our garden guest

Sarah was in the house talking on the phone and spotted this guy on our back fence. He was pretty nervous about the doves on the phone lines overhead, so I couldn't get close enough for a close up. I'm guessing that trait is how he ended up so big. My six-year-old self would have killed to have had one of these in our back yard. And by 'killed,' I mean, 'would have caught and put in a fish tank, attempted to have fed crickets and spiders to, and would have literally killed, due to not knowing how to care for.'

 

who doesn't love mud?

Our St. Augustine grass has a fungus called Take All Root Rot, which destroys the root systems of the grass, eventually killing it entirely. It doesn't sound good, and it isn't, but it is actually a pretty common ailment in area yards.The neighbors, from what I hear, are combating it with fertilizer, but I read a few things online that said fertilizer actually makes it worse. I'm guessing that the previous owner of our place fertilized heavily, so I'm using peat moss to lower the soil's pH. I'm not entirely sure what the means, but the stuff I read said it was a good idea.

I don't mind dead grass so much in the short term. You won't find me complaining about having less yard to mow. But I am afraid it might be harder to re-sell the house in a few years if we don't have any grass in the yard. I can see the advertisement now.

For sale: Small house in established neighborhood. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. Kids will love making mud pies in the barren yard, just add water.

and so it begins

Journal articles are the currency in the academic job market (in my area at least). Three important things determine the 'richness' of your Curriculum Vita (fancy word we use for a resume).

1. The sheer number of your publications
2. The prestige of the journals you've been published in
3. The number of your publications where your name is listed first among the authors (psychologists usually publish in teams)

Today my adviser and I are submitting a manuscript for publication. It reports the results of an experiment that I thought would never, ever work. I pitched it to her as I was trying to demonstrate how this famous researcher was really, really wrong. I said something along the lines of, "That's stupid. If he's right, then this absurd thing should happen if we do this."

Well, we did "this," the "absurd" thing happened, and it turns out that he was totally right. I guess that's why he's famous, and I'm not.

Which brings me to my point. Although we think our findings are pretty important, so does everybody else (regarding their own findings). And so there's a screening process for every journal. An editor decides whether a manuscript is worthy of review or should be rejected before review. If he or she deems it worthy, it gets sent to two or three anonymous experts on the topic of the paper. They read it, criticize it, and make suggestions about how it could be explained or alternate ways the results could be interpreted. They also recommend whether it should be rejected outright, revised and resubmitted, or accepted without changes (extremely uncommon). The time from submission to publication (if accepted) can span more than a year.

My adviser thinks we've got a good shot at getting in a top-tier journal, so we're submitting to Psychological Science. It's one of the best journals for all of psychology research, not just social psychology research. Naturally, I'm confident that we'll be rejected immediately (they reject 85% of their submissions, the vast majority of which are from some the of the best researchers in the world), but the good news is that when we are, we can just re-submit to a less prestigious journal.

psychology of sport

Yesterday morning I went to the range to hit golf balls with another graduate student. He had never played golf before and wanted to give it a shot. (Get it? Shot?). We get along really well, and as we often do, we chatted about various things as we went about our business. After he'd whiffed (swung and missed) a few times in a row, I told him about how golf always keeps people coming back because we all hit a really great shot every once in a while. The good feeling sustains us until the next one comes along. He pointed out that golf "just puts people on a variable-ratio schedule of reinforcement."

I was thunderstruck. Of course it does! (Get it? Course?). For those unfamiliar with both golf and behaviorism, the revelation isn't extremely consequential. But now I understand why I can't stop playing sports. They're actually addictive. And I have proof!

Here's what happens. People respond to rewards. If you do something and are rewarded, you're likely to do it again. There are many different types of rewards (e.g., money, food, etc.) and some are more effective than others. Interestingly, the timing of the rewards is also a very important part of their effectiveness. It turns out that the most effective schedule is one where you're certain the reward is going to come, but you're never quite sure when (a variable-ratio schedule).

Think about it this way, you go to a casino that has two machines (small casino). One machine, the change machine, gives you four quarters every time you put in a dollar. Not very exciting.  The other machine, the slot machine, doesn't give you the same thing every time you put in a dollar, but you can be certain that you're going to win something eventually. Even though the machine gives you nothing the majority of the time, you sometimes get a few quarters, sometimes you get a few dollars, sometimes you get hundreds of dollars. There's even a chance that you'll get thousands, or even millions, of dollars. And you never know precisely when. Very exciting for most people.

Nobody ever got addicted to a change machine. Lots of people get addicted to slot machines.

Which brings me back to sports. Everyone, from the causal player such as myself to the consummate professional, all of us, we're on variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. The perfect drive, the sweetly swished three pointer, the crushing home run--we never know when exactly they'll come but we're certain they WILL come if we just try longer and harder (TWSS). And that's what brings us back, time and time again. At least now I have an excuse.

P.S. This was blogged from the toilet. Just thought you should know.

double gross

When he isn't feeling well, the dog occasionally makes a mistake and uses the bathroom (#2) in the house. He also sometimes barfs in the house, but we typically have time to run and usher him outside because he always warns us with about 15 seconds of heaving and weird gurgling sounds.

Today, he started heaving, and I quickly got up to throw him out. About 1 millisecond after I got up, he barfed on the only rug in the house. I put him outside in case there was any more, and I went to get the cleaning supplies. It was when I returned to the barf that I noticed it looked and (especially) smelled suspiciously like poop. I was forced to inspect it as I removed it from the rug, and as it turns out, it was poop. You read that correctly, the dog barfed up his own poop.

