APS 2009

Well everyone, the APS conference went well. I met almost all of my prospective graduate programs, professors and directors. Needless to say, my list has dwindled quite remarkably. I am working on two manuscripts at the moment so I am keeping this post brief. I will be posting the two posters I presented at the conference at a later date. Until then, enjoy this picture of bFlat, Philip Zimbardo, and I at SFMOMA.

Aliens Fans

For those of you who are Alien, Aliens, Alien 3 & Alien Resurrection fans this is a case study on the character Newt. I did this a few years ago in my child and adolescent psychopathology course and I just found it. Enjoy!

Because I only know a little german

As I was riding home with bFlat from the park, we had a silly conversation I thought I would share with all of you.

We just passed Bed Bath & Beyond and I asked, "Do you suppose they have the same rule in German? You know, like how we would say 'bed bath & beyond.' Do you suppose they would say library, meatshop, and bank?" Why 'library, meatshop and bank?' Simple, those are three places I can say in German.

Guitar Hero as a Scientific tool

Over a year has past since the Guitar Hero experiment and I finally gotten around to writing an official document that will be published at APS the Observer. Feel free to check out a copy of the article that will be printed in the July issue below.

Nerds, Scientists, and anyone doing research

To those of you who do tons of web searches, trolls through the archives at the University Library, or is just really into research--like yours truly--you can understand how quickly you loose track of what you read, when and where. I have finally found something that will manage all of my citations and not piss me off like the Microsoft office tools (endpoint).

Sage Publishers had a link on their page suggesting http://www.citeulike.org/. Needless to say, what makes this website quite possibly the best thing since sliced cheese is the search function. It lets you tag and note your citations plus find more articles that share similar tags and authors! It is been a real help the past few days while I build a lit-review of about 20 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Try it, and let me know what you think!

dockscape #5

dockscape #5
Originally uploaded by mugley

I really like this picture I found while playing around on flickr. I haven't got much time for posting lately. So, I thought I'd write a quick blurb about this pic.

In any case, I'm working on a new website for my photography. I expect to have a final revision done in the next couple weeks so look forward to a post about that.

Ode to Coffee 2

I lied, this is hardly an ode to coffee. Although, I am, however, writing about coffee again. In my quest to find fair-trade goods and be a responsible citizen of the world, the easiest thing I can do is buy fair trade coffee. That being said, the stores around here are terrible about carrying fair-trade coffee of any kind. Secondly, the fair trade that is available is still a whole bean item. In other words, I have to use the in store coffee grinder, and believe it or not, Bflat is terrified of them. Albeit strange, but it does have a foundation in logic.
People are gross--she has quite a bit of authority on that particular matter--and these same gross people fiddle around with a machine that does not look like it has been cleaned in the past 15 years. Therefore yielding a machine that is gross.

My father was a big coffee drinker, so grinding the beans down is no real mystery to me, nor is it terribly uncommon. He actually used something identical to this one.

So this brings me up to my critical question. Does anyone use the in-store coffee grinder, does anyone else share the phobia, any recommendations for a good home coffee grinder, or am I missing something critically important about the fair trade coffee (i.e., there is ground coffee avaliable.)

Doggy Days

This is a day with Waldi.



Here is a little more of Waldi being active.

Writing drafts for blogs is absurd.

Well, that is what I thought for a good deal of time. I mean, come on, it is merely a blog. But as I was chatting with a fellow research assistant at the office today it became apparent that a lot of people read this drivel (i.e., this blog) and make inferences about me as a person. Are some of those inferences useful and accurate? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it tells me (thanks to the stats I keep on the page) I am an uninteresting writer when I only use a single draft otherwise I would have consistent or slow growth in readers. No, because this is truly a place for my ranting and such, and this blog is dressed up as a blog for people to "learn something". There are some useful thing I write about, but they have been slim to nil as of late. This leaves me yet another task to work on. All things considered reading this blog is only an accurate representation of who/what I am as a writer without censoring, not necessarily that of my writing ability after a few drafts.

So the big question of this past month has been, what can I do to make this a better blog? I decided last week, pictures are fun--everyone likes pictures. In light of my recent conclusion, I suppose I should put a little more care into each word before I jump that deadly gun and push "PUBLISH POST" in the future.

Graduate schools and google earth

So, I'm on the hunt for a graduate school that meets two requirements.
1. within one hours drive of any school that offers a CRNA program
2. has a faculty interested in cognition (more specifically decision making)

Sounds easy right?

Well, in the United States (and Purto Rico) there are a total of 108 graduate schools that offer a MSN for a CRNA liscense or Masters of Science in Nursing for a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist liscense (and you thought your degree sounded cool). So one could assume that because there is 108, that the distrubution of said programs would be two programs per state and six states have three programs. Not even close. So to keep track of these schools I decided it's time to put pushpins on a map locating them all. Then I can find graduate schools for psychology in those same states (and hopefully within an hours drive).

After looking online for a large enough map to put about 500 push pins in it occured to me, "I bet google has something that does this." Sure enough, Google Earth has a push-pin utility.

So, what did I spend a good portion of my night doing?

This

Ok, the quality is a little bad in the preview, so click on the picture. All of the yellow pins are CRNA programs, and blue are psych programs. I have a long way to go on it yet, but it will be much easier to narrow down graduate schools now.