Fun with Stop Motion

And as an interlude for your Thursday afternoon, here's some fun with stop motion, featuring a little Alien versus Predator:

Be Here Now

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I've accepted a new position outside of the VA. Earlier this week, I started my new job as a Psychometrician at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And I realized that I'm exactly where I've always wanted to be.

As a teenager, I became fascinated with tests - most of my exposure was through those stupid personality tests from magazines, which I didn't find nearly as stupid as I probably should have, but I also had the opportunity to take a cognitive ability (what was once known as an intelligence) test in 4th grade. I thought the concept of solving puzzles to find out more about oneself was amazing.

Flash forward to college, when a fascination with statistics I encountered in journal articles during General Psychology resulted in a shift from theatre to psychology as my major. But I was even more excited when I discovered that one of the classes I could take was Testing & Measurement, which was all about the various psychological tests for diagnosis (such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI), examining development (such as the House-Tree-Person task, which literally involves having a child draw a house, a tree, and a person), or for determining cognitive ability (such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, or WISC, which is what I learned during that class I took in 4th grade, after I recognized one of the tests involving recreating symbols with blocks):

I briefly considered going into clinical psychology, as a person who would administer these psychological tests, but social psychology drew me more strongly. But I was in luck when one of the classes I could take in grad school was structural equation modeling, which is frequently used in a test development paradigm called classical test theory - an approach about creating a single test that measures a particular concept, and obtaining data to demonstrate it measures what it is supposed to (validity, through comparisons with gold standards, where possible, or similar measures), consistently (reliability, by comparing items from one half of the test to the other - called split-half reliability, or over time - called test-retest reliability). I didn't really do a lot with test development in grad school, unfortunately, but I was able to in my time at VA.

And the last piece in the puzzle was a fellowship I received while at VA, where I was able to receive additional training in a newer area of test development, item response theory, and a related but mathematically different approach, Rasch. In these paradigms, responses to individual items are believed to be determined by two things: the difficulty level of the item (or in the case of personality tests, the amount of a trait a person needs to response in a certain way) and ability level of the person (or amount of trait he/she possesses). This approach has many advantages over what I learned in grad school, the two biggest of which are: 1) you can now more accurately estimate ability level, based on how people respond to the items, and 2) it is no longer necessary to give every person all items or even the exact same set of items. This opens the door for things like computer adaptive testing.

All the tools were there. And what am I doing now? I'll be working on batteries of cognitive ability tests, very similar to the WISC I took as a child. I get to do exactly what fascinated me as a child - working with tests - combined with a love of statistics I discovered in college to really dig into the tests, and make sure they work. I'll even be involved in writing the manuals that go along with the tests! It's a dream 30-some years in the making.

When You Want to Write a Complaint Letter, But Can't Find the Time...

... this website has your back. Enter the target of your complaint letter, some basic information, and preferred length, and it does the rest for you. Just for fun, I had it write one against me:

This is to voice my dissatisfaction with Dr. Sara Locatelli's apothegms. I begin with critical semantic clarifications. First, in order to convince us that it's okay to leave the educational and emotional needs of our children in the maladroit hands of the most spleeny pronks you'll ever see, Dr. Locatelli often turns to the old propagandist trick of comparing results brought about by entirely dissimilar causes. Thanks to her, we're all in a freefall into a pit of expansionism. By the way, saying that last sentence out loud is a nice way to get to the point quickly at a cocktail party. For all intents and purposes, she wants us to feel sorry for the vile beatniks who galvanize the filthy herd into enthusiastically supporting her yellow-bellied, crime-stained endeavors. I, speaking as someone who is not a dimwitted paper-pusher, insist we should instead feel sorry for their victims, all of whom know full well that Dr. Locatelli's allocutions are like the Hydra from Greek mythology. They continually acquire new heads and new strength. The only way to stunt their growth is to accentuate our universal humanity. The only way to destroy Dr. Locatelli's Hydra entirely is to provide more people with the knowledge that she has made some imprecise statements and statements that ought to have had all sorts of qualifications and reservations attached to them. I'll go further: Her diegeses have caused widespread social alienation, and from this alienation a thousand social pathologies have sprung.

If one needs a sign that Dr. Locatelli is abominable, then consider that she has been going around claiming that students should be molded into “change agents” to promote her misguided, drugged-out agenda. When challenged about the veracity of that message, Dr. Locatelli attributed its contradictions of the truth to “poetic license”. That means “lying”. Now that I've had a chance to cogitate, let me see if I have her argument correct: Dr. Locatelli seems to be saying that her tirades provide a liberating insight into life, the universe, and everything. Well, Dr. Locatelli can believe whatever she wants, but we all know that the truth is that like a verbal magician, Dr. Locatelli knows how to lie without appearing to be lying, how to bury secrets in mountains of garbage-speak. Believe it or not, a few unregenerate, garrulous big-labor bosses actually want her to get as many people as possible to line up behind the geek-tent barkers at the latest and greatest carnival of stoicism. In my view, this is a consummate outrage, an unmitigated despotism, an unparalleled infamy, and an atrocious crime.

