Trivial Only Post: The Power of Serendipity

My family is full of excellent cooks. And by excellent, I don't mean, "Whip up something amazing, with restaurant-worthy presentation, and ingredients no one can correctly pronounce." I mean excellent in terms of improvisation, of taking something that would be considered "a recipe gone wrong" and making something else out of it.

My mom still tells the story about "spoon fudge". My grandma tried to make fudge, but it turned out wrong. It was far too runny and would refuse to set up into perfect little fudge bars. But it tasted amazing! So everyone just ate it with a spoon. Hence the name.

When I was a child, my mom got a shiny new cookie press. And like all cookie presses, this one came with a bunch of recipes. She tried making one for sugar cookies, but the batter was all wrong. It was again, too runny, and when she tried squeezing it out of the cookie press into perfect little shapes, it melted into a runny blob. So what did she do? She scraped the batter into a cake pan, baked it, frosted it, and served - it quickly became a family favorite. "Cookie cake", as we called it, was always requested as birthday cakes as a child. I still find myself craving those chewy frosted squares with multicolored sprinkles every year on my birthday.

Several years ago, I started getting the baking bug. I'd cooked for myself all through college and found I enjoyed it; it was great stress-relief, and I looked forward to making food for others and watching their reactions when they took a bite. For Thanksgiving, I decided to bake a blackberry pie. I mixed up the filling, made the perfect crust (following my mom's excellent recipe passed down through the generations), and popped that baby in the oven. As I was removing my perfectly cooked pie from the oven - bam, it fell onto our (thankfully recently cleaned) oven door. I was as crushed as my pie, at first. But we decided to just scrape it back into our pan and call it "Oven-Door Cobbler". It was a hit, both figuratively and literally.

Life is what you make of it. Sometimes, the fudge is runny. Sometimes, the cookie press doesn't work. Sometimes, the oven door gets the first taste of the pie. You can give up, or make something else with what you've got left. It's all up to you.

Trivially and nostalgically yours,
~Sara

Trivial Only Post: An Open Letter to Pinterest

Dear Pinterest,

I've been using your site for a while now and I have to say that I love it. I have long been a fan of social bookmarking, but must say that I love the idea of sharing sites and ideas visually, and the layout is very aesthetically appealing.

However, there are a few things that I believe need some additional attention and/or removal.

1. The phrase, "Pin now, read later" has got to be the dumbest, most annoying phrase ever. No, I want to read everything this page has to offer now! Come on, people. It has to go.

2. If I see one more "How to use your baby's footprint/handprint/thumbprint/whatever to make some cute animal/character/necklace/whatever", I may just scream. It was cute the first 20 times; now it's just annoying. If anyone actually attempted all of these ideas with his/her baby, the baby would constantly be covered in paint. I believe my mom did this ONCE with my brother and me; not once a holiday, not once a season, ONCE.

3. It's cool if people want to reuse the pin description from another pinner, but please at least urge them to read it over first and make sure there isn't personal information in there that wouldn't apply. Though, it does make me chuckle when a guy I know to be straight or an unmarried woman shares one of my pins I have labeled, "My husband would love this".

4. Pinning from blogs is great; I love getting to experience new blogs, and have discovered a few worth reading regularly through Pinterest. However, pins for a specific blogpost should link directly to that post, not to the main page for the blog. To do this, click on the title of the blogpost you like; you will be taken to the permanent link for that page. Then pin away. The main blog page is a feed; it shows the newest post (whatever it is). The post you like may be the newest post when you visited that blog (and therefore at the top), but by the time the pin gets to me, it's 50 posts down the list, and I have to do some digging. Sometimes, I can find it with a google search; sometimes, I just give up.

5. Not a complaint, but a suggestion - it would be cool to browse pins on two topics, rather just "Geek" or "DIY & Crafts". Because I'd die from excessive happiness if I could browse a board full of Tardis scarf patterns. No lie. Yeah, I know I could just google that, but the cool thing about pinterest is discovering things you didn't even know you should/could be looking for.

