Grad Student Mouth

What have I been up to recently? Well...

I recently presented a poster (brief research summary) at a research expo here. Huzzah for another line on the vita!

Stats labs are going well. This batch of students seems to be having a harder time getting some of the concepts, but so far no one has asked me what the x and y axes are, so that's a good thing.

Data collection for my masters proceeds apace. We've had a lot of "bad participants", so I'm having to run as many as possible to reach my target sample size of N = 20 for the second experiment. Hopefully I'll be done with data collection before Spring Break, because afterwards the quality of participant really turns to crap.

Went out to dinner recently with a prospective new grad student. It was fun to be on the other side of that fence. :) Also, it was great to have dinner with the guys from the experimental program. I forget sometimes that we're a like-minded group of people all interested in mostly the same things, so it was fun to rediscover that.

I've been addicted to Brand New's latest album, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. It would have been a shoe-in for Album of the Year if I had only discovered it before 2006 was over.

I've been enjoying Xbox live immensely. I've even had a pseudo lab meeting over a game of Gears of War with my labmate Mr. Clean (that's his gamertag AND an accurate physical description of him).

Still haven't found a Wii, but at this point I really am not thinking about it too much. I'll start looking again perhaps after Spring Break. I still haven't seen one anywhere yet, but no worries. I want to enjoy just having the Xbox 360 by itself for a while longer. :)

I've been diving more deeply into my article readings recently. After running an experiment in this field, things I didn't quite get before are suddenly clarified. Yup... after a year and a half, I still love my job.

Wedding plans are... well... wedding plans. They're getting taken care of. JumpingJayhawk has been pretty stressed by work recently, so a lot of the wedding stuff has been pushed to the back burner of both of our minds. We just have this general idea that it's going to happen sometime in the near future. :)

Finally, I'm planning on heading out to Seattle near the end of my Spring Break week to see Mothergoat for a while and just to break away for a bit. I always enjoy the company of good friends, and it helps to talk face to face with people who don't crack statistics jokes and attempt to operationally define every facet of human behavior once in a while... it keeps me from getting a case of "Grad Student Mouth"

And just FYI, "Grad Student Mouth" is the condition in which a person loses the ability to engage in conversation without couching it completely in the professional language of his or her field.

An example of "Grad Student Mouth" as contrasted with the responses given by a normal person:

Normal Person Question: "You're in a good mood... any reason why?"

Normal Person Response: "I'm feeling lucky today!"

Grad Student's Response: "I'm feeling lucky today, though I am aware it is an illusory affective conclusion because my top-down processing components are giving me a pleasing ego-centric interpretation of the electromagnetic sensations my primary visual cortex is decrypting that is largely biased by the fundamental attribution error. This is supported by several experiments that indicate top-down processing components can largely influence bias on the grounds of the context in which information is presented. Seeing as I have recently experienced several positive events in my life, I believe that my cognitive processes have been biased towards the assumption that things will invariably turn out in my favor, which I understand to be a component of the gambler's fallacy. However, this does not change my affective state, and I am therefore quite pleased to feel as lucky as I do right now."

Yup. Grad Student mouth. The inability to answer a question simply and in terms that everyone can understand. :P

Brief Updates

... because it's late and I don't want to write a lot.

Masters Thesis has been proposed. I am now currently collecting data.

I am still teaching the intro to stats labs. They are amusing beyond belief.

I have been asked to present my data at the monthly colloquium for the department. Very cool. That means that the whole department shows up to hear me talk to them for about an hour. Then I answer their questions when I'm done presenting my stuff. It's my first formal presentation in a meeting form, so I'm really looking forward to it.

And finally, an eyeless monster with a dislocated jaw hanging loosely from its twisted neck is standing in my doorway. I think it wants broccoli.

Ok, that's enough for now. Time for sleep.

(Oh, and just FYI - Norma Jean's newer album, Redeemer, is quite good.)