus and people who are interested contact us, and then we pay them, if one has a subject pool, then subject recruitment is streamlined that it is just so easy one can do it while asleep.

It made me appreciate the benefits of a subject pool. How convenient having one is. Unfortunately, my current department doesn't have one, that's why I am collaborating with a department that has one. Which made me think, that when I come to the point where I am in the job market, what would be the factors that I would consider important? A good insurance program? A university that is in an urban setting? Should I pick a university that is located say in Boston or Washington DC, because it is in a good metro area, but it doesn't have a subject pool? Or what if there is a university in the middle of the boonies but it has a subject pool? I think I'd prefer the latter.

Playing with people's heads is awesome, you have no idea.



(Avant-Garde Museum, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: Life After Genius by M. Ann Jacoby

Awesome book this truly was. Oops, time to switch to the non-Yoda dialect.

Anyway, I should say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was very interesting and captivating that I blasted through it in just a couple of days.

So, this is a book that revolves around Theodore Mead Fegley, who is a math genius, genius enough to skip several grades in elementary, middle, and high school, and enters college at 15, and finishing his undergraduate in less than three years. Almost, since the book begins when he walks out of college a week before graduation, without delivering his senior thesis.

Several characters revolve around Theodore. His father, Lynn, is an undertaker, very quiet, refuses to accept a scholarship for his son and instead insists on paying for his college education on his own. His mother, Alayne, is this control freak, who thinks that Theodore is different from his father's side of the family, and dreams big for her son. She basically is the typical parent who wants their kids to do the things that they were unsuccessful in accomplishing. Theodore's aunt Jewel, used to be a very caring aunt, but now, after the death of their son Percy, she went into catatonic depression. Uncle Martin on the other hand is a fellow undertaker, managing the family business of a funeral home, and is harsh and cruel on Theodore, because he blames him for Percy's death. In short, every character in this book has their own skeletons in their closets.

I suppose it is difficult to recreate the conflicts that this book presents, as everyone seems to be blaming everyone for the existence of their skeletons. Theodore decides to have a new life once he enters college, so he wants everyone to call him by his middle name now, which is Mead. This creates a divide in the arenas in the book: his family members still call him Teddy, his school associates call him Mead, while his arch-nemesis calls him Fegley.

Growing up, he battles the bullies, destroying his science project, embarrassing him to various degrees. He also battles the cutthroat people in college, people who would go into depths of crime and bribery just to get an A, like his "friend" Herman Weinstein, who turns out to be the person that he battles the most in the story.

The book presents a very good scenario for several psychological conflicts. It indeed is psychological fiction at its best, although I think it may have been a little over the top. There are too many abnormal people in the story, which I think is the only bad element of this book. But then again, who in the world is normal? We all have skeletons in our closet.

I have to say that I liked this book a lot, and found plenty of things in which I can relate. Mead has conflict with his parents: her mom only wants one thing, that is, to get him out of the small town of High Grove, Illinois by means of his genius. His father on the other hand secretly desires his son to be an undertaker like him and continue the family business. So there's the overprotective mother and the very impassive father. Their family dynamics are so extraordinary that I feel pity for Mead. It also made me appreciate the value of openness, and listening. Mead's parents didn't even listen to him, only insisting on what they think was best. Never did they realize that they had to listen to what Mead had to say as well, they only realized that late in the game, when their kid is all grown up. In the beginning, they were more willing to think that Mead was simply hallucinating instead of taking his word for the truth.

With respect to the structure of this book, I highly took a liking to it, since it wasn't the traditional chronological narration. Every chapter was dated, as to how many days or years it was before graduation. Thus, the chapters were in different time periods in Mead's life. It was presented based on content, and not based on the date. One chapter can be 8 years before graduation, when Mead was just 10, and the next can be 3 weeks before graduation, when his parents were in town visiting the university. In this way, I believe the author had trusted her readers that her readers would be smart enough to reconstruct the missing links in between the episodes. I liked that factor, since it needed use of my brain by requiring me to read between the lines.

I also liked the ending. The conflicts were slowly being resolved, one by one. One by one, Mead's family members get normal, and finally sees the light, in a way. However, the good thing is that the author did not fully end the story. The main conflict is between Mead and his relationship with Herman Weinstein, and the ending leaves it hanging, welcoming the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks.

Overall, a very awesome novel. 5 out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(Pillowed Statues, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Psycholinguistics and Linguistics

What follows is not a scientific exposition. What follows instead is a subjective rant of a person who simply happens to have a background in academia.