As you can see, this list is short. So it should be no problem to meet all my demands... er, requests. I'd consider it a Christmas AND birthday present. :)

Trivially yours,
~Sara

Puppies Not Politics: A Social Experiment

Its been almost a week since the election, and the political posts seem to have finally died down, replaced with talk of Christmas, Day-After-Thanksgiving sales, and the end of the year (nothing yet on the “End of the World” so many were/are expecting - but we’ll have to wait and see if more 2012 apocalypse talk surfaces). Is it just me, or do the election cycles just seem to get longer and longer, with political advertising starting earlier each time? A columnist for CNN joked that, now that the election is over, it’s time for politicians to get back to what they do best - campaign for the next election.

This year, as a response to all of the political posts I observed from friends on Facebook, I decided to try a little experiment - starting August 26, I posted one puppy picture for every post I saw.

One of the many PNP puppies; you can tell he's trustworthy, because he wears glasses.

The rules were pretty simple:

1. One picture per post I saw. The keyword here is saw - I did not seek out posts purposefully, but only counted ones that I either saw while scrolling through my news feed or that I happened to see when visiting someone’s profile page. If Facebook lumped similar posts together - e.g., X of your friends posted about Barack Obama - I would only count however many were displayed, and did not expand posts. 
2. The picture could contain one or more puppy. I use the term “puppy” pretty generally, to refer to any dog, regardless of age. I have to admit, though, to play on the word “puppy”, I posted a picture of recently born Mongoose puppies from the Brookfield Zoo. Pictures could also contain other animals - several contained cats/kittens, a couple contained fancy rats, and one even had a pig. 

Overall, what I got was a conservative estimate of all the political posts I saw on Facebook between August 26, 2012 and November 6, 2012. The final count: 469 posts. I decided to do the math on exactly how often I saw political posts. The Puppies Not Politics album was up for 73 days or 1752 hours or 105,120 minutes. If I remove the time I spent sleeping (rough estimate - likely an overestimate, considering my life-long battle with insomnia - of 584 hours or 35,040 minutes), I saw on average one political post every 149.4 minutes, or 0.8 per hour, or 6.4 per day. Obviously, this is averaged across the whole period and doesn’t get at the variability in frequency; some days, posts were far more abundant, such as after debates.

As I said, this is a conservative estimate, since I didn’t purposefully visit Facebook just to count political posts - it was only when I wanted to visit Facebook anyway to see what was going with my friends, post a status update, etc. Some days, I didn't have the time or energy to look. I also did not bother counting advertisements, seen either on Facebook or elsewhere. The overarching lesson here is that we see a lot of political ads, and comments - not a surprising conclusion, but still. When one’s newsfeed is packed with information about a certain thing, we often start to block that thing out and gravitate instead to what is unique in the bunch.

If we do happen to notice all those political posts, we are most likely to pay attention to posts with which we agree already, and tend to ignore the ones that run counter to our beliefs or expectations, especially when we don’t feel like engaging in systematic thought (see previous post about Facebook and "when thinking feels hard"). So liberal posts are unlikely to reach (and “convert”) a conservative, and conservative posts are unlike to reach/convert a liberal. Why, then, do we spend so much energy posting political information if it is unlikely to change anyone’s mind? There are a few explanations; this list is not mutually exclusive:

