dog days of summer

Starting Sunday, my friend and I are headed across the country to present some of our research at a conference on the west coast. His wife is also going to be out of town for back-to-back weekend weddings and a week of work training in between (all in another state). That leaves Sarah to hold down the fort--with the addition of their lab/pitbull mix, Sawyer, for the week.

Both dogs are still adolescents, so they are playful and RAMBUNCTIOUS. My friend and his wife left for the first wedding early this morning, and I've been working nonstop trying to get both dogs to stop roughhousing in the house. I hope to have them ready before Sarah has to fly solo in a few days, but I think I have my work cut out for me. Already, there have been lots of timeouts in their crates and lots of positive reinforcement. Yes, I did say timeouts. Believe it or not, they've been more effective than yelling. After all, it's not appropriate to punch dogs. No matter how much you might want to.

After 3.5 hours, both of them finally decided to lay down. It was very quiet and still for a moment. Then I saw a little black and orange head slowly peek out from around a corner (Mowgli). That was a nice five minutes of peace. She saw the new dog sleeping on the floor, HER FLOOR, and froze. Too late. She'd been spotted behind enemy lines. He lazily lifted his head, and she receded into the shadows like an apparition. Unfortunately, dogs are curious about apparitions, and that was the end of nap time. After some more timeouts and playing outside (the timeout free zone), the dogs came in and went back to sleep. The end. Until, four minutes later, Gizmo crept up and pounced on Sawyer's tail...

P.S. Sarah is a saint.

conversations I have during the day

Barney: Excuse me. I have a question. What game was that you guys were playing yesterday?

Me: That's a good question, Barney. We've been playing Scrabble on our fancy new board. Sarah was concentrating very hard on winning.

Don't tell her, but she's about to lose. Try to ignore all the naughty words she spelled. Some people will do anything to win. All I wanted was to eat some cherries, which I did.

Mowgli: I am disturbed by the moral laxity in this household.

 Mediterranean House Gecko: mmmphh freemph vroophrh. Nom, nom, nom.

Mowgli: GET OUT OF MY ROOM!!!!!!!

Barney: Okay, okay. I get it. You don't like other living creatures. Me and my buddy will go talk somewhere else.

Me: There is increasing evidence that I may need a hobby.

on time orientation

This is a super-interesting, 10-minute talk about "time orientations." It's given by Philip Zimbardo, an influential social psychologist, who is perhaps best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment. The animations totally make the talk.

do the right thing

Come on Selig. You know you can do it.

Update: COME ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

r is for reject

Remember how I mentioned last week about how I was submitting research to a prestigious journal? I believe I had this to say,

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.

I shouldn't have been surprised, then, when the paper got stamped with a big red "REJECT" a week after we submitted it. (At least, that's how I imagine it happened. They notified us through email). Surprised? No. Disappointed? Sadly, yes. Apparently our results were "too specific to appeal to psychologists across disciplines." Oh well. Revise and submit elsewhere.