So, I was reading this one article the other day. It wasn't a trivial article, it was an article that was published in an academic journal. The journal was something that I constantly kept an eye on, given the fact that it publishes things that I am usually interested in. It is also peer-reviewed, which means that in order to be published, one's manuscripts will be critically scrutinized first by anonymous reviewers.

So I was reading an article, and I never got past the introduction, since the introduction was rather interesting, in the interesting sense of the word. The thing is, in mainstream Linguistics, there is a big split between the Chomskyans and the non-Chomskyans. This is basically a syntax issue: there are people who believe that humans represent sentences with the use of movement (like Chomsky), and there are people who believe that movement is not a real construct in the head. I happen to be non-Chomskyan.

So, back in the 1970s, psycholinguists got so interested in this new theory of syntax, so they went into their lab and tested this. Now, the results weren't too promising. The psycholinguists didn't find what the linguists were positing. So experiments have been conducted to prove and disprove the existence of movement, among other things. Now, out comes the biggest claim, and one that I think is detrimental to the field. Chomsky claims the difference between competence and performance. Competence refers to one's knowledge of one's language, and performance refers to one's actual use of the language. Thus, these theoretical constructs can exist, but in competence. It does not always mean that it reflects in one's performance, as the linguists claim.

Now that is something that I find it hard to swallow. That basically renders the linguists unfalsifiable. That basic tenet of falsifiability, that I think is very important. No wonder I started moving into the camp of the psycholinguists. Because I think that just simply sitting in an armchair positing all these constructs will be useless if they have no psychological reality.

Anyway, back to the article that I was reading. They were lamenting that there has been a decrease in collaboration between the linguists and the psycholinguists for the past couple of decades. Well, my impression is that it is because the psycholinguists were frustrated at the linguists, at how the theories of these linguists became too abstract to be psychologically tractable.

I personally do not believe in a division of labor between competence and performance. There may be a good reason to posit the distinction between these two ideas, but I do not see why plenty of theoretical linguists are so hung up at just studying linguistic competence, as if there is always this ideal speaker or ideal listener of the language.

Language is meant to be used. Language is used by everyone in many different situations, and these situations exhibit language use that may be very very different from what the ideal form of language is. I find it interesting that some scholars decide to study language in a bubble, in a vacuum, protected from the elements of society and other factors, without taking into consideration what exactly is the reality of things.



(Delicate Installation, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

I did not like this. And the main reason for this dislike is the fact that I cannot wrap my head around it.

The thing is, I was very much confused as to the nature of this book. It was a collection of stories, and yet the stories were linked with each other, in fact, too linked to each other that I am not sure whether this is a novel or not. The whole collection of stories sounded like several chapters of a novel about this one person.

Now the other disturbing thing is that this book claims to be fiction, and yet it somehow sounds very autobiographical. Maybe it was intended that way, maybe not, but I just don't know.

Another thing that irks me is the fact that the chapters (or should I say, the stories) that compose this book are too microscopic. They focus on one explicit thing that makes the reader lost in its pages, in a bad way. One gets the hint that the stories are related to one another, and yet at the same time, the stories narrate something so intense and deep. All the stories are told in the first-person, and yet this first person has no name. It is implied that the stories share one first person, therefore, it's just a collection of chapters of a novel of this person.

Anyway, this first person has plenty of things in common. He is Bosnian, he has been living in the United States, he got stranded in the USA as a tourist when the war in Bosnia erupted, and he has plenty of connections. He lives in Chicago, he writes, and he has family in Bosnia. All of these seem to mirror the life of the author himself.

Anyway, reading this book has plunged me into this deep confusion, that I think I ended up being more dissatisfied than pleased. Unfortunately, the author has won a MacArthur Genius Grant and therefore suggests that plenty of people out there like his work. Unfortunately, I don't think I can consider myself to be one of them. 1 out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(Weird Chair, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 17: Relative Clauses

Relative clauses are certain structures in language that are meant to enrich and modify the description of entities. These add descriptions to the entities in the sentence, namely, the subjects and the objects. Here is an example.

1. The dog chased the cat.
2. The dog chased the cat that ate the mouse.

In the first sentence, both entities are just regular plain old entities. However, in the second sentence, the object of the sentence has a relative clause attached to it. Now, in this case, what is the purpose of the relative clause? Well, it adds further information about the entity. So, in the discourse of the second sentence, it may be the case that there are two possible cats to talk about, but we are picking out of the two the cat that was involved in eating the mouse.

