Random Thoughts II

Ever notice how people say "dead body" rather than just body? If you've found a body in the duct work of an elementary school (as police in Phoenix did today) why do journalists say police found a dead body? It's pretty obvious it's a dead one otherwise they'd say they've found a person. Go figure.

Through googling I found a blog (loaded with comments) about how horribly against-God IVF (in vitro fertilization) is. Evidently quite a few Christians think if a woman can't get pregnant, God has other plans for her. Messing with "god's will" through IVF is wrong evidently, but none of them think open-heart surgery and diabetes medication is. Go figure.

Some journalists have nothing better to do than pick at nits about whether Barack Obama was correct in using flack jacket in a press release instead of Flak jacket or whatever the current correct AP style is. Yeah, one dictionary says it can be spelled both ways, but AP style probably has it one way. In any case, no one should expect a public figure to use AP style!

I love Grey's Anatomy and watch every episode. Last night Sleyed and I watched the season finale online since we had missed it while flying to NH for the big event. I thought it was the best of the finales we watched (Lost, 24, Desperate Housewives, Heroes) but still a bit disappointing. Do all of the women have to end up being pathetic, wimpy-dimpy basket cases?

I've found a couple of blogs about Newfies. Around here, we love newfs -- flying fur and slobber and all. Ayla likes ice cubes too. Orion has a friend named Wet for obvious reasons. Nanook is a Landseer who appears to be owned by a Norwegian who got him and his Newfy sib bibs that say "Drool if you're Norwegian" (also Spit Happens). Kodos posts videos of himself and is huge. Haley doesn't have her own blog but she is one seriously cute puppy!

Graduation!

I actually have a PhD now!

There's so much to say about the trip back to NH for the event - seeing 2 U.S. Presidents speak, what my advisor said about me at the luncheon, getting hooded and walking around town in the garb, recovering my golf clubs from the storage unit, the lost luggage (including the PhD diploma!!!!) . . .


The Luncheon
My dad came with us to NH for the event and was a good sport about traveling. He hadn't been on a plane for decades. The weather was crap, but typical NH. We got in at about 2am and had to wake up early the next morning for the "new PhDs" luncheon.

The luncheon was interesting. Evidently it's the occasion for advisors to talk about their students and their students to rebut. I was a little worried about what mine would say about me but she was amazingly complimentary. I was genuinely surprised.

The Graduation Ceremony
We took my dad out to the coast for lobster that night and woke up bright and early the next day to get to the stadium for the graduation ceremony. We left at around 7am so that we could park for a ceremony. We had to walk about a mile to the stadium. Then we waited, got rained on, and waited some more. I was off by myself with the other graduating PhDs.

Bill Clinton and George Bush spoke. I had an amazing seat - at the edge of a row right in front of the stage. I had only one person in front of me. I hoped that the Presidents would walk down our aisle but they went down the next one, shaking hands along the way. It would have been so amazingly neat to be able to meet them, but it didn't happen. While waiting to get hooded, I was so full of anticipation. Not knowing what these ceremonies are like, I invented a picture of what the hooding would be like.

On one hand, I hoped that one or both of the Presidents would assist with the hooding like Gore did years ago when he spoke. On the other hand, I hoped we would get the same kind of hooding that the honorary doctorates received, but nope. They did have us go up on stage, and have the hood placed on (by our advisors), but they just read off our names, put the hood on (two seconds) and that was that. Once we had all walked across stage they did the whole "By the power invested in me by the trustees of the university.... blah blah blah, I pronounce you blah blah blah" while we were seated.

I have to say that I was disappointed by how perfunctory the hooding was.

The Presidents took off right before all the PhDs got up on stage to be hooded. That was a disappointment too.

Oh well. I think I just expected too much.
-- Kind of sounds like graduate school!

We walked around town afterward; my dad really wanted me to keep the garb on so I did. I figured why the hell not; it cost enough! While we sat and had coffee and bagels several people came up to congratulate me and say they saw me on TV. Apparently it was televised on NH public TV. According to my family I was the only graduate who got a close-up shot on the big-screen projector.

To celebrate we ate at my absolute favorite restaurant. I had my absolute favorite food: lobster ravioli. And, for the first time I ate the whole serving. I was so stuffed, but it was worth it. Who knows when we'll be back again.

We had clam chowder at our favorite clam shack the next day, went birdwatching at Plum Island, and showed my dad the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, ME.

The Golf Clubs
On a whim we stopped at the apartment buildings we lived at TWO YEARS AGO to see if the golf clubs I had forgotten were still around. Much to my surprise they were. They had been in an unlocked area in an UNLOCKED shed. We also spotted a dining room table, chairs, and lamps we had to leave behind because we didn't have space in the U-Haul. I thought about checking the clubs but ended up giving them to my friend who came up from Baltimore for graduation. She's more likely to actually use them. I just asked her to give them back to me if she ever doesn't want them anymore because they are the clubs I used throughout high school when I was on the golf team and the sand wedge and putter were graduation gifts (for my BA).

Lost Bags
We flew home bright and early. I had to check my bag at the door of the airplane because the flight attendant insisted there wasn't enough space. I never check luggage for fear of them losing my stuff. So, what do know? They almost lost the bag and also my dad's bag. My diploma was inside! I wasn't terribly worried because nothing in my bag was truly irreplacable. I could get a new diploma printed (at a significant charge). What really made me anxious was that they had the bag I was planning to use for our Japan trip. Fortunately we got the bags back a day later. The airline had a courrier drive them to my house - about 200 miles away from the airport. My diploma was still inside, unharmed.

Clinton's Speech


Bush's Speech

Never E'Neuf Newfs!

