Blog Roots III

Periodically, I like to return to my blog roots and give a general update, so here goes: (Previous Blog Roots I, II)

T$ Update:

School and research are proceeding quite nicely. The first semesters of my time in Kansas were mostly slow, my research and other involvement did not keep me extremely busy. But then data collection for my thesis, supervising the rat lab, coordinating a student’s convention and other things kept me very busy. The same pattern is beginning to emerge here in Texas.

I’m working on several projects in the Aging and Cognition Lab related to metacognition, social aspects of age differences in memory, and student’s use of study strategies. I’m also very excited about a new project in the Environmental Psychophysiology Laboratory. I’ve written about the ERN here before; the new study is also related to the ERN. The study has the potential to make real progress disentangling several issues that have plagued interpretation of the waveform. The principle investigator (PI) has high hopes for its publication in a high-impact journal.

As is necessary to receive my stipend, I also teach a lab section of PSYC203: Statistics for Psychology, today we talked about independent samples t-tests. So far, it has been a fine experience, but mostly a back-burner activity, if I were the teacher of record I would feel more responsibility for the course.

Other News:

Was in Houston and Rice University over the weekend for the ARMADILLO cognition conference. Friday and Saturday there were talks all day and a poster session Friday afternoon (I presented some of my work on stereotypes and aging). Unlike other conferences I’ve been to, there was only one event at a time, whether it was a talk or a poster session. Meagan and I also enjoyed the Rice Village district, we had tapas Friday evening and visited the Chocolate Bar Saturday afternoon.

One interesting thing about Rice University, a private university with what must be an enormous endowment, is that its often referred to as the Harvard of the south. To students and faculty at Rice though, Harvard is the Rice of the north. UPDATE: I checked, Rice’s endowment is 4.7 billion dollars as of 2007. (wiki)

Meagan and I are hosting a Halloween party this Saturday. We’re hoping we can have as good a party as we did our last year in Kansas, which will not be an easy task. I think our costumes are a secret but I’ll definitely post pictures after the party.

TX Update:

Who knew it would rain so damn much in Texas. In September we had 7.4 inches of rain, over three inches above average, and this month we’re already at 8 inches, 4 inches above average!

Language’s Equal Status

I’ve grown up hearing people say and thinking that the English language was a “complex” language, even more complex than other languages. Now, after minimal reading in linguistics, I know this is a misconception. English may be irregular but it’s no more complex than any other language. The linguist Dan Slobin summarized this point nicely in a Qualia interview.

There’s no way in which you can define one language as being more complex than another. If you look at all of the devices available in a language, my guess is they’ll balance each other off. So, if you lose case-inflection then you’ll have more complicated word order laws and richer uses of prepositions. (Slobin, 2005)

Case inflection is a linguistic device that varies between languages. In English, there are very few case inflections. For example, if English speakers saw the word “cleaned” they would not know who or what cleaned, whereas in Italian the word “cleaned” would change form to indicate who was cleaning and when the cleaning occurred. On first reading, one might think this English is more difficult for this reason, but this is wrong because there is a trade-off. Perhaps the trade-off is that in English sentence requires a strict word order (e.g. noun-verb-noun), whereas in Italian it is allowable to switch word order.

Another interpretation of case inflection in English and Italian would be that Italian’s abundance of case inflection would make it a more difficult language, but the “rich inflection morphology” makes words easily distinguishable (Bates, Devescovi & Wulfeck, 2001, p. 373). On the other hand, English’s paucity of case inflection causes ambiguity for users, but context and word order resolves ambiguity. Also, consider Chinese, where 80% of words are compound words, which might be difficult for listeners to interpret if it weren’t for lexical tone, or the way the words are said (Bates et al.). Bates and colleagues write “all languages must have achieved a roughly comparable degree of learnability and processibility across the course of history, or they would not still be around” (2001, p. 374).

I wondered if my belief that English was the most complex language was unusual. Am I the only one who has ever thought English was the most difficult to use? I developed a short survey to help me answer this question. In the survey, I asked individuals what their first, or native, language was, if they knew more than one language, I asked about their awareness of several other languages from Indo-European, Asian, and other lines, and finally I asked them what they thought the most complex language was.

I predicted individuals who were monolingual would have a higher likelihood of saying their own language was the most complex, and those who are bi- or multi-lingual would be more likely to report a language other than their native language as most complex. I’ve collected data from 6 individuals that vary in their native language, age, gender, and linguistic abilities. Respondents include 3 men and 3 women, of which, 3 are native English speakers and 3 are non-native English speakers (Malayalam, Spanish, and Chinese). Three are monolingual while the other three are at least bilingual.