I may not be able to make the black bean burgers that I had been planning for dinner. Too soon.

nephilim among us

In the newest edition of Science, researchers compared human genes with Neanderthal genes. What did they find? People from Europe and Asia have a little, tiny bit of Neanderthal in them (Green et al., 2010). This doesn't imply that we descended from Neanderthals*, it indicates that a long, long time ago, we mated with them.

What's interesting is that the Bible may have pointed to this thousands of years ago:

• Numbers 13: 32-33 "We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."
• Genesis 6:4 "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown"

No one really knows what the Bible is talking about when it mentions these mysterious "Nephilim," but wouldn't it be interesting if they turned out to be Neanderthals?


*There is some misunderstanding about the relationship between humans and our non-human ancestors. According to evolutionary theory, humans did not descend from monkey, apes, or even 'cave men.' A simplified version of the theory is that many, many years ago there was an animal, let's call it a yarp, that was all over the place. Over time, and in response to different environmental stressors, some yarps in some areas became more human-like, whereas others in other areas became more monkey like. Eventually, we ended up with humans and monkeys and neanderthals.

some thoughts on evolution

It's true that evolution's account of the nature of the world contradicts the traditional Evangelical interpretation of the Bible's account of creation. Many Christians devote incredible resources to rally against it. I, personally, think our time and money would be better spent elsewhere.

The creation story tells us more about the character of God than the character of the world. The point of the account is not to tell us about the nature of the earth. It is to tell us about God's ultimate love, power, and authority in relation to all created things. Evolutionary theory doesn't necessarily challenge that truth.

Imagine you're in the Garden of Eden. You see Adam and Eve as God created them. They're adults, not babies. Imagine all the trees. They're not seeds or saplings. They're full grown too. Now imagine the ground under your feet. The rocks aren't brand new. Neither is the dirt. The Bible is silent about the actual age of these things, and I choose to believe, then, that God created a mature world filled with mature things. Adam and Eve would have had fused growth plates in their bones, reflecting their adulthood. Trees would have had growth rings, reflecting their status as fully formed plants. Most importantly for this discussion, the rocks and mountains would have been full of old carbon and, I'm guessing, a truck load of fossils. The whole world reflects its maturity.

This are exactly what we find when we examine God's creation. There are fossils. There are super old rocks. There is a record of things that no longer exist. There is evidence of old age. Could all this evidence be fake and part of a giant conspiracy to destroy God's authority. Sure. And that's exactly how it would have to look if we relied solely on our traditional interpretation of the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2.

But there is no biblical mandate to stick to this traditional interpretation. So we can choose to continue to reject the claims of evolutionary theorists and other scientists outright. We can say that they are doing their sciences wrong, that the rocks really aren't that old and that the fossils were created during the flood. But anyone who has read the biblical text in even the most cursory way will observe that the creation accounts are silent about the age of the objects in the universe. So when some of the smartest people in the world, people who have devoted their lives to their sciences, speak, I choose to listen. And I choose to believe their evidence because the Bible doesn't preclude me from doing so. My science, my faith, and my life are all enriched as a result.

Every semester the faculty get together to discuss the progress of the graduate students along a number of domains like teaching, department citizenship, coursework, and research. I was expecting a particularly good evaluation in the research domain, given that they changed some policies because I was doing much more than my 'fair' share.

The section about my research did include some nice comments from my adviser, but it concluded with a strange recommendation: "The faculty agreed with this assessment and recommended that you increase your commitment to research as you continue in the Ph.D. program."

Given that I was basically chastised a few weeks ago for being too committed to research, I wasn't particularly thrilled with this. So I went back and compared last semester's evaluation with this one. Aside from the comments by my adviser and the professor I TA'd for, the evaluations were the same. Word for word. Identical. Never mind how I actually followed the advice the first time.

Oh well. I'm learning a lot about how not to treat my future students.

According to the U.S. Coast Guard, tar balls thought to be from the BP oil 'spill' are now washing up on the shores of one of my favorite places. I say 'spill' because when you slosh a little milk out of a glass, you say that you've spilled milk. You really shouldn't use the same word for when you've 'spilled' more than 1,000,000 gallons of milk every day for 15 days.

I'd like to blame someone, but we probably wouldn't need offshore oil drilling if I (and everyone else) didn't use oil and its byproducts to (a) make everything we use and own (plastic is made from oil) and (b) power all of those things (electricity comes from oil).

So I guess it's mostly our fault.

A brief series of unfortunate events:

1. Drove 45 minutes to school this morning on a day off to have breakfast with my lab and adviser.
2. Checked my email when I arrived and saw that my adviser was sick and rescheduled the breakfast for Tuesday.
3. Returned to my new car and saw that someone had hit it, resulting in a series of 12-inch gashes in the paint and body in the lower driver's door.
4. Drove 45 minutes home obsessing about the car in silence.
5. Got home and re-assessed the damage: Not quite as bad as I kept imagining it, but still pretty ugly.

I have literally only driven the car 4 times since we bought it. And it's not one of those, "oh well, at least now you don't have to worry about it getting dinged up" moments. There were already two dings on the back bumper. Those were the "don't worry about it" dings. These gashes are ugly and deep, and I'm going to see them every single time I get in the car. At least it wasn't worse--but if it was, it probably would have been worth it to file the insurance claim and get it fixed. I'm pretty bummed out.

And I just got bitten by two mosquitoes.

We just got a letter from the county about our property value. The bad news: we're going to owe about $700 more in property taxes this year. The good news: we're going to owe more in taxes because our property value went up 18% since last year's appraisal. That's a lot.