This afternoon at lunch Sleyed mentioned something about how cute Landseer newfs are and before we knew it we were talking about getting another newf. Not seriously talking - just having fun imagining life with two newfs. If we had enough land and money, I'm sure we'd have nine newfies...

There are a bunch of cute stories about "You know your Newf is big when..." at Drulzelot, a Newf blog. I can relate to this one:

"... driving with my Mack, who was a very long slabby dog, and when I was in paying for my gas, the teller asked me how many dogs I had in the car. I answered "Just one..." and then followed her line of vision, to see Mack standing in the back seat of my car with his head out one side window, and part of his tail sticking out the window on the other side, wagging..."

Speaking of her Royal Newfssance, Katy has been the subject of a bit of concern ever since she wigged out when our neighbor had a new roof put on his house last week. Actually, I think her little panic attacks started a few months ago when she got spooked by kids lighting off fire crackers behind the science building. She hesitated to walk on campus and is just now coming around.

Then the roofers arrived, followed by balloon stampede weekend with the sound of hot air balloon firings over our house, and then more fireworks to close the fetsival. She was so freaked out the night of the fireworks that she slept in the bathtub one night and refused to eat one of her "munchy snacks." She cowered for a week and acted afraid of just about everything, including us at one point.

She's on the mend now. Today the Baroness von Roughenhausen worked up enough confidence to wander off to the alley and BOTH neighbor yards while I was outside with her weeding. We weeded together for a while but she got bored and wandered off a few times. She came back everytime I called her so I figured her freedom outside would be good for confidence building.

She loved it - tearing around the yard at high speed, juking imaginary dogs, play bowing, etc. I love to see her happy. It's also wonderful that she seems to like pulling weeds - it's the weirdest thing. She only pulls the weeds!

We aren't getting another newf, but it sure is tempting sometimes. She's a big sweetheart - very protective, emotionally sensitive, agreeable. And, when I've been working at my laptop too long, she's eager to make me take a break for the towel game.

Stupid Towel Game is her favorite. She holds one corner of a kitchen towel in her mouth while one of us holds another corner. Then we flip the towel around in the air like you would a jump rope very fast until it forms a long, tight spiral. She goes nuts when it hits her on the top of her giant head. I've played STG so long that my arm hurts... and still she asks for more.

The pictures capture what I was confronted with every few hours while writing my dissertation.

Newfy Drool-o-Meter

Found at Nanook the Newfoundland, the Newfy Drool-o-Meter Key:

Dry Mouth: Zero interest or appreciation for the item in question - not worth drooling over.

Minicicles: Just the tiniest hint of a droolcicle starting at either corner of the mouth. Drool worthy? Barely.

One-Slinger: The treat is good - good enough to get the juices flowing but not so good that I would offer it as an aperitif on a first date with Sunshade.

Two-Slinger: Now we're talking! The drool is even, it's sling-able, and it has been earned.

Simultaneous-Ropes-to-the-Floor: The highest honor I, or any newf, can offer a treat or toy. So delicious and delightful that the drool flows like water.

We call Katy's version of this the "drool fangs" but I like this one too.

Female Infanticide

Primate groups are rife with infanticide. Now there's more evidence females kill each other's babies too.
Typically, it is the newcomer males who kill infants in a group. Infanticide usually happens in species where males leave their natal groups (the ones they were born in). At maturity they leave to form their own group or join an existing one. By killing babies, the new males bring the nursing females back into estrus sooner so they are able to impregnate them and sire their own offspring right away rather than waiting the 3-4 years it would take for the females to wean their babies sired by the previous male and become fertile again.

When infanticide was first observed in primates, scientists thought it was pathological. Later the careful detective work of primatologist Sarah Hrdy demonstrated that infanticide was an adaptive reproductive strategy for males.

I think the same thing might be happening with the discovery of female infanticide in primates.

When Jane Goodall first observed a mother-daughter pair of chimps who killed, in seemingly systematic fashion, the offspring of other females in their troop, she thought the pair might be mentally off - perhaps psychotic. Serial killers even! At one point, Goodall co-authored an article with an American personality psychologist in which they created personality profiles of all of the females in the troop. They showed that the two females (Passion and Pom) were different from the other females.

Even with this new observation of female infanticide, the behavior is unusual and not normal so far as anyone knows right now.

It all leads me to question whether this is abnormal behavior/mental illness in chimps or some sort of adaptive reproductive strategy in which the females are taking out the competition.

I think it is also possible that it could be both abnormal *and* adaptive, but doesn't warrant a label of mental illness. For aberrant behavior to be a "mental illness" it has to be maladaptive. There isn't a whole lot of evidence that wild primates have any mental illness. That's associated with captivity - a fact that would be totally unsurprising to Freud who believed that Civilization is what causes our discontent.

Uakari Monkey & The Origin of Blushing

It is said that humans are the only animal that blushes.

Uakari monkeys have bright red faces and are unusual among primates for it. But they don't blush. I don't know how anyone would be able to tell even if they did!

The evolutionary origin of their bright red faces is as about as big of a mystery as why humans blush.

One theory about uakari monkey facial redness is that it's a sexually selected trait associated with testosterone. A related theory says it advertizes health.

These neat-o small (9 pound) monkeys live in South America, really are that white (at least this subspecies), and are reputed to be monogamous.

Uakaris, along with bearded saki monkeys, might be the only primates other than humans that form large groups made up of monogamous pairs. These monkeys are NOT well studied so they may not actually be monogamous. The ARKive site has some really great footage of uakaris.