Of those six people, two thought English was the most complex language – both were native English respondents. Clearly, data from 6 respondents is hardly enough to come to a general conclusion about a population’s beliefs regarding language. However, I don’t think I’m alone in ever thinking English was the most complex language, certainly not among monolingual English speakers. It will be interesting to continue collecting data to explore this question. There are problems with my survey too. For example, I didn’t ask people to consider a particular form (i.e. written, spoken) when they reported what they thought was the most complex language. Chinese was the most oft reported complex language; my guess is respondents were imagining Chinese script. Interestingly, the only Chinese native speaker thought Spanish was the most complex language because “Spanish speakers speak so fast.”

Probably the most important finding though, is the fact that everyone reported a “most complex” language, and that they all readily did so. To me that indicates language’s “equal” status among linguists is not well known in the public.

Multiple Approach – Avoid Conflict UPDATED

What are your thoughts on Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device?

Earlier today I was forwarded two .pdf documnents (about 50 pgs) that I need to read for class. My preference would be to print them out for reading and have the ability to make margin notes. But I can’t do this with a clear conscience knowing the amount of paper I would use if I did this for each reading (close to 1,000 pgs for this one class). Furthermore, what will I do with the paper after the class. The readings would be a good resource, but for how long?

So I thought — maybe I should just buy a Kindle. With a Kindle I could read .pdf and .doc files, and make notes, all without paper. I know Kindles have a carbon footprint, but isn’t it less than using all that paper? A summary of a recent analysis on Kindle’s carbon footprint is found here.

I suppose I could just read the papers on my computer and make notes on scratch paper, or even a word .doc but then I wouldn’t have the source in front of me during class.

Is it really worth spending $300.00?

UPDATE: Just found a nice blog with a video about the Kindle 2.0 and .pdf. Turns out in order for Kindle to use .pdf you have to go through a conversion process that basically obliterates the format of the document. This is a deal-breaker for me. Looks like I won’t be buying a Kindle in the near future. Tables and figures are just to important to lose (or make vastly more difficult to understand).

Picture Me Crying – My Manuscript was Rejected

I’m trying not to be too dramatic about my rejection notice, but I did feel quite deflated when I found out my manuscript was rejected. It’s been nearly a week since I heard, now I’m mostly optimistic about the future of the paper.

The paper was reviewed by two experts, I was dissapointed it wasn’t three. Of course, the editor also reviewed my paper, but probably cursorily. Reviewer 2 encouraged a revision and resubmission and Reviewer 1 didn’t make a final judgment, but from a reading of the comments it was probably a reject.

To give you some background about the study, we asked students to predict their exam scores and gave them extra credit for being correct, we were measuring their metacognitive abilities. We hoped that with time and practice making predictions, their metacognition would improve. Good metacognitive abilities are associated with improved grades. In short, we were trying to help students know themselves.

We submitted the paper to Applied Cognitive Psychology because it was applied. We collected data from students in a traditional classroom — we thought this was a real strength of the paper. Reviewer 2 commented that we need to address this quasi-experimental aspect, and provide a justification.

A major comment from both Reviewer 1 and the Editor was our lack of a control group, or a group that made predictions about their exam scores and DID NOT receive extra credit for accuracy. This is a valid criticism and one that we are addressing this semester by collecting another semester’s worth of data, no small endeavor.

So, the paper was rejected, but I’m not sweating it. When it’s all said and done the paper will be even better and we’ll resubmit, probably to the same journal.

New Manuscript Status

I’ve written previously about the manuscript I submitted for publication (link). The title of the paper is Training Metacognition in the Classroom: How Incentives and Feedback Influence Exam Predictions. According to the publisher’s (Wiley) online author center, there is a new status for my submission.

I submitted the paper July 17, 2009, as of today the status is “evaluating recommendation.” This means the manuscript has been reviewed by at least 3 of my “peers” and they have made recommendations to the editor.

The best case scenario would be an accept notice, which means the paper would appear in the Applied Cognitive Psychology sometime soon. An equally good scenario would be to hear back that the paper is accepted contingent on minor revisions. In this case we would make changes to the paper and send it back.

I could also get a revise and resubmit notice, a good outcome and one that is infinitely more likely than either outright acceptance or acceptance with revisions.

Worst-case scenario is an outright rejection notice. Researchers get rejection notices for a variety of reasons. One could be the the paper is poor quality. Another could be the journal is not the right venue for the paper.  If I get a rejection notice for the former reason I will cry first, then revise and resubmit the paper elsewhere. If I’m rejected for the latter reason, I’ll just resubmit elsewhere.