Relative clauses are one kind of extraction. Relative clauses are made by joining two clauses together, basically. There is a main clause, and the relative clause needs to have a missing argument, since this is basically the same entity as in the main clause. Thus, in the second sentence above, "ate the mouse" is actually the clause with a missing subject.

In many languages, the relative clause either have a missing subject or a missing object. Compare the following two sentences in English.

3. The cat that _____ ate the mouse went missing.
4. The cat that the dog chased _____ went missing.

Sentence 3 has a subject relative clause, while 4 has an object relative clause. So English allows extractions for both places. There are languages, however, that have restrictions on extraction. Tagalog, for example, is one such language where one can only extract the subject of the relative clause. Thus, object relative clauses do not exist in Tagalog. In order to extract the proper entity, one needs to modulate the voice of the relative clause in order to vary the subject, and then one can extract it.

Okay, that last bit must have sounded gibberish, since I am not providing any examples here. But hey, this isn't a research paper, so I guess this is enough. If you really are curious, then email me and I will be more than happy to give you examples and further explanation.



(Optical Illusion, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Cavalier Cooking

One of the reasons I like cooking more than baking is because I can be impromptu and cavalier about it. Unlike baking, one does not need to be precisely exact in measurements when it comes to cooking. One can modify things on the fly, and add things if necessary.

So today, I made pasta. I bought oyster mushrooms, a jar of alfredo sauce, fresh dill weed, onions, and penne. What I did was saute the minced onions and oyster mushrooms until they were tender, and then I added the chopped dill weed and one-half teaspoon of nutmeg. I also added a half of a jar of olives that I still had in my refrigerator. Finally, when everything seemed cooked, I added the jar of alfredo sauce, and rinsed the jar with a little milk, and added that as well. Finally, I added salt and pepper to the sauce.

Now, when I eat this, I would sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese. That would be awesome. I like oyster mushrooms a lot, they are meaty, heavy, and yet exotic. So there you have it, a meatless pasta in cream sauce.



(Balancing Act, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Sometimes, good books don’t need to make use of complicated characters tackling complicated and extraordinary issues. Sometimes, good books can be told just by using regular characters that seem normal.

See, there are books that sometimes has bizarrely extraordinary characters, such as princes and princesses, royalty and nobility, people who have powers, and all those other things. But the thing about this book is that it never tries to put itself higher than the reader, the average ordinary reader. But before I discuss how I think that that is indeed the case, let me tell you what the book is about first.

The book narrates the story from two angles: the angle of Annie and Duncan, who are a couple from England; and the angle of Tucker Crowe, who is a former rockstar who just disappeared into oblivion some decades ago. Tucker has a small set of followers, trying to decipher the puzzle of Tucker’s disappearance from public view, even having a website and all that discussing all possible Tucker sightings, re-analysis of Tucker’s lyrics, and arranging pilgrimages to Tucker-specific locations, such as a toilet in a Minneapolis bar, the house of Tucker’s former girlfriend, a house in Montana, and such. These people are called Crowologists, but in reality, they are just fanatics. Duncan is one such person.

The book starts when Duncan and Annie from England decide to make a trip to the United States, in order to make a pilgrimage to Tucker Crowe sights. Annie just tags along to Duncan, but somewhere in the middle, she decides to bail out and see San Francisco instead, instead of stalking some lady’s house. That starts the drift between Duncan and Annie, which eventually results in their break-up, but after Duncan has an affair with a colleague.

Tucker on the other hand is now a middle-aged father, father of several kids with different mothers, but he hangs out with just one of them, Jackson. He has unresolved family issues with all of his kids, and he really isn’t the poster dad that one would expect to be. The main conflict revolving around Tucker is his lack of direction, and how his family members are dissatisfied with him.

Now how do the two sides collide? Well, the title of the novel is in reference to an album of Tucker that just came out, after several years. The novel tells about Tucker’s last album entitled Juliet, and several years later, a collection of songs, that were basically the same songs from the last album, but rather premature, came out. This was called Juliet, Naked. Now, the Crowologists loved it badly, to a certain presumptuous degree, that I was rather annoyed. I especially was annoyed at Duncan for being so obtuse, narrow-minded, and haughty. Duncan listened to it, and then wrote a review praising the work. Annie on the other hand listened to it, and didn’t like it. She also wrote a review, but Duncan doesn’t respect her opinion because he thinks that she isn’t an expert Crowologist just yet, so what does she know about the matter? Anyway, they drift away, and the break-up happens later, but in the meantime, the real Tucker Crowe writes Annie an email, thanking her for her opnion. This gets things between them going.