Blushing, like any other nonverbal behavior with communicative value, fascinates me both academically and personally. You see, seldom am I embarrased to speak in public; it's an occupational hazard after all, but, every once in a while a totally uncontrollable and horrible blush sweeps across my face, neck, and upper chest. I can feel my skin heat up, sometimes I sweat. What is weird is that rarely in such instances do I actually feel embarrassed, yet there it is blazing, bright freaking red, red, red. I even blush alone. I think it must be related to hot flashes, but I am way too young for that. To add insult to injury, I am incredibly pale-skinned, so even the slightest blush can be seen from afar, like the fire truck roaring down the street yelling at everyone to get the hell out of its way.

Bright red faces are not unknown in the animal kindom. Primates, and famously humans, become red with anger. Here the red signals, indeed, SHOUTS: Get away!!!

I would argue that reddened faces during anger make it possible for socially grouping animals to maintain those groups in spite of frequent conflicts which inevitably emerge whenever individuals must live together and use the same resource pool. Having a signal that indicates to everyone else that you are pissed off and which prompts others to get away from you protects everyone from fighting, injury and group disintegration.

Why we would show rage on our faces rather than some other part of the body intrigued Darwin, who wrote about that and the subject of emotion and facial expression in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. I love picking up the book and reading it but I find it incredibly frustrating because it is mostly (80% I'd say) descriptive with little evolutionary theorizing about why animals and humans have the facial expressions they do, including that of shame. Needless to say, in the last few days of pondering my impending unemployment, I thought about writing a textbook about nonverbal communication across animal species! I found out when prepping my nonverbal behavior seminar that there isn't anything on the market that does even a decent job of reviewing the relevant research. Much of what exists is pop-psychology rubbish.

But, back to the point. Rage and shame are not the same, but maybe both work to hold groups together. Darwin didn't offer up a compelling theory of why people, alone in the animal kingdom, blush. Perhaps, as he hints, it has something to do with us being one of the few species that has a self-concept. In order to blush, you have to know you exist independently from others. This is why humans don't tend to blush until about age two, right around the same time they "individuate" and realize they are not the same person as mom and dad. Congenitally deaf and blind people blush.

The one theory that Darwin presents and subsequently rejects in The Expression argues that the Creator (today we'd call it an Intelligent Designer) made us blush when we do something that violates the rules of our social group so that others will know we regret it. I like the theory a bit. Yet like Darwin, I think evolutionary forces made it so. If a signal makes others want to keep us on the island when we screw up, such a signal could evolve through natural selection. It could also have arisen through group selection, sexual selection, or random genetic drift.

You know what's interesting? The face becomes red and then we feel the heat from the flush. Thus, others see the signal before we even know we're blushing.

The World's Strangest Looking Monkey

Among the world's strangest looking monkeys is the snub-nosed langur, the species I chose for my third primate pastel.

Many monkeys, and this one in particular, bare a striking resemblance to our depictions of extraterrestrial beings, a coincidence noticed by feminist historian of science and technology, Donna Haraway, in her thought-provoking but dense tome, Primate Visions. If you're curious about the connection Haraway draws between primatology, cybernetics, and space exploration, her book is fairly reviewed by (male) primatologist Robin Dunbar here.

The golden or snub-nosed langur (rhinopithecus roxellana) is a rare species that lives in temperarate broad-leaf and coniferous mountain forests in southwestern China near Tibet. They live in huge troops which have been known to join up from time to time in bands that can contain to 600 individuals. This is very unusual for a primate species. Most live in much, much smaller groups.

Like many other "old world monkeys," the snub-nosed langur's basic grouping pattern consists of one male with 3-4 females and their offspring. Such groups are called "one male units" or OMUs, aka harems.

You can view photos and even video clips of this neat primate at a really neat website called Arkive.org. Check it out! It's really cool.

What's in a name?

A Rose by any other name may smell as sweet but would be more likely to pursue a career in math and science if you believe the results of a study by economist David Figlio that will be published soon in the Journal of Human Resources. I got the press release this morning, through the grapevine, which being as I live in the Petite Provence of Washington is very à-propos.

You can read the press release if you want to here. It is amusing, but I can tell you that it basically says girls with feminine names like Anna, Elizabeth, and Emily are less likely to study math and science after age 16 than their peers with more masculine-sounding names like Alex, Abigail, and Lauren which are evidently names judged to be less feminine. The conclusion is that girls with girly names live up to social expectations that they aren't any good at math.

Unfortunately the study has not been published yet so I could not read the article to determine whether this is junk science. Grrr.

It's great that interesting studies get good press, but the system that exists makes it incredibly difficult to critique a study at the time it becomes news. Later when the study is actually published, it's yesterday's long-forgotten news but people come away with the impression they should think carefully about what they name their kids because THE NAME WILL HAVE SERIOUS LIFE-LONG CONSEQUENCES!

Sure, the article went through peer review, but I suspect a lot of shitty science gets published because someone knows the editor or reviewers or someone else so the wheel gets greased. The author has published before on this topic - one I remember hit the press a few months ago - and said people with black names like "Shaniqua" fare more poorly in life than people with names like Robert and Elizabeth.

It may well be that girls with more masculine names end up being encouraged to pursue math and science or at least aren't subtly discouraged, but I think the findings may very well be the product of statistical error.

I don't know what the sample size is, but if it is large one can turn up statistically significant results with very small effect sizes. I would be incredibly surprised if the effect size for name on math/science achievement is large or even moderate. If it's a small effect, as I suspect it is, the finding is pretty much meaningless in real life.

Another problem is that there simply are not that many girls with gender incongruent names so the sub-sample size is small compared with the sample of girls with feminine names. Small sample size is associated with much more variance in outcome than large samples. Perhaps the 5 girls with masculine names just coincidentally happened to have pursued math and science. It's a statistical fluke.

If it is a real effect, then just what do teachers, peers, and parents do to get masculine-named girls to pursue math and science - AND - is the effect of NAME more or less damning than LOOKS?