1. The poster may be unaware that their posts are not changing anyone’s mind, and perhaps believe that, if this [insert type of person] just knew this information, they wouldn’t be a [type]. That may be true, but good luck getting that person to even notice the post, let alone click on it, let alone read it, let alone consider what they’ve read.
2. The poster may be completely aware that their posts are not changing anyone’s mind, but instead share the link or post because they think their like-minded friends will see it and enjoy it. Facebook is one of many ways we can share “things we think are cool” - in fact, this notion of social bookmarking has spawned other services, like Pinterest - and we can share them just in case other people will think they are cool too. 
3. Posting political information that matches with our beliefs is a way of declaring our membership in a group. Group membership is a very important source of our self-esteem. By posting information that declares, “I am a liberal”, or “I am a conservative”, etc., we get the boost in self-esteem that comes with belonging to a group. Of course, research specifically on Facebook status updating shows that comments/likes have a strong effect on self-esteem, so if I posted something and then received largely negative feedback on it, my self-esteem would probably suffer. Would it cause me to distance myself from the group? Like so many things in psychology, it depends. I may actually strengthen my ties to the group, if I believe the derision is unwarranted. 
4. This may be a bit cynical of me, but I have to throw it out there - some people may post political information to appear intelligent and cultured. We’ve all done it, not just with political posts. I’ve certainly shared something that gives me the opportunity to, say, show my knowledge of space exploration TV show (e.g., Star Trek, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica) captains. Or posted one of the “Grammar Nazi” e-cards (only to discover there’s a typo in one’s comments on the picture). Am I calling Facebook users hypocrites? Maybe, but aren’t we all? 

These are just a few of the potential reasons off the top of my head. What do you think, readers? What are some other reasons for all the political posting?

Thoughtfully yours,
~Sara

On Top of the World: The Importance of Science and Innovation

By now, you’d have to be living under a rock (one without WiFi, no less) to not know that on October 14, 2012, a man named Felix Baumgartner traveled by balloon to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, then stepped out of his capsule and jumped, free-falling 128,097 feet and reaching speeds of Mach 1.24. In addition to breaking a number of other world records, he became the first person to travel at super-sonic speeds without the aid of a jet or space shuttle.

Let’s pause and just think about how cool all of that is.

Seriously, stop and think about this. If you need some help, watch this video.

We live in an age where this kind of thing is possible. Think about how far we have come as a species. Centuries ago, diseases, like the bubonic plague, that were a death sentence can be treated with antibiotics. Which is why it disheartens me when people do not see the value in scientific achievement.

We have become so comfortable in our existence, thanks to these scientific achievements, that some spend all the time saved us by technology crusading against these life-saving achievements, like modern medicine and vaccinations that have increased our life expectancy by decades and eradicated once-common diseases, computers and the Internet that have made information accessible to billions, and the trains, planes, and automobiles that have allowed us to explore our whole world and not just the little piece in which we happened to be born.

Yes, I recognize that I’m speaking about the “first world”, and that there are many parts of the world these innovations have sadly not touched.

And that’s something that needs to change. Because the quality of life to which we have become accustomed is brought to us by scientific achievement and encouragement of innovation. Of questioning why we have always done things a certain way and trying to introduce a new way of approaching a problem.

That’s right, today’s quality of life is brought to you by the letters S, T, E, and M.

Without scientific achievement, our quality of life will stagnate. Or worse, backslide. This is why, whoever wins in November needs to be supportive of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. They need to support, and incentivize, innovation, through basic research in all of these fields. This means funding this research and/or making it easier for private investors (such as Red Bull, which funded Baumgartner’s jump) to fund this research.

And they need to support and encourage quality scientific education, because even the most amazing scientists will not live forever, and their ideas won’t live forever either if they are not passed on to the next generation of thinkers.

As a government employee, I can’t comment on political campaigns and therefore, can’t say who I think would be more supportive of science and innovation (just letting you know, in case you share your thoughts in comments – whether I agree with you or not, I really can’t say). But the issue of science and its importance is non-partisan. It is something we should all care about, even if adding two numbers together fills you with a dread similar to playing Twister with 50 snakes.

Because believe me, they are in it to win it. 

I read an interesting post recently about the phrase “I’m entitled to my opinion” that you should definitely read (here). I won’t reiterate what it said, but will add that you should at least be aware that the reason you or I are “entitled to our opinions” is because we live in a society that has become so comfortable due to technology that we have time to think of our ridiculous, ignorant opinions (or write our ridiculous blog posts) – rather than spending our time trying to avoid the bubonic plague.