Anyway, I won’t really give the details here, but the rest of the book tackles both the issues of Annie, who now feels like she wasted her whole life with a good-for-nothing person in Duncan; and Tucker, who is locked in a tangle of half-brothers and half-sisters and unknown children. It is not as much as a romantic story between Annie and Tucker, but more of a realistic picture of real people tackling real issues.

Now at this point, my readers might be already thinking that I have a favorable impression of the novel. In fact I do, I like the novel. I like the fact that Hornby tried to be in touch with the general populace. There were Wikipedia entries, email correspondence, lots of references to pop culture, all these attempts to ground it within the reality of the common reader. It wasn’t something that one had to have either a sophisticated imagination or a scientific mind in order to properly process it. Granted, it was not Umberto Eco, but it still made justice portraying real situations of real people, and that was what I liked.

Overall, it was a relatively easy read. I liked the mixture of correspondence, encyclopedia entries, blog entries, among others interspersed with the narrative. I definitely recommend this to someone wanting a fresh take at contemporary fiction, as this is perhaps one of the most down-to-earth novels that I have read in the recent past. 4 and a half out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(Blob with Hole, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

First Week

So, the first week of classes are over. Somehow, I am not surprised at the amount of work that I have already done so far. It's like, turn on the switch to start the semester and the whole factory of work and research is in full swing immediately.

So, what has happened five days into the semester?

Well, research-wise, I have made progress, both in the content and the logistics. I won't elaborate here, just read my previous post. Aside from that, I have a couple other projects I am doing on the side: one has immediately picked up again, since this one needs participants, and we already started recruiting the moment the semester began, and we only need a few more participants before we can finish the first stage of things. Hopefully, that happens by next week, which is why I am busy with writing new stimulus items for the next stage so that I can get that approved by Tuesday.

I also have standing collaborations with two other people: one is a professor, who I design experiments with; and another is one other fellow graduate student, who we both think that we should combine both of our strengths so that we can present some research together. For this one, I am picking up my traditional Linguistics background again, since this will be a non-experimental research, and so I need to read some literature again to refresh my memory. Hopefully, we can have something fruitful to present to the academic community, and we're targeting a conference that is scheduled to happen in Santiago de Chile in August 2011.

I am still waiting to hear from the results of a conference that will happen this March. My collaborator and I submitted an abstract back in December, and so I am itching to know whether our submission has been accepted or not. After all, it's close, it's in New York City (read: I can crash in my sister's sofa!), and it's dead-center on my research area. So I might go regardless, in order to keep up with the most recent activities on how humans process language.

Some rather good news that I got just recently, was the decision of the faculty here to give me a TA-ship. This was unexpected, since there was someone who was originally scheduled to get this position, but didn't. I apparently was chosen to be his replacement. So I am happy, I get to TA this one big auditorium class with two other TAs, but at least I get to have a paycheck. Paychecks are awesome.

I guess that's that for the moment. It's a three-day weekend, which means that I don't have obligations in school for Monday, but that doesn't mean I have all the time to sunbathe all day. After all, it's winter, it's been a while since I have seen the sun.



(Male Torso, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Clash of the Titans

So, the next couple weeks would be a heavyset one. I have finally made the stars align themselves so that my three committee members would be in one room. So this coming Wednesday, I will be sitting with them, in a room, discussing the dissertation proposal. Time to fortify my fortress.

Somehow I don't know why but I am a little bit unnerved by this. I have been used to the three members of my committee being in one room, heck, they're always clashing in lab meetings. But somehow, the idea that this is a private meeting that concerns only the four of us is a little bit new. In part, because it hasn't happened before.

Well, I guess there's always a first time for everything. And this is one such thing.

I actually feel fortunate that I am working with the people that I am working with. My adviser comes from UC Berkeley, which is known for a strong Linguistics Department. The second person in the committee who happens to be from my own department has a history with UC San Diego, which is known for excellent Cognitive Science and Linguistics Departments. Finally, the third committee member, from the Psychology Department, was trained in the University of Rochester, which also has a stellar Cognitive Science Department.