Is it possible to be a very attractive woman and pursue math and science successfully?

Of course it is, but is it harder?

My personal observations and experience lead me to believe that pretty women have a much harder time in academia (the realm I am familiar with) than women who look less feminine. There's not a lot of make-up, trendy clothes, sexy hair and the like among women in academia, at least at work. It's a rather butch crowd in my experience.

Perhaps women have learned early in their careers that in order to be taken seriously and to not get sexually harassed as much when dealing with the old boys network, it's wise to tone down femininity.

Perhaps some combination of social pressure and niche selection is responsible for the finding that names affect career path. Or, maybe it is just a statistical fluke.

Either way, I won't be too concerned that my hypothetical daughter won't like math and science or excel in those subjects because I name her Elizabeth and everyone calls her Betty. Her parents will be surprised if she doesn't excel in those subjects given the kind of family and upbringing she will have! But if hypothetical daughter doesn't pursue math and science, the last thing I'd blame is her name and peer pressure.

Problem: HOW TO GET INTO A RESEARCH NETWORK?

Will I be an unemployed, but hopefully not unemployable, PhD?

That thought has maked my stomach churn lately. I have several applications out, in various places, for a variety of types of work, but I still have this sinking feeling that I will need to figure out: 1) how to pay my student loans which will become due SOON, 2) how to make myself more employable in academia, 3) what to do to pass the time.

THE EASY PROBLEMS

Three is easy; I've got Pimsleur Japanese plus hiragana and katakana to learn. I should be doing that anyway to prepare for going Japan, but assuming none of my application pan out, I can throw myself into language study. I could resume my study of Arabic and French. I also have endless art project ideas. There's the primate portrait pastel series, the Curious George themed toybox for some lucky kid, paper-making, beadwork, and simple furniture items like tables and an ottoman. That could keep me busy for a couple of years.

In the meantime I can take care of the first problem with the dreaded temp work. Every time I realize that is the only definitive way to make money in this town without getting a 'real' job in some other field, I feel a little vomit forming in the back of my throat. I went down the temp path years ago after I couldn't locate a worthwhile job here after college graduation. Eventually I went off to graduate school. And look where I am - right smack dab where I started, but now I have a pretty huge diploma and will most likely have to leave again. And they say there isn't a brain drain here.

THE Publish or Perish PROBLEM

But what I should really focus on is the second problem - how to make myself more employable in academia. I have a great teaching CV. Zero problem there, so far as I know. What I lack is publications.

What has always been the bane of my existance as a graduate student is that I have no publications. My advisor/program did not coach me through any of that and I haven't found outside people who publish a lot who will take me under their wing. The conferences I have presented at and attended are very clique-ish. If you aren't a "name" or at a university where the 'cool' research is being conducted, forget about meaningful networking. And this field is an 'outsider' field so you'd think they would go out of their way to help others get into it.

What I need is a research mentor and/or a collaborator who is experienced with publishing. I haven't found someone who will let me work on one of their projects. I have my own research project ideas - tons of them - that isn't the problem. I need someone I can trust who will vet them and help me turn the ideas into publishable documents.

I have two potential papers in addition to the one I have been trying to get published. It recently got rejected, for the fourth time, and so now I have to figure out which bottom barrel journal to try just to get it published. I should also rework my dissertation and a project I did with one of my thesis students. The dissertation needs to be seriously boiled down and the thesis - pretty much rewritten. I know I need help. The trouble is, I have no idea who will actually help me on this one.

So, I have two problems associated with getting publications that are both essentially about lacking an academic network.

What do you do to get into a research network?

Orangutan Pastel

Here's my second attempt at a pastel - an adult male 'cheek padder' orangutan. I worked from a photo of an individual I believe is named Adik. Adik lives in Borneo and as you can tell from his cheek phalanges, he is a dominant male.

In Borneo, only dominant males develop secondary sexual characteristics such as full cheek pads, deep voice, and a huge size. Subordinate males who live in the dominant male's territory do not develop these traits. No knows quite why the so-called 'Peter Pan' males fail to develop. It may be stress-induced dwarfism or hormonal suppression possibly caused by pheromones emited by the dominant male. If the dominant male leaves or dies, the most dominant of the subordinate males in the area mature and become the dominant male with all of the associated physical characteristics. Orangutans are the only primate known to display two different coexisting adult male morphs. Of course there's a scientific term for it. It's called bimaturism, but some also call it arrested development.

Besides being physically stunted, the Peter Pan rangs might also be considered socially stunted. Females prefer to mate with the dominant males, so in order for subordinate males produce progeny they often resort to alternative strategies: rape or what primatologists call forced copulation. Females have evolved strategies for dealing with the threat of forced copulations. Lone females will travel to be closer to a dominant male. If she can't find one she seeks out other females. When no dominant male is nearby but a subordinate Peter Pan male is, females tend to stick closer together.

This is significant because orangutans are a solitary species. Fruiting trees are sparsely scattered in their habitat and don't come into season all at once so the habitat cannot support group foraging. Instead, rangs forage individually to be sure to get enough to eat and also leave enough to ripen for later. For females this artifact of habitat opens the door to being harassed by subordinate males. Dominant males rarely force copulations.

Obviously, one can draw some very interesting and provactive comparisons between humans and orangutans.


*** This pastel took a lot longer than the previous pastel I did on account of the time it took to put the tiny hairs on his face. I really like this one. I like how his eyes, nose, and lips turned out. I think he has a very typical orang expression.

My next pastel will be of a monkey without hair on its face. Candidates are: douc langur, snub-nosed langur, and bald uakari. I am leaning toward the snub-nosed langur because it has a very strange face - it's blue! Plus it is an incredibly rare species; I could not locate a single decent source to link to. The one I found contained plagiarized material.