Training Metacognition

I submitted my first manuscript today to Applied Cognitive Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal. The title of the submission is Training Metacognition: How Incentives and Feedback Influence Exam Predictions

There is certainly no guarantee it will be accepted but I have a good feeling about it. After a dozen iterations it is pretty well polished and I think our conclusions are sound. I’ll update with news as I get it.

So far the status online is “under review” with Dr. Robert Belli at University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie Lindsay Lohan Britney Spears Nadya Suleman Miley Cyrus David Carradine

I love looking under the hood of Blogger5000.wp.com. The statistics available on the Dashboard of WordPress are great. I can check active posts, recent visitors, search terms that directed people to my blog and all kinds of other statistics.

Until recently, my most active post was Poker 5000 with 58 views. The search term that directed users to my blog the most was “nature girl,” (try it in google images and you’ll see a picture of Meagan). But recently I wrote about seeing an Elizabeth Taylor impersonator and my “hit” statistics went through the roof. Check it out:

The Elizabeth Taylor post is wildly popular. In the picture above on the right you can see sustained growth in daily hits shortly after Taylor post was published. The search term “Elizabeth Taylor” has directed users to my blog 201 times and that does not include incorrect or abbreviated spellings of the her name (e.g. Liz Taylor has been used 11 times). The post about Taylor has been viewed 240 times since 5/21/09, by far the most popular post on Blogger5000. 

If the site were used for advertising revenue, I suppose I would only write about celebrities. For fun, I’ve titled/tagged this post with several celebrity names. For validity and to avoid conflated results, I did not include celebrities names that happen to be in the news today but are not usually (e.g. David Carradine, who was found hanged earlier yesterday in Thailand, or Eminem and Bruno who made a scene at the MTV awards). I’ll give readers an update soon about the impact of celebrity-name tags. 

UPDATE: Just read Elizabeth Taylor was in the hospital shortly after my post was published. That might explain why there was a lag between the time of publication 5/21/09 and the appearance of more blog visits… Given this new connection, I’ve added David Carradine to the title. 

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is #7 on the American Film Institute’s list of  Greatest Female Stars of All Time.  She is also Dame Commander (DBE) of the Most Excellent Order of the Brittish Empire. 

Whats most impressive though is that people impersonate her for a living. Earlier today I attended a Senior Exposition in Bryan, TX to recruit research participants. I couldn’t tell that the woman on stage retelling the biography of Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t actually Elizabeth Taylor until someone whispered she wasn’t.

Blog Roots II

T$ Update:

Lots of people are counting down the days until the semester is over, I think I have about two, maybe three weeks until the Spring semester is complete. Summer session begins in June. Our wedding is also in June. Planning is nearly complete, we still have to figure out where we will print the programs and confirm all the vendors. Honeymoon planning has barely begun beyond booking (4 B’s in a row) flights and hotel rooms. Minimal planning for the honeymoon is probably best after the planning glut the ceremony and reception required (2 R’s in a row, not as impressive).

Mike, over at thisafterthat, has been at his job for three years. He is a graphic/web designer for the greater Sioux Falls area. He is also my best man and is planning a killer bachelor party at Palisades Park. Recently, I set up a wordpress account for a Sioux Falls business, but I’m not going to quit my day job. I actually did some elementary CSS editing and created a graphic with that Stone Age software called MSPaint, maybe you’ve heard of it.

Other News:

Through a class project, I’ve been collecting electroencephalogram (EEG) data. It is a really simple experimental design related to cognitive neuroscience, but I’m excited about my first foray into human neuroscientific research. If the data supports my hypothesis it could make waves among a small group with esoteric interests (ahh…science). If I can get my phone to communicate with my computer I’ll post a picture. (Done)

Meagan interviewed at Texas A&M to start a school counseling masters program in the Fall. She is still waiting to hear back about their decision.

TX update:

Just a warning, if anyone wants to visit Meagan or I in the future, you should look into getting or renewing your passsport.

Time Capsule

The Time Capsule column I submitted has come out in the Monitor on Psychology! Print copies of the magazine came out last week and the online version was posted a day or two ago. You can check out the column at: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/04/children.html

Unlike, a peer-reviewed experimental paper, my column went directly to the editorial staff for them to make revisions. While the content is wholly mine, a few revisions were made that I didn’t recognize. For example, the title “Putting Children in the Spotlight” was not mine. One of my original titles was “Blame it on Jimmy Carter,” apparently they didn’t care for that one.  

I’m writing on Kurt Lewin, Alan Funt, & Candid Camera for the series next.