So, an upcoming clash of the titans is on schedule next week. Hopefully, this is a constructive meeting and not a destructive one, and that this would actually mean that my dissertation will move forward significantly.



(Concrete Crustacean, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Conversion

I finally did it. I converted to Google completely. My usage of Yahoo is now minimal.

So, I have been thinking about it for a while. The thing is, I only started using Google for stuff that I do recently. It all started when Blogger was bought by Google. So, I had to establish an account with Google to continue blogging, that was fine.

And then, I was able to migrate my school email to Google too, due to the fact that I technically am already an alumnus of the university, since I graduated last June 2009 with a master's degree. I was then eligible to migrate my official school email to Google, thus retaining the email address, so all my correspondence that are official, such as my CV, publications, etc, will not be compromised.

I then realized how awesome Gmail was.

Then, there's also the calendar issue. I used to have a Yahoo calendar, which was fine, except that I could only make one calendar at a time. So I cannot have overlapping calendars, and when I saw one of those, I was like thrilled with all the possibilities that a calendar such as that would provide.

Besides, I was collaborating with another graduate student, and we had to coordinate the times in which we conduct experiments. In order to do this online, the only way was to make a Google calendar that was shared across the two of us. The thing with the Yahoo calendar was that I could share it, but in doing so, I share everything. I only wanted to share a part of the calendar, and that was where Google calendar was great, since it allows one to make several calendars at once, and turn them on or off depending on what one needs.

So the other night, I moved things. I stopped using my Yahoo calendar, I moved my emails to Gmail, and consolidated my activities to Google. I still use Yahoo only for instant messaging, but that's about it. Google is awesome.

Now, I guess I should ask Google for some money since I basically wrote this awesome post about their awesome product.



(Recycled, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

And It Starts All Over Again

Today marked the start of my tenth semester. Wow. I feel old. Anyway, nothing much new to report, except that in a way, I am full of energy again with respect to working. I know, geeky, but hey, that's how it is.

So for today, I did exactly that. I went to school early in the morning, and I went ahead and posted fliers for my experiments for one of my projects. We still need a few more participants for the norming part, and so that's what we are hoping to accomplish now. Once that clears up, then we'll conduct the main experiment, and that's where we start hoping that the numbers we get are good enough to produce a statistically significant result, and therefore bring out another publication. We're targeting this conference in York (the old version) which will occur in September, and hopefully my collaborator can go in my behalf.

Then, I met my friend, whose help I needed because she has a big car and I needed some transportation. A few graduate students who are older than me in the program are finally graduating, and so they have been holding yard sales and such. I got myself two medium-sized bookshelves since I needed some place to put my stuff in my apartment-slash-office. It's funny that now that I am almost nearing the end of my graduate career, but only now have I started to make my apartment personal. I suppose I was too functional and pragmatic. I had an office for the past 4 and a half years, so why would I make this apartment workable? I'd simply head to my office on campus if I needed to work. But, I dunno, I am slowly liking this idea of working from home. So, for just one dollar for each piece (if that sounds cheap, then it costs 18,500 Vietnamese dong), I was able to buy two bookshelves and now my books are arranged in some place other than cardboard boxes.

Then after my yard sale shopping, we went to have lunch in the local activist's diner near my house. The food is so-so, but I suppose I go there for the people. It's one of the places that I know I will miss once I leave Buffalo. I really don't know how to describe it, it's like the Shopping Center Complex in UP Diliman, or Telegraph Avenue in UC Berkeley, where undergrads hang out and discuss ideas. Eating there once in a while makes me feel younger.

Then, we headed to the grocery shop. Time to restock my fridge. I am thinking of eliminating meat from my diet again, but I need inspiration. I've always been attempting to do it again these past years, especially since I've not been meat-free after I came back from the Czech Republic in 2006. I guess I need good recipes. Come to think of it, the eggplant parmigiana sandwich I ate for lunch was superb. Maybe I should try reproducing that.

Then, I went back home. I went to work. I had to construct a database for our participants, so that we can keep track of who actually was in the lab and took part in our experiments, since one thing you don't want is to violate the theoretical assumptions of the statistical test that you'll be using, including random sampling and independence of samples. Once a person does the experiment, the person cannot partake in any other experiment related to that group of experiments, since he or she has already seen the materials before and therefore the responses for the next session isn't independent anymore of any other confounding factors. I like the strict mathematical precision of things, such as stats.