Love it! Hate it :-(

Now that my dissertation is officially done I have been on R&R, doing other projects - mostly gardening and art. It is surprisingly easy to go from one day to the next without paying much attention to what the date is, or as I found out this morning, what day of the week it is! To Sleyed from bed early this morning:
You're going to work?!
At the UB?!
Why?!
It's Saturday!!!!
I said with conviction. Uh ooops.

Last night I finally opened the box that contained my doctoral robe. I tried it on and as anyone who knows me well might have guessed, my eyes watered. Yep, I hope the novelty wears off by the time I am actually hooded on stage in front of two former U.S. Presidents so I don't cry. I don't know why I get so emotional about stuff like this, but I have always and I probably always will. Being the first in my family to go to college, it's an extra-special achievement that I went on to get a PhD too. Why colleges and universities do not consider First Generation College a quality that adds to the "diversity" of the place I don't understand. It may be "hidden" but so is sexual orientation and that qualifies. Maybe I just am frustrated with the prospects of finding a position in academia - for so many reasons. I have applications out so we'll see. I may be pouring coffee for minimum wage just to pay off student loans for my BA... Hate that.

My manuscript got rejected for publication again. Hate that. How many times does your article have to be rejected before you are justified in scrapping it?

My new hair cut is fabulous. I absolutely adore it. The chick who cut my hair really did a great job. I wish she had nailed the color too. She put highlights in, but they came out way too streaky. She's going to fix them next week. Not being someone who has done this a lot before - the last time I really got my hair cut was about 10 years ago! - I don't know whether I should expect to have to pay for the color re-do or not. I don't think I should because The costumer is always right, right? I was pleasantly surprised that it only cost $95 for the cut, color, and style. Tipping is another thing I don't get - how much are you expected to tip for this sort of service?

Although I don't have much money left over from savings, I still treated my family to a few little "home improvements." The best new addition is the red habatoi silk comforter I got from Pottery Barn. Love it!!! Also, I got a great Hiroshige print (the one I have been admiring) from my FIL. I found a suitable frame for it yesterday and picked out the ideal spot. It'll be hung later today. Love it too!

In a few weeks I will be able to hang up the next project - a series of hands of fatima that FIL is scroll sawing for me. I plan to paint them black, hang them above the bed, and put tea lights behind them. I can't wait to see how they turn out and what interesting shadows they will cast. When I told Sleyed where they would go I refered to them as hand of fatimas not hands of fatima. He doesn't leave work - ever. Mr. Grammarian immediately exclaimed: So cool! I thought he was approving the project! But no - he wanted to discuss something that he read in Words & Rules or some other text. I didn't mind really; it was actually pretty interesting that in spoken lanaguage we have very clear rules about pluralizing words but in writing the rules aren't always the same. The hand of fatima thing was a perfect example.

The next project will be hanging the new shelves that will eventually display my primate pastel series. I'm doing a cheek-padder orangutan.

Regina Spektor!!!

I'm not usually blown away by talent but last night Regina Spektor did just that. She played a small venue at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland to a standing crowd full of mostly young women. It took a long time for her to finally come on stage, and when she did her first performance left no doubt that we were all in for a fantastic show.

It took a bit of research but I was able to discover a You Tube clip of the song she opened with, Ain't No Cover, which she performed a cappela while tapping her microphone softly to mimic a heartbeat.



Her band wasn't with her, which if you believe this review, made us all lucky! When she got up from her piano to play "That Time" she told us all a story about her green guitar and then she forgot the lyrics! She brushed it off demurely and then got rolling on the third attempt. I think it only heightened the anticipation for one of her best songs. Here's a YouTube clip of her telling us about the guitar - we were the first to hear her use it and though it was out of tune she played on, tuning her voice to it.



She played for about 90 minutes and did a four song encore that included a cover of a John Lennon song. She played several songs off of her album Begin to Hope, including Fidelity, On the Radio, Summer In the City, Samson, and Apres Moi. I enjoyed seeing which songs appeared to be her favorites - she belted out Apres Moi so powerfully it was impossible not to feel her passion. She sang Summer in the City very delicately; it was sweet actually.

Regina writes her own lyrics and music and performs them with amazing feats of vocal gymnastics with such gusto, yet diffidence, that it is hard to feel like she is up there just to show off. At one point during "Poor Little Rich Boy" she played three instruments at once, never missing a single beat. Her range is amazing and when you throw in the music, smart lyrics, her passion, you get one hell of a talented individual.

Ravens: Masters of Deceit

Spiegel Online features well-written article about the intelligence of ravens; it's well-worth the read. It talks about the birds hanging on to the tails of boars to get pulled through the snow on their backs, playing dead next to a carcass to fool another raven into leaving the food alone, and other displays of intelligence. It also mentions a theory about how raven behavior might have driven the cooperative hunting seen among wolves. Very interesting. Though it's short on scientific findings, the shared anecdotes are entertaining. I also wish stories like these included references to the published science behind the story. I don't have time to go track it all down on my own!

Ravens look similar to crows but are much larger. You can easily see the difference in the photo above. Some people have raised crows, ravens, and starlings from birth to be pets. Mozart's starling became famous and possibly wrote one of his most famous pieces of music. Crows have been reputed to be able to learn to talk, but so have some dogs and cats whose owners swear they meow and moan things like "mama."

I've never met a talking crow but I did meet one once in the aviary here in town that vocalized every time Sleyed and I walked away and only when we walked away. It shut up when we reappeared. I think that qualifies as play. Crows are smart like ravens. Indeed, I've never heard of a dumb member of the corvid family. I've met the ravens of the Tower of London. They were aloof, but they meet a lot of people so it's got to be difficult to make an impression on them! Legend has it that if the ravens who live at the Tower of London ever leave, the monarchy of England will fall.