~Thoughtfully (and scientifically) yours,
Sara

On Quality Chasms, Interactivity, and Digital Textbooks

As has become increasingly the case recently, the time between this and my previous blog post is much longer than I would have liked. Many people argue that one should only write when one feels inspired, but I’m not one of those people; a writer writes, and I find that if I don’t write regularly, I get out of practice. Ray Bradbury offered advice to young writers, including that they should write a short story every week – at the end of the year, you’ll have 52 short stories and the odds that they will all be awful are pretty slim. Perhaps I should follow his advice and write a blog post every week?

But what I’d really like to write about today is a response to an editorial I read about digital textbooks. Last week, Arne Duncan stated that paper textbooks should become a thing of the past, and we should embrace digital textbooks. Justin Hollander wrote an editorial response to this declaration, arguing for the benefits of paper in education. You can read his editorial here.

It really is a well-written piece and offers may good arguments. At the same time, what Mr Hollander and many others fail to recognize is the power of technology to go beyond merely reproducing the written word on the digital screen.

At my job as a health services researcher, we are spending a lot of our time exploring something called “patient-centered care”. Though this concept has been around in psychotherapy for decades, it came into the forefront of health care and medicine in a report released by the Institute of Medicine.

That report, titled “Crossing the Quality Chasm”, was the second in a series of reports addressing quality issues in American health care, stating, “Between the health care we have and the care we could have lies not just a gap, but a chasm” (p. 1). Specifically, the issue is with the design of the system, which is not aligned with the needs of the current population – a population that has longer life expectancy and more ongoing, chronic conditions requiring a different management approach, is more mobile (so people may not see the same doctor their entire lives) and simply is more abundant (making it difficult for doctors to really know their patients’ situations and needs). The report provided recommendations for safe and effective care, specifically discussing patient-centered care as “encompass[ing] qualities of compassion, empathy, and responsiveness to the needs, values, and expressed preferences of the individual patient” (p. 48).

This report also discusses increased use of technology, to improve access to information, education, and care, so long as the technology is aligned with a patient’s individual needs, values, and preferences. That is, the technology should be customizable and tailored to the patient.

Perhaps you’re asking (or have been asking), “What does any of this have to do with digital textbooks?” Hang in there, kids; we’re almost there.

Patient-centered technology is not about simply digitizing information once recorded only on paper; rather, it is about changing healthcare delivery, efficiency, and quality, and creating a system that is truly patient-centered. People who merely take information from pamphlets and booklets and slap them onto a web-page are entirely missing the point. Where technology really shines is in its ability to shift in response to the user. The concept here is “interactivity”.

Let’s say I’m a physician who wants to teach my patients with diabetes about managing their blood sugar. In the past, I’d probably have them do some in-person training, perhaps with a nurse educator, on checking their blood sugar, giving themselves insulin, and all the other self-care that people with diabetes must do, and I’d probably send them home with some pamphlets. Of course, they would continue seeing me regularly, but so much of what people with diabetes must do involves self-care; they really must become masters of managing the condition.

With technology, I’d still do some in-person training, but I could also have them receive information from the pamphlets through a website or tablet app, where they can select what information to view, access embedded videos, and perhaps even take a quiz to assess their understanding and identify gaps in knowledge. I could even design this program so that, based on quiz results, they are given access to additional reading and videos to specifically address those gaps.

So let’s bring this back to education. Say I’m a student taking a statistics class. I read the section on measures of central tendency (mean, median, and mode), then complete a quiz. If my quiz results show that I’m having some difficulty with mode, I could be taken to additional sections that focus more heavily on that concept, provide more examples, or even take a different approach to presenting the information.

I can understand the hesitance to completely abandon paper. Paper should still have an important place in reading and education. There is something to be said for the ability to touch, to hold something in your hand, to hear the binding crack, to smell the ink on the pages. And when the choice is between reading a book on paper or reading a book on an e-reader, where the logistics of navigating pages is basically the same, it seems more a matter of personal preference than superiority of one medium over the other. Sure, the ability to search and carry more books without adding weight to one’s bag is nice, but may not be enough for the increased (at least initial) costs of converting from paper to electronic. 