So yeah, that's my day so far, and it hasn't ended yet. I still have a few job applications to submit to, and I need to prepare something for tomorrow's lab meeting. I need some numbers for submission, so I'll bring out my calculator and deal with that. The semester starts and I am busy yet again. Oh wait, that's old news.

Whew. 2010. I have a feeling this year will be quick.



(Points, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

What is the Color of Your Bra?

These past few days, I have witnessed weird female behavior in cyberspace, namely, in Facebook. Starting last Thursday, I saw some of my female friends putting colors as their status updates, such as white or electric blue and I so I thought, what was that about? In fact, one responded saffron and so I thought, she must be cooking.

Anyway, it turned out that more and more of my female friends have been doing it, to the point that I saw one along the lines of pink with violet dots and another being beige with lace. So I decided to look it up.

Apparently, the latest meme was that females should post the color of their bra, just that, in their status update. The males should not know about it, and apparently, the intention was to make people aware of breast cancer.

Whoa, really? How does that make people aware of breast cancer? At first, I thought, heh, that's a fun meme, it's cute, it makes people think. It did make me giggle, once I figured the whole thing out.

But then, weird things happen. Some of my guy friends started copying the trend, and so every now and then, you'll see a guy with a status such as blue and you'll think, Really? You wear them too? Not that I find that wrong, but sometimes it clashes with what you know with that person and it causes some sort of cognitive dissonance.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing is if you see your mother post her bra color in Facebook. There's a reason why no matter how normal sex is, all of us seem to be grossed out by the idea of our parents' having sex. I cannot explain that, but that seems to be the trend. And somehow, knowing your mother's bra color falls along those categories.

So yeah, that was the latest Facebook meme. Was it fun? Well, it depends on how you define fun. Did it accomplish what it needed to accomplish? I don't know. Judging from the articles you see online about the reactions of people, it didn't seem to make people more aware of breast cancer. In my opinion, all it made me aware of was that my female friends wear very interesting bra colors. It didn't provide any informative material about breast cancer and prevention, all it did was provide fodder for the sometimes promiscuous imagination.



(Curl, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Razorblades and Sprays

Now that my office is at home, and that is where I am spending most of my time now, there isn't the big pressure to dress up. I know, this is a vain post, I supposed I am allowed to do this once in a while.

Anyway, when my rhythmic daily activities consisted of going to school because my office is there, I would always shave (daily with the exception of head hair which was done every three days), take a shower, and spray on some fragrance before I head out. Now that I am working from home, things are a little different.

The thing is, this home office thing is a little different, and I am trying out new dimensions of self-discipline. I am getting a lot of work done, thankfully, but I am becoming more lax when it comes to my habits. Yes, I still shower every day (what do you guys think, no I am not becoming a sloth), but shaving is getting to the point where I only do it when I am getting out of the house. So I look at the mirror in the morning sometimes and think, wow, I look a little older.

Well, given my genetic make-up, the goatee is the only possible style I can sport. Blah, I don't want it, it's additional hassle. But for a brief moment, while looking at myself at the mirror, I do like the rough look. Oh, that's a little Narcissistic of me.

I perhaps will slow down in my cologne consumption as well. Since what is the point of smelling good using some liquid that's made in France if you're the only one smelling it? Not that I bathe in it. But I have to say, I am good with respect to my olfactory sense. I could name a cologne if I smell it on the street if I have recognized it in the past. And for that reason I don't want to wear fragrances that everyone wears. For that, I am glad that I didn't get Acqua di Gio by Giorgio Armani, and thankfully I already finished my bottle of Cool Water by Davidoff. Oh well, what did I know back then?

Okay, vain post over.



(Firefox?, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: This Human Season by Louise Dean

Tragic is the operative word for this novel. At first, I didn't like the way the novel progressed, since this is one of those novels that are unkind to the reader. But as I persevered, it grew on me, painting a picture that was rather grim and tragic.

So, what is this novel about? This novel revolves around The Troubles in Northern Ireland, with alternating chapters between the story of John Dunn, his girlfriend Angie, and his son Mark Wilson; and the story of Sean Moran and his family. John Dunn is a former Army person, British, and a worker in the Maze Prison. He is a Unionist, but he doesn't really care. He just goes in and goes out, for the job. He has an illegitimate child, Mark, who is 19 years old. During the course of the novel, John learns of Mark's existence, and they eventually meet and bond, for a short while.