A new version of the Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich, will be published in June. I have the original on my shelf and recommend it to anyone who is interested in the minds of animals, particularly corvids.

Evidently some crows, magpies, jays, and ravens are kept captive in cages in the U.K. called "Larsen Traps" that use the captive corvid to attract another to keep the birds from interfering with "game birds" and song bird populations. The ACT website is interesting and highlights the hazards of human attemps to manage wildlife.

What's the temperament of that dog?

That was the question I was asked last week when Katy came face to face with a pet macaw.

The macaw stood perched on the iron fence enclosing the outdoor seating area of a popular Big Brand coffee shop. It had been squacking its fool head off and upsetting Katy while we were waiting outside the local coffee shop around the corner. We walked up the other coffee place to see what was making all the noise. It took Katy a while to spot the bird. She wanted to run away from the frightening phoenix. I have been trying to acclimate her to things that scare her by immersion therapy so we stayed a while, about four feet from the bird. She wanted to leave.

The guy who ostensibly belonged to the bird asked about Katy's temperament and I replied she's a Newfoundland and most are very friendly but this one is skiddish. Sleyed appeared with coffee from around the corner and we left. Later I saw the dude walking down the street with the bird on his shoulder.

Those who know me well know how I feel about people owning non-domesticated species as pets.

Anyhow, Katy is not what I would call a "bird dog" in spite of the common breeding heritage of Newfs and retrievers. She thinks the ducks on campus are interesting and I haven't seen a great deal of evidence that she would try to kill a bird. If I allowed her to chase ducks, I think she'd be more likely to chase them into the water in oder to swim around with them, maybe mouth one a little if she caught one, but then who knows what - lick it to death? Max is th eone with the kill instinct. He is a bird dog, and if he had received proper training, he would be the classic, hard-working spaniel who runs out ahead to flush the pheasants for Katy to retrieve and deliver gently back to us. She might have been a good bird dog. She follows direction well, is eager to please, and learns from mistakes if she is corrected in time. BUT she hates loud noises, so someone would have to hunt with a silent rifle or shot gun in order for her to try her paws at bird dogging. I think pulling is her true forte, and that really is what her breed was created to do. Eventually we'll get her hooked up with a cart she can pull.

Talk About A Wild Hair

Now that the cat is out of the bag about what I research, I suppose the occassional hair reference or post devoted entirely to grooming will not come as a surprise.

I made an appointment to get my hair chopped off today. It's been a long time in the making and is now long enough that I could easily lose ten inches and still be able to pull it back in a short ponytail. I will donate my chopped hair to Locks of Love, the outfit that makes wigs for kids with cancer.

Although I like having long hair because it requires little maintenance, it is not totally maintenance free. I spend less than a minute "styling" it so that part is wonderful, but it is getting so long and heavy that the time it takes to wash and brush it is becoming a nuissance. Her Royal Highness the Newfsance can tell when I am brushing my hair because of the telltale sounds. I will admit that somedays I just braid it without brushing it because I don't feel like spending 20 masochistic minutes making it smooth. It is also incredibly heavy and since I don't blow it dry, it remains heavy for a long time until the water evaporates. I usually wash it in the evening so it can dry while I sleep.

I am ready for my summer buzz cut. When we get Zam the Spaniel buzzed for the summer he comes home with a fun short do we call the puppy cut. The few ounces he loses seem to come back in the form of pounds more youthful energy. We'll see what the puppy cut does for me!

Here's how it will look:

Field Research

One of my options now that I am finished with school is to look for interesting places to do fieldwork or teach. I would love to stay where I am at, but the reality is that I may not be able to. Good jobs for PhDs are scarce in my isolated little desert outpost.

Some of the places I look for jobs include the Teaching of Psychology listserve, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Social Psych Network job posting forum, and PIN where today I spotted an advertisement for an assistant professor of primatology in Japan. I am not qualified, but any time I learn about an open position in primatology I get really excited. Japan has a long history of primate field research. In fact, it predates Jane Goodall's pioneering study. To see an open position there is surprising; I would be even more suprised to see one in this country. They are exceptionally rare.

The best way to be a bona fide primatologist is to do fieldwork. I don't think I can really be taken seriously as a primatologist until I conduct field research on a nonhuman primate species. Otherwise, I will always be a psychologist to many people. Who knows, maybe if I publish my research in a primatology journal (there are only two - one U.S. and one Japanese) that would make me legit. I doubt my research would be considered for publication in these two journals however. That would take a major change in their editorial policy. So, field research looks like an attractive possibility.


I learned French so that I could read books like Terre des Hommes and Le Petit Prince but also so that if and when the right time came, I could go do field research in Francophone Africa either studying gorillas or lemurs. The right time may be fast approaching. I may not be able to secure a job here; my DH may not be able to advance his career here; it looks like I won't be able to start a family; and there is a field research position with the WCS that actually pays for the research assistant's travel, insurance, meals, and accommodations to study gorillas at Mbeli Bai. The gorillas at Mbeli Bai were in the news a while back when researchers there reported the first ever observations of wild gorilla tool use.

It is nearly impossible to get paid to study primates as a field worker and very few research sites support anyone other than the P.I. Most often, to do field work, you have to pay for your flight and travel to the field site which can run around $3,500 and then also pay for all of your meals, housing, and incidentals including gear like binos, boots, rain gear, tent, etc. And you have to be willing to commit to at least 6 months in virtual isolation. You also have to be prepared to spend long days in the field on anti-malarial medication with all sorts of insects, snakes, and other nasties.

It's a job for the crazy.