But if we can capitalize on the technology at hand to supplement and tailor material, to really allow students to grasp core concepts so that we may expand upon them in the classroom and move toward mastery of the subject, then Mr. Duncan, I couldn’t agree more.

Thoughtfully yours,
~Sara

 Institute of Medicine. (2001). Crossing the quality chasm: A new health system for the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

CDC, You've Created a Monster (Pun Fully Intended)

At work the other day, I heard a radio ad for Illinois's Click-It-Or-Ticket campaign, in which they discuss the importance of wearing seatbelts in case of a zombie attack (hiding and waiting for unsuspecting drivers before jumping out at their cars - yeah, seriously). People are fascinated with zombies recently and public health organizations are no exception. For instance, CDC released a disaster preparedness campaign last year, in which they discuss the preparations individuals and families should make to prepare for a zombie uprising. Though the purpose of this campaign was to get people thinking about disaster preparedness for less supernatural reasons (floods, tornadoes, etc.), it also was meant to get people's attention - and it worked, though the response on the internet was perhaps more "WTF, CDC?" than "Wow, I never thought about disaster preparedness like that."

Besides, wouldn't wearing a seatbelt be a bad idea if zombies suddenly jump in front of your car and cause you to wreck? I mean, you want to get out of there quickly after wrecking, right? If you're surrounded by a zombie hoard, you're probably not moving very quickly anyway. And now that I think about it, if they wait to jump in front of your car so they can make you wreck and get some food (sounds suspiciously like fishing), wouldn't that involves things like patience, thinking power…? Not exactly what zombies are known for.

But I digress.

Public health organizations are doing whatever they can to get people's attention these days. And the CDC campaign, although weird and random, got attention and perhaps that's all it needed to do. After all, mass media campaigns for public health are generally really expensive to implement but have small effects. Really, any campaign intended to simply educate does little to actually change behavior - in fact, it does little to even change attitudes about a behavior, and even if it does change attitudes, a lot of psychological research demonstrates that attitudes are poor predictors of behavior. That's right, people can hold very strong beliefs and behave in ways completely counter to them. It drives me nuts when people say that psychology research just confirms common sense, but seriously - does this actually surprise you?

How about now?

By using something currently popular, like zombies, they increase the chance that mainstream media will pick up the story and help pass on the message, which could exponentially increase the campaign's reach. But does capitalizing on the current trend actually weaken the message? Does it mean that, once zombies are no longer "cool", the campaign will lose its effect and possibly even have the opposite effect in the long run? I tried to find some research on this - it's what I do.

There's definitely been research on what makes public health campaigns effective, but the focus is more on things like tone (e.g., fear appeals) than content. One exception is a review by Randolph and Viswanath, which examined studies of public health campaigns to determine which factors most clearly related to effectiveness. They identified as the most important factor: "successful manipulation of the information environment by campaign sponsors to ensure sufficient exposure of the audience to the campaigns messages and themes (influencing the information environment and maximizing exposure)." Okay, so perhaps CDC's (and even Illinois's Click-it-Or-Ticket) idea was a good one - do something that gets attention and is picked up by other media outlets. Fine fine, moving on in the list… 2) use social marketing to develop messages appropriate to a specific audience and get the message to that audience (meaning there may need to be more than one message for different demographic groups), 3) create an environment in which the target audience can carry out the recommended change, 4) use sound health behavior theory, and 5) conduct process as well as outcome evaluations to understand the campaign's effect.

But there is a bigger question here. Could CDC have legitimized some people's beliefs that a zombie apocalypse is upon us?