We have to set an example. If we do, others will follow, and soon everyone will be leading her out of a dream world and back to hard reality. This is an encouraging prospect, especially given that Dr. Locatelli used to maintain that poststructuralism is indispensable for the formation of citizens and for the preservation of our free institutions. However, after my last letter so eloquently put a lie to that, Dr. Locatelli and her bedfellows have busily if rather quietly gone to work on their palinodes—amending here, canceling there, and generally trying to conceal the fact that in a vain effort to exculpate herself, Dr. Locatelli has been proclaiming to the world that she has done no wrong. Rather, it was her mercenaries who have been cultivating an unhealthy sense of victimhood. I suppose the next thing she'll have us believe is that she should be a given a direct pipeline to the national treasury. Dr. Locatelli is unhappy that people like me want to challenge paternalism and thereby create the possibility of justice and fairness in our society. Such cavils notwithstanding, if her perceptions get any more pro-censorship, I expect they'll grow legs and attack me in my sleep. Until we address this issue, we will never move beyond it.

If you'll excuse me, I'll be in the corner, thinking about what I've done...

The Bully Who Cried Wolf

This morning on Facebook, I came across an article about bullying. Or more specifically, it was about differentiating bullying from rudeness and meanness. As a researcher, I love operational definitions and digging into different but related concepts to come to a better understanding of human interaction. Specifically, the author Signe Whitson (social worker and author of Friendship & Other Weapons: Group Activities to Help Young Girls Cope with Bullying) defined the terms as follows:

"Rude = Inadvertently saying or doing something that hurts someone else.

Mean = Purposefully saying or doing something to hurt someone once (or maybe twice).

Bullying = Intentionally aggressive behavior, repeated over time, that involves an imbalance of power."

The point Whitson was trying to make is that, while all of these behaviors are problematic and need correction, they shouldn't all be called bullying. Her reason for this is that overuse of the word takes away its effectiveness, especially if people begin hearing ad nauseum about cases that aren't bullying:

"I have already begun to see that gratuitous references to bullying are creating a bit of a 'little boy who cried wolf' phenomena. In other words, if kids and parents improperly classify rudeness and mean behavior as bullying — whether to simply make conversation or to bring attention to their short-term discomfort — we all run the risk of becoming so sick and tired of hearing the word that this actual life-and-death issue among young people loses its urgency as quickly as it rose to prominence."

What I've learned as a psychologist - and have repeated to friends, especially those who are or are soon becoming parents - is that it takes a lot to damage a person permanently. People are pretty resilient. But repeated injuries, whether physical or psychological, can have lasting effects. We need time to heal and rebuild, but if a person keeps being bullied without having the opportunity to grow and move on, they become stuck, merely reacting to it. They don't have time to prepare and build resources that would help them shield from it. Even worse, they may come to see being bullied as part of who they are. So I think Whitson's terminology is very important to keep in mind.

At the same time, rudeness and meanness can grow into bullying, if left unchecked. So I think it is still important to intervene before things get out of hand. To be fair, Whitson does say all of these behaviors need correction, so she isn't downplaying their importance. But we do need to strike a balance between responding to bullying, and intervening to keep other behaviors from turning into bullying.

Take a Load Off

It's Labor Day! I decided many years ago that the best way to celebrate is by paying someone else to do some work for you. 11 years ago, I celebrated by getting a tattoo. For nostalgia, here's a very low-res picture taken on a crappy flip phone right after I got it:

How did I celebrate today? I ordered a pie so I wouldn't have to do any baking for the party I'm about to go to. If that doesn't highlight how much I've changed in that time, I don't know what does.

Now I want to get another tattoo to remind myself I haven't completely turned into a 30-something suburbanite.

Enjoy your Labor Day! And take a load off:

Alexander Hamilton, Sleep, and Memory Consolidation

I'm currently reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow - the book on which the Broadway musical, Hamilton, is based.

I'm currently about 250 pages in, so it doesn't look like I'll finish before the end of my vacation, but I've made a good dent. In the current section, which is about Hamilton's writing habits, particularly with regard to the Federalist Papers, I found this description of Hamilton's approach to writing from William Sullivan's Public Men of the Revolution:

One who knew his habits of study said of him that when he had a serious object to accomplish, his practice was to reflect on it previously. And when he had gone through this labor, he retired to sleep, without regard to the hour of the night, and having slept six or seven hours, he rose and having taken strong coffee, seated himself at his table, where he would remain six, seven, or eight hours. And the product of his rapid pen required little correction for the press.

What Hamilton was doing - and I'm certainly not downplaying his genius, or his Mozart-like ability to write without the need for revision - was taking advantage of the memory consolidation function of sleep. That is, during sleep, your brain builds neural connections and essentially transfers events and what you learned that day into long term memory. This is why one of the effects of sleep deprivation is memory issues. So Hamilton did the thinking (and some research) needed to gather his thoughts, then slept to allow them to coalesce and organize. Then he would wake up and write it all down. In fact, I just received a link to yet another study demonstrating the memory consolidation effects of sleep.

Of course, what Hamilton did was even more extraordinary when you consider that it was not yet known that sleep could do this - at least, not from scientific study. Psychology wasn't even considered a field yet; that would happen in 1870s Germany. That Hamilton fellow was pretty smart.

New to Netflix This Month

As I've blogged before previously, the only reason I haven't I subscribed from the Glamour email newsletter (which I don't even remember how I started getting) is that they send a list of Netflix additions/deletions just often enough that I keep reading. (Yes, I know I could probably just find this list somewhere else, but I'm lazy.) Here's the list of new additions for September, including the newest Marvel show, Luke Cage. Can't. Wait.

I'm still enjoying my vacation (what my husband has started calling the Summer of George), which will be ending soon. Monday, I visited the Art Institute; Tuesday, I dropped by VA to complete some paperwork, and did some outlet shopping before playing pub trivia; and yesterday, I ran some errands, then watched fireworks on my friends' boat. I hope to get back to regular blogging one of these days, and will definitely post an update when I start my new job.