Bingo bango bongo I don't want to go to Congo...
not just yet anyway!

I'll wait until I for certain don't have a job, read the Heart of Darkness, and then seriously consider the possibility of a major life adventure (but only if Sleyed wants to join me!).

Being Neurotic Can Kill You

Dan Mroczek, a developmental psychologist working with longitudinal data from the Department of Veterans Affairs, has found that men who became less neurotic with age had a lower risk of mortality.

So what does it mean to be neurotic?

In the realm of abnormal psychology there are two broad classes of mental illness: psychoticism and neuroticism. All types of mental illness can more or less be fit into one category or the other. Conditions like schizophrenia, dissociative fugue, and Alzheimer's are psychotic disorders because each involves a break with reality, the hallmark of psychoticism. Neuroticism on the other hand encompasses mood disorders of which depression and OCD are great examples.

Just as with physical health, there is no a black and white distinction between health and illness in psychology. Mroczek's research suggest people should be concerned about the long-term side effects of being even slightly neurotic.

According to his study, small increases in neuroticism have harmful effects. "Participants with as little as a one-unit increase in neuroticism over the course of the study were shown to have a 40 percent higher chance of death than a participant who showed no change" according to the press release. The study will be published next month.

Just how and why being a worrywort, touchy, or moody affects health is not known.

Mroczek suspects that it might have something to do with an inability to effectively deal with stress.

Stress can corrode the immune system that guards our health through a chemical called cortisol. Stress causes our bodies to release cortisol. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In small amounts, cortisol actually helps our immune system function better. In larger amounts it shuts down the immune system and can seriously damage many organs, including the brain.

Cortisol can be kept down by avoiding situations that cause stress or by coping more effectively with stress. Unfortunately, many people get wrapped up in taking the edge off of the daily assaults of life by resorting to bad habits like smoking, drinking, and over-eating. Those ways of coping decrease subjective stress but they don't actually do anything to lower cortisol levels. In fact, smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol harms the immune system because those chemicals kill vital white blood cells.

Massage is one highly effective way to cope with stress. It has measurable, positive effects on the immune system. So does exercise.

Being neurotic can kill you, but it does not have to. The best thing people can do to improve health is to stop smoking, drink less, get exercise and trade back rubs with a loved one.

Dissertation Defense - The Verdict Is In

Although I've had a few days to reflect on the while process of successfully defending my dissertation, I can't say that I have any profound thoughts on it. It was a lot of work, but in the end, it was completely manageable. Other than one melt down over whether my SPSS spreadsheet was so screwed up once it got imported into SPSS that it would be worthless -AND- the many numerous small assaults on my patience with detail, it was a relatively emotionally easy task to deal with.

The hardest part of all of this for me has actually been the rift that has erupted over time between me and my mother that stems from our vastly different levels of education and corresponding values.

Yes, I may have a Pretty Huge Diploma but as my mother reminded me not too long ago, she has "a PhD in street smarts" as if to say that was better and that I lacked the life knowledge that really matters. Why she really feels so insecure in comparison to me I will never know. For me to understand that would require us to actually talk without self-protective defenses. I am capable of laying down my quills in the name of peace-making. I hope some day she is too.

My experience of having difficulty with a family member because I am educated is certainly not unique to me. Later this month the author of Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams,
Alfred Lubrano, a reporter working at the Philadelphia Inquirer, will come to speak on my campus. His book is a combo of autobiography and interviews of fellow "Straddlers" as he calls them who walk a fine line between their working class roots and their white collar life, not really fitting into either. A summary of the book can be downloaded here.

"This country always celebrates the idea that there is enormous opportunity here to move up from one's station in life, to achieve greatness from the most humble of roots. But for those who are the first from a traditionally blue-collar family to enter college and move into the white-collar workplace, there is a darker side to success when they find themselves alienated from both their own family and their strange new middle-class world."

I don't know if I agree with the conclusion of one review of the book that proposes class values is a subject even touchier than race or gender, but I do think this is a subject that ought to be discussed along with race, gender, and sexual orientation.

The movie Spanglish provided my first opportunity to realize that my education might alienate me from my family. I recall one scene from the movie in which the working class mother speaks to her school-oriented daughter on a bench waiting for the bus to take her daughter off to get an education. I can't recall exactly what the mom said, but I remember she expressed anxiety about whether they would still be able to relate once her daughter moved into the other (white, educated, English-speaking) world.

I'd like to think I can navigate both worlds, but it is a struggle to straddle them well. I can relate to being an outsider who doesn't really fit into either one. Although it's uncomfortable, I find that I actually gravitate toward that place. My dissertation topic is a perfect example.

I studied human mutual grooming - think primates and louse picking but translate that into the myriad ways humans groom each other. The topic is brand, spanking new but it's not like no one has ever noticed it before. No one has ever published anything academic on the subject. Finding a "home" for my research in the world of publishing has been difficult. It's psychology but not your typical psychology study because I talk a lot about animals and use theories from evolutionary biology. It's not biology either because zoologists study animals, and as we all know from our culture, people aren't animals. For that reason it's also not primatology. However, my stance has always been that people are primates too so if I review primate literature, use ev bio theory, and study a primate species, my research ought to be considered primatology. But alas, it isn't because I studied the only primate species that doesn't fall into primatology. So that takes me back to psychology. My research isn't classic social psychology because the topic has little to do with behavior change on account of being in a group and my theoretical perspective is evolutionary, not the Standard Social Science Model. However, my work is not classic evolutionary psychology either. I did not use Sexual Strategies Theory to craft my hypotheses. The fatal blow. To make it worse, there's a little journal that deals with nonverbal behavior but they are only interested in behavior that has actually been observed. No one is going to observe people taking a shower together or sqeezing each other's pimples. We just don't groom in public. I am not interested in professional grooming so much as the casual ways we tidy each other's appearance.