Four or five years ago, I discovered a web group devoted to surviving zombie attacks. As a long-time horror movie fan (see previous blog posts - part 1 and part 2), I figured this was a group run by fellow horror movie fans who would discuss different zombie movies… sadly no. This was a group of people who genuinely believe a zombie apocalypse is imminent, and spend their time 1) posting news stories supposedly providing evidence that zombies are among us, and 2) devising plans to survive attacks. I received quite a few, "This is not what our group is about" messages in response to some of my posts about great movies, or even when I said that my survival approach would depend on if these were slow-moving, Night of the Living Dead zombies, or fast-moving, 28 Days Later zombies. I can imagine that this group must be pretty active given the media's recent focus on particularly heinous attacks involving cannibalism (and I choose each of those words very carefully - no, these recent events are not, in my opinion, evidence of zombies, but rather evidence that, "If it bleeds, it leads" is still the approach taken by mainstream media, and that, given our recent focus on zombies in popular culture, the media IS biased in what stories it chooses to cover).

I come from a behaviorist background - my undergraduate psychology department head was a behaviorist and for the better part of my undergraduate career (and a not-insignificant chunk of my graduate career), I was like a mini-Skinner, arguing that everything could be explained by contingencies of reinforcement. Though I lean more toward cognitive psychology these days, I still remember many of the things I was taught in my behavior classes and believe these topics are still very relevant for understanding human behavior.

One important thing to keep in mind is unintended consequences. When trying to reinforce a certain behavior, you have to watch for other behaviors you may be inadvertently rewarding (or punishing). For example, I had a professor in college who hated it when people showed up late for class. When people would come in late, he would stop class and spend a minute or two interrogating the person about why they are late, lecture them about why their behavior is unacceptable, etc., etc. He would also take points off for tardiness - the same number of points he would take off for an absence. Basically, people who showed up late once never did it again - because after that, if they were going to be late for class, they just skipped. I'm sure if this professor were aware that his punishment, though decreasing tardiness, was actually increasing absences, he would have changed his approach. But I doubt he ever examined his tardiness and absence data to look for this pattern.

The same goes for interventions intended to change human behavior - you want to examine behaviors that might have been affected by your campaign, whether those were behaviors you were hoping to change or not. It is unclear what effect the CDC campaign had on things like belief in zombies, but if I were performing an evaluation of this campaign, that would be something important to assess.

In fact, CDC spoke to a reporter at Huffington Post about the recent events, and said that CDC is aware of no virus or toxin that could cause the reanimation of dead tissue. So perhaps they recognize that selecting zombies for their campaign was a bad idea.

Still, the blame cannot be placed entirely on CDC. As I said earlier, zombies were already getting lots of attention, and this is probably why CDC selected that topic to frame their disaster preparedness campaign. What do you think? Did CDC add an air of legitimacy to the supposed "zombie apocalypse"? Or just capitalize on the zeitgeist?

Thoughtfully yours,
~Sara

Trivial Only Post - On the Insanity of FSoG

I haven't posted in forever. I'm working on a new post, but it's gotten rather deep, and is taking a while to put together. So I've decided to try something new. In addition to my deeply trivial posts, I occasionally think things that are best described as trivial only. Hence, the trivial only post. These will be short, to the point, likely very snarky (who am I kidding? - that describes all my posts) and on rather ridiculous topics. Let's see how this goes.

The more I learn about the author of Fifty Shades of Grey, the more I think she's actually completely out of her mind, and rather than recognizing and treating her mental illness, we're heralding her for writing such compelling drama. The most recent thing I heard about Fifty Shades of Grey (hereafter referred to as FSoG, pronounced Fih-Sog, if you don't mind) that makes me think that?: Spotify was advertising the FSoG playlist, which contains tracks "inspired by the book everyone is reading."

First, not everyone is reading the book, but whatever. Second, last time I checked, "I'm on Fire" by Bruce Springsteen, The Flower Duet from Lakme, and "Toxic" by Britney Spears were written long before this book. I think someone needs to check their dictionary and make sure they're really clear on the definition of "inspired". Honestly, we should explain how the space-time continuum works, but that might be asking too much.

After all, what can you expect from a book that was "inspired" by Twilight?

Trivially yours,
~Sara