The other story revolves on the Republicans, centered around the Moran family. Sean Moran is also 19 years old, and is a prisoner in the Maze Prison. His mother Kathleen is a worried housewife, who is having an affair with Brendan Coogan, an important person in the IRA. Her husband, also named Sean, is an alcoholic. They have three other children: Mary, who left and moved to England; Liam, who is 13; and Aine.

Basically, what the novel does is paint the tragic lives of both sides of the people involved in The Troubles. The prisoners stage their blanket and dirty protest, while their families outside are worried to death about them, while the prison guards are killed one by one by the IRA in retaliation for the subhuman treatment that the prisoners get. Basically, the prisoners want to be treated as prisoners of war, not as common criminals. Over the past few days reading this novel, I have learned more about The Troubles than I have known in the past.

So why was I a little bit hesitant at the beginning of this novel? The thing is, like I said earlier, the novel is unkind to the reader. The novel doesn't begin smoothly, where there are introductions and background settings and all that. It doesn't begin with Once upon a time... Instead, it plunges the reader directly into the action. The main backbone of the novel is in the dialogue. The narrative is minimal, and everything instead is made known to the reader by means of the complex dialogue that occurs between the characters. Thus, not every fact is presented in the best possible order. Instead, the reader has to slowly and patiently wait until every piece makes sense. In the end, I liked this way of presentation.

I suppose a tragic subject needs a tragic ending. This is not a book that will make your heart glow. Instead, this is a novel that will make you glad that you weren't there in 1979 in Belfast. I do not want to spoil what is the tragic event at the end for potential readers out there, but I believe it is the best ending possible in this novel.

So, I am recommending this, if you are very interested in the history of Northern Ireland. 4 out of 5 stars, I think this is a very good piece of historical fiction. It moved me, but the subject matter was not enough to give it a full 5 stars. By no means is this a fault of the author, but more about my general interests in things.

See my other book reviews here.



(Technicolor, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Alaska

So we have been having several days of extreme cold weather now. The snow is on and off, and so shoveling is mandatory for the time being. The good thing is that I am not the only one doing it this time, since there are other responsible tenants in the house.

Anyway, it's just January 7. Winter just officially started about a month ago. There's a few more months of cold weather. I am glad that I am not in Fulton, NY (this is a town in central NY, near Syracuse), where they got 55 inches of snow for the past week. We just had about a little less than 2 feet.

However, the winter scenery is still white, pretty, but slushy. The fact that I live in the city limits of Buffalo makes it a little harder though. The thing is, with uncontrolled urban development and sprawl, the more affluent people flee to the suburbs. Thus, Buffalo's suburban villages and towns are way better at their snow management. They have the more affluent people, therefore they get more taxes, and more taxes means that they have the resources to deal with the snow plows and maintenance.

The city on the other hand has the less affluent people, and so they get less taxes to pay for their management. Thus, snow management is one aspect where the resources get cut. I personally experience this, since my street is not a major thoroughfare, and so the snow plow gets to it ten thousand years after the next street, which is a major connecting street. Thus, when the snow plow finally gets to my street, the snow is already fully packed to the ground because ten thousand cars have driven on it by then, and so the snow plow's effort is therefore rendered useless.

Anyway, what am I complaining about? I am only here for a short while. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! Just kick me in the head if I tell you that I am moving to Alaska. Sorry Sarah Palin, I have nothing against you, but I have plenty of things against the weather.



(Modern Art, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

You Drink, You Drive, You Go to Jail

Oh, not only driving, but also flying. The other day, I saw this news article about a United Airlines pilot that was arrested in the United Kingdom because he was supposed to fly a flight from London to Chicago. And he failed the breath test.

I do not understand how some people can be irresponsible at times. I am glad that the other airline personnel noticed it, and so he was apprehended. But if not, he would have about 250 people's lives under his belt for the next 8 hours and who knows what would have happened?

He is being paid quite a sum for being an airline pilot, I am pretty sure way above the median salary for the common man. But with that comes responsibilities. No wonder I didn't become a medical doctor, because I don't think I would be able to take that responsibility of having another life depend on mine.

I guess some people take that responsibility a little too light.



(Circular Inky Canvas, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Gadgets to Go

Given that they say that 2010 is the start of a new decade (okay, I don't really care about the millennium debate, I know there wasn't a 0 AD, but technicalities aren't the purpose of this entry), there are plenty of articles online about things that will come and go. So one of those was this article from Yahoo! about the things that one should not buy in 2010.