As much as my research makes difficulties for me because it doesn't fit any one area, I actually like that it straddles multiple areas. My breadth is a strength.

My committee encouraged me to publish my dissertation. They think my introductory chapter, the literature review, is very strong and could stand on its own as a review article. Evidently I synthesize well. They think my whole dissertation makes a real, genuine contribution, and they think it should be published in its entirety for it to make the strongest statement.

Hopefully one day in the not too distant future I will be able to find an editor and reviewers who think my unique research voice needs to be heard.

Oh if only I knew what to do with the document!?

ONE: Hack it up to create a number of small articles and rewrite the lit reviews/theory so that it fits journals that exist? Yuck.

TWO: Hack it up to create a couple of articles with really brief lit reviews that retain the theory but wait to make a statement later? How boring.

THREE: Figure I won't get a T-T where I actually want to live and focus on writing a book instead that way I will be able to make the statement I want to make? That seems risky and I don't know the first thing about book publishing either.

I think option two is the best choice of the 3. I can always write the book later and it will be much more interesting after I've done the additional studies I want to do! I just need to choose the journal(s).

Since you've read this far, I'll reward you by revealing the results of my study in a nutshell:
People perceive groomers (as opposed to non-grooming touchers and non-touchers) to be better parents, more caring, more in love with the person they groom, and more committed to them.

Easter Weekend

My family has a tendency to ask me what I did on holiday weekends, especially religious ones, as if I am supposed to be doing something special. This time, I think I actually did something worthwhile, i.e. I didn't have my fingers glued to my laptop. While I do have slides to finish for my dissertation defense on Thurs, I chose to goof off instead of finishing my work. I went to church.

Ha ha ha. Just kidding. Not in a million years. It's not that I'm not a spiritual person, I just don't need organized religion to remind me to be a kind and decent human being.

I have ALL DAY to kill tomorrow just trying to get from Walla Walla to Portsmouth; I think I will have plenty of time to make last minute improvements to my slides. I call this justifiable procrastination. I emailed myself my slides - three or four different accounts - just in case. You never know when something might go wrong.

I have had 3 defense anxiety dreams - all over equipment not working! The first was my old Audi - it struggled to get up an imaginary hill on the way from the airport to the university. Then it was some other thing that broke - a different car maybe. The latest was Katy chewing up my laptop.

Here's what happened over the weekend when she had to be penned in the kitchen again so we could leave. She is standing on top of Max's kennel, who is inside trying in vain to scratch his way out.

Goofing off on a holiday weekend for me means gardening (two blisters worth of digging), starting a new pastel for my primate series (a "cheek padder" adult male orangutan), pigging out on high-end junk food (Vietnamese fried calamari, creme brulee, and $8 martinis from Whitehouse-Crawford, the swankiest place in town), and then burning off the calories on a couple of marathon dog walks.

The two raised planter beds Sleyed made will look pretty once the plants grow in. I wanted them to rest smack in the middle of the backyard where all of the best grass was growing so he dug up the grass and I layed down our makeshift sod in the brown patches in our yard. That was how I earned my blisters. One poped, so needless to say, washing the dirt out of my hands was unpleasant.

I started the beds with seedlings that I grew indoors along with an Spanish lavendar plant I found at the Home Despot. 7 seedlings cluster near the lavendar - they are also English lavendar. I collected the seeds from a parent plant down the street.

The rest of that bed has about 30 seedlings that were growing in a tiny yogurt container on my window sill. I forget what the seeds are, but they grew well and I have a lot of them. It was fun to transplant seedlings because of the incredibly delicate work needed to untangled the tiny root systems.

I also put down seeds in all of my containers (foxglove, trumpet vine, snapdragon), smooshed some seeds for trees in the ground (Catalpa and Koelreuteria), and put some seeds into the ground that I gathered from my gladiolus.

I can't remember the last time I had so much dirt under my nails.

When I had finished I walked back inside, kicked my sandals off at the door, and grabbed a 40 oz beer from the fridge. It wasn't Old English -that would be too redneck - but it was certifiably crappy beer - the cheapest I could find.

Good drinking for the slugs.

I filled several yogurt lids with the beer and then went back inside to clean up. What did I find? Miss Roughenhausen with a face full of TV remote control. Yep, she chewed the brand new one, but I discovered her naughtiness in time to save the remote. It has visible teeth marks, but it still works. She whined and cried to go out so we headed out. She must have remembered the lids full of beer from last spring, though I had clearly forgotten her fondness for beer because she headed straight for them and before I knew exactly what she was doing, Katy slurped up most of it. That huge tongue can make beer disappear in two licks. She's soooo country.

And now - the wind is blowing all of my seeds to who knows where - 30 miles per hour with gusts to 40 mph the news says. Fantastic - the expensive new manure dirt - will be gone too.

Worrying about the condition of my garden is WAAAAAY better than worrying about my upcoming dissertation defense.

Temporary Peace Treaty Between Rivals

The deal I brokered was short lived, but I think this shows measurable progress toward a more harmonious co-existence between the Prince of Piss & Vinegar and the Baroness von Roughenhausen.

Bet you can guess who got up and left first.


*** This just in: Giant Comfort Hound just flopped down again on the pillow next to Mr. Piss, and he did not get up. Wow. This is a truly historic event. They are both snoozing now. Amazing. I might actually be able to get the rest of my defense slides done without having to stop to run interference!

*** Ah, dang, after 2 minutes of that Miss Newfy must have decided it was just too much. She moved on to her prefered spot by the back door. At least little Mr. stood his ground. They are his pillows after all :=)