The statue got me high.

I’ve forgotten how much I really, truly love They Might Be Giants. It’s been so long since they’ve come up on the ipod on shuffle (it’s 30GB of music, after all) that I’ve sort of lost track of them. I should double check and see if they have any new albums recently. Or tracks.

I’ve been using iGoogle some over the last couple of days to try it out and see if I like it. So far I do, especially in terms of feeds. Of which I have like 80, so it’s actually been pretty good at tracking everything, delivering me my weather, having a handy dictionary when I know I’m not spelling something right at all, and so on. I think I’ll stay with it for a little while longer.

I also emailed back the prof. I was applying for an assistantship with to provide writing samples. Cross your fingers for me because I really need this. Or the tuition scholarship to come through. If you’re curious, the website for the journal I’d be helping him edit is here: Design Research Quarterly. It’s pretty interesting and accessible.

Quick link listing before I have to go to class:

• Chris Napolitano on George Bush, the State of Porn, and Why Playboy is Still Hot - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
• WorkPlace: In Iraq, Whistleblowers Fired, Harrassed and Detained Without Charge
• ABC News: Are We Teaching Kids to Fear Men
• Sleepy? Cut out late-night Internet and TV - Yahoo! News
• Playboy U. Hopes to Score With Students - Chronicle.com

Twice in one day; I must be high or something!

Gamers’ world reveals secrets of the next epidemic

I read this and I laughed and laughed. Then I realized what people did in the game is exactly what people would do in real life and that shut me up pretty quickly. Also, it’s a really interesting social experiment; sort of puts the Black Death in perspective.

But the coolest thing about a WoW epidemic is that real epidemiologists used the virtual outbreak to study behaviors, such as the “stupid factor,” they hadn’t considered in creating outbreak models. Of course, my thought to that is mostly: “you don’t consider the stupid factor first?“

Good lord.

I think I’m done. Okay, so, it’s only a preliminary proposal, really, but I’ve got the HSC forms filled out. I’m sure I screwed it up somewhere but at least it’s done. I have all my qual reading done. I even have most of my stats/quant stuff done (including the problems). The crim stuff is going to be interesting because I’m not getting the bible until Monday.

It was about $55 worth of printing for the readings. Two binders of readings for the semester. That hurts.

I toyed with the idea of dropping a class and taking two hours of readings in the department on sports and delinquency. Then I talked to work and bargained my hours down some. 32 is still considered full time so I get full time benefits. The paycheck… Well, I’ll have to figure that out when I get to it. Even at 40 hours I wouldn’t be making enough to cover all my bills. (This is the part where I cross my fingers and pray for the tuition scholarship to come through.) But I think I should be okay, at least until Nov.-Dec. financially. The real worry is balancing 32 hours of work and 11 hours of grad school courses. I’ll have to cross my fingers on that too. And send out a couple of emails about my final decisions on the matter.

Which I’ll do now before I forget.

There. Done. I love Semagic drafting.

Let’s see, what else?

I’ve been getting a lot of sales calls since I moved here last month. Just today I’ve had five since around 10am. I finally figured out why they keep calling though; my old number is on the national DNCL, not this one. Time to add myself again!

I have mixed feelings about the National Do No Call List. On one hand, I love not getting phone solicitation. On the other, I’ve done that job and the more people sign up to things like the DNCL the faster people like me go out of business. And the DNCL has some glaring blind spots that will get you every time:

• Charitable organizations (which is why the FOP — Fraternal Order of Police — can call me about once a month to solicit donations)
• Organizations you’ve already done business with (so if you stay at night at, say, a Hampton Inn once three years ago, they can call you)

So the DNCL sort of misses a lot of the egregious offenders of phone solicitation.

I also found time this week to finish Bioshock. I went with the “good” ending and made it out of the game with 950 achievement points. Not bad for a first play through. When I have more time I want to do it a second time, try a different plasmid build and maybe even pay more attention to the philosophy of the game. It’s obviously based on objectivism (”Atlas” and if Andrew Ryan isn’t supposed to be Ayn Rand I’ll eat my shoes) and I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of direct quotes from Atlas, Shrugged but it’s been a while since I’ve read the book.

See, this is what I love about video games (Roger Ebert notwithstanding): they can be as socio-politically/intellectually deep as you want them to be. Bioshock is either a philosophical ramble through an ailing dystopia filled with egoists and scientists so devoted to pure research they lost their sense of humanity altogether or it’s a really fucking cool setting for a survival horror FPS game.

Someone linked me this video of Miss Teen South Carolina flubbing her geography on a question about how to improve geographical education in the US. I cringe for a variety of reasons.