The article mentioned 10 things, namely: DVDs, home telephone service, external hard drives, smartphone also-rans, compact digital cameras, newspaper subscriptions, CDs, new college textbooks, gas-guzzling cars, and energy-inefficient homes and appliances. Some of these, I agree, but for some, probably not.

Well, I understand the DVD argument. Especially for me, I rarely have a movie in which I would want to watch it again and again. Perhaps The Fountain, but not a lot of other titles. And yes, Netflix is so convenient, just have a subscription and the movie will get to you through the mail.

I also agree that home telephone services can be obsolete. Everyone has a cellular phone nowadays, and the home telephone service just is useful if you have an answering machine. But the cellular phones have answering machines as well. If you simply do not want to pick up, then don't pick up. Self-discipline is necessary. Just because it rings, doesn't mean you have to pick it up.

I do not agree with the external hard drive argument. Yes, online data storage is cheaper, IF you compare the monthly subscription fee with the cost of an external hard drive. I have a 320 GB external hard drive, I paid less than 100 USD, but it was a one-time fee. Besides, I have the comfort that I do not need an Internet connection to access my files, and also the security that there wouldn't be a smart-ass hacker who could access my files because it's stored in a server somewhere in the planet.

Yes, I also agree that newspaper hard copies will be obsolete sooner or later, but perhaps not in 2010. There are still people who like reading their news on paper.

CDs will be gone. I myself use Internet radio and online music services. The last time I bought a CD was when I wanted rare music, when I wanted music from West Africa or the latest album by Tiziano Ferro.

Looking back, there are several things that the past decade had that we don't have anymore. Remember the Betamax and VHS? Analog television broadcasting? Paper tickets for airlines? Modems? I am pretty sure there are more stuff along these lines, but I can't access my memory for some reason.



(Cavorting Horseshoes, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Uncertainty

There has been a lot of uncertainty in my life lately. And I don't like the feeling of it. The other day, I somehow entered this state of being antsy, just because a friend of mine asked what I was doing for Tuesday, and I seriously couldn't picture in my head what the calendar looked like and where Tuesday was. The fact that we are in the middle of a semester break seems to add to the uncertainty, that one day is just the same from the next, that I didn't even know what day of the week I was in that day.

Add to that the fact that I am moving out of my office this coming Wednesday. I have cleared pretty much all of my stuff, and I have moved things back home. I am moving my office to my house, and I also applied for a study carrel in the library. Come to think of it, I wonder how I buzzed through my undergraduate years. Three and a half years, and I didn't have an office or a permanent study area that was just my own. And I was able to write an honor's thesis. Well, I know I will come up with something.

I guess it's this losing an office thing that bugs me. I effectively lose an anchor. of sorts. It's also some change that I need to go through. For the past four and a half years, I have been the inhabitant of this one room in the university, and my co-inhabitants have changed over the years, but I stayed put. But obviously, I cannot stay put for eternity. I guess this is one way of moving on.

Well, I guess I have to say farewell to Baldy Hall. Not quite completely yet, but I know I won't be haunting its corridors as much as I used to.



(Wooden Clash, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell

Every once in a while, I decide to pick up something really outrageous and bizarre, and see how I would tolerate it. This is one such item.

Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood is a novel (?) about me. Yes, it is about me. I learned quite a lot about myself reading this novel. Now, how would that happen?

Well, what else do you expect in a book that is filled with sentences that are in the interrogative mood? Every sentence in this book is a question. The author does nothing but asks the reader questions, ranging from whether I am a vegetarian or not, to my opinion about butter-pecan ice cream, to my relationship with potatoes.

I guess the subtitle of this book was rather apt. The full title of this book was The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? Honestly, is this a novel? Probably not. There wasn't a plot. There wasn't a trace of a story, but instead, I think, this was simply a collection of questions, that one can ask someone else, and armed with the answers, one can construct a profile of the person answering them.

So, I guess this was indeed experimental literature. Is it literature? Maybe, for the 164 pages of questions that it had, I found myself giggling at times. I suppose the Powell's knack for words just worked that I never found myself annoyed at why I would be reading otherwise a very absurd and bizarre book. Would I recommend it? Maybe, only to those who want something different and at the same time possessing an open mind. 3 out of 5 stars.

See my other book reviews here.



(Wooden Ballerinas, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)