Word of the day: exegesis

I have a lot more to talk about but, frankly, after working on this stuff for quant for about 8 hours today… I want to get off the computer and do something fun.

Typical.

In truly typical fashion, my printer ran out of ink this morning and I bought the wrong type of ink cartridge tonight on my way home from work. Which means going back and spending another $30 on the right kind of cartridge. Way to save money, there.

I ditched the piercing research idea over the week. I still really want to do it at some point; it might be better as a quantitative project though. There’s going to be human subjects issues regardless of how it’s modeled, but I think it might be easier to get that sort of thing past an IRB if I was distributing paper surveys to tattoo parlor customers. It seems less invasive and sensitive that way. I just have to consign it to one of those “Maybe when I’m tenured!” lists. Along with social experiments such as coming to class and pretending to be a student on the first day just to watch reactions and see how long it takes before they start to split. Of course, yes, five minute rule, but no one actually leaves after five minutes of no-show.

Instead I think I’ve settled into something that will fit comfortably both in qualitative research and in my criminology class. I hope. It’d be my luck it gets bounced and I need to scramble for something else. The idea will still work perfectly for crim (one of the crim paper options is an intensive literature review). It’s qual I have to worry about on three fronts even. First the project has to be approved at the prof. level, then the IRB level, then I have to get permission for the interviews. Possibly from more than one person, as I want to look at college sports participation. I’m not sure if I’d need consent forms from coaches/administration in addition to the players themselves.

I’ve got a whole giant post-it note of ideas, including:

• female genital piercing
• phone harassment at call centers
• women in their second career
• hospitality and women traveling alone; safety issues? differences in guest treatment?
• women bloggers: girl gamers and social comms
• gender tracking of petty offenses
• sexual harassment in female dominated workplaces; possibly looking specifically at the reaction to and feelings about harassment seminars
• job negativity/dissatisfaction and workplace culture
• reflexive authority and abuse within a teaching environment (build on Zimbardo and the assumption of authority)
• regional responsiveness to sales via the phone; how accents change perception of competence, knowledgeability, persuasiveness, and overall impression

I have another equally full post-it with notes about the project I do want to do.

I finished my reading for Qual, finished my paper (Jesus, the first week of grad school and I have a nine page paper written for my Monday class by Wednesday. This scares the crap out of me.) for qual, made it through two chapters for quant, working on the problems for chapter two in quant (I have chapters three and five to finish).

This leaves around five or six articles to read for crim, designing a methodology for my qual project, filling out the IRB forms, editing the paper, playing around with NVIVO to start learning it and –

I’m sure there’s more.

Grad school is nuts.

I’ve read a couple of articles over the last week I wanted to talk about. But I never found time before now and I just don’t have the energy. I’m so eager for the weekend. Even if it’s a working weekend, it’s a weekend that doesn’t involve going anywhere. So instead I’ll just link them all up for your perusal:

• The working wounded: Most women don’t have a choice to stay at home with kids; this is an essay on the Mommy Wars and the latent assumptions within the discussion
• Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls; a study of sexualizing girls and young women in “advertising, merchandising, and media” and its impact on self-image — this is something I’d love to do a study on someday
• The 17th century women’s guide to looking good; amusing!
• Rise in births, abortion in Philippines feared with phase-out of US birth control program; aid pulled, out comes baby?
• How cops can measure gunshot residue on your hands; new developments in testing for residue in Brazil
• Federal court slaps data theft victims; they let our data get stolen and we have no recompense. Crap, I just opened an Old National account when I moved here
• “Cosmic train wreck” may derail theories of dark matter; intergalactic collision = theory collision
• New fossil ape may shatter human evolution theory; speaking of theory collision
• Rise of the Silver Surfers: The Over-50 Social Media Opportunity; retire and start blogging!
• NBC pumps up for ‘Gladiators’ redo; the return of American Gladiators. Seriously, what? Just? What?
• Morning-after pill popular but under pressure; happy anniversary emergency contraceptives!
• A BA in ladylike submission!; apparently Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has a new course. In homemaking.

And in other news, Bioshock is my reason for living at the moment. I hope to make some time to actually play this weekend.

So, now, I go to bed. Yay bed.

Research question

I think I want to do a qualitative research project on female genital piercing. This could be a cool project because a) piercings squick me (yes, even ear piercings), so it’s a chance to explore something that gives me the willies and b) because of the connotations with pornography and female genital mutilation and legality issues.

The hard part will be finding at least two people who are willing to own up to having one and agree to be interviewed. If you are one or know someone, will you please get in touch with me? Leave a comment or email me and I can go over it with you.