let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

The marshmallow study continues, with now-middle-aged participants still reflecting their four-year-old willpower. (PDF download of the study.)

I'm told that when I was about four, I participated in a study at the local university. The researcher asked me a series of questions, and I was supposed to answer them while playing with toys as some sort of distraction. Partway through, I put down the toys and asked to see the clipboard with the questions on it. The researcher bemusedly handed it over, and I read through and answered the questions, explaining that it was easier for me to process them when I read them myself. My mother sat on the other side of a two-way mirror, making a valiant effort not to piss her pants laughing. I have no idea what the study was about, but I'm pretty sure my data were excluded.

It makes me wonder how I would have handled the marshmallow test, had I been a participant at the age of four. I would have earned my second marshmallow easily, because I would have spent the fifteen-minute wait lecturing Dr. Mischel about his choice to use a candy containing gelatin and demanding to know whether he was aware of the processes involved in producing that ingredient. I would have then stormed away in a huff, possibly after destroying both marshmallows in a display of symbolic protest.

These days, I just criticize the experimental design and try to figure out the point of the study before debriefing. I am a terrible subject for scientific studies. Really, really awful.

I like it when all my samples are the same size, because then I don't have to go in and recalculate mean/standard deviation/standard error if the value I'm calculating for happens to show up more than once in the results. *happy wiggle*

(There is nothing more awesome than using statistics on actual true-facts data, especially when I gathered the data myself. I am finding things out that no one has ever found out before. This is why I do this, you guys. *wiggle wiggle wiggle*)

ETA: seriously, when I run an analysis, there's a minute before I tell Dr. K the results when I am the only person in the universe who knows or has ever known this one little thing about how the world works. It's the most fucking amazing feeling I've ever had.

I was over at Dr. K's today analyzing some data and talking her into buying me Photoshop (successfully, yay), and we were talking about getting an abstract ready for our AChemS poster submission, and she just kind of casually mentioned "first author, which would be you..."

dude, what?

Apparently I'm going to be listed as first author on this. I guess it sort of makes sense, looking back over the work that's been done in the lab since last year's conference. And I'll be the one doing the writing and layout and graphs for the poster itself. Still, I wasn't expecting this, and it feels sort of amazing.

Experimental Methods midterm: 100%, bitches. Mmmmmhm.

Off to the cafeteria now. Winter and Jason and I are using one meal swipe each when it opens and staying inside until it closes at eight. We're going to take over one of the tables next to the electrical outlets and do all our homework for 9.5 hours. I'm unreasonably excited about this.

Oh, and it sounds like I'm going to be able to join Dr. Laird's lab. He gave me his book and told me to find a topic that interests me so he can team me up with someone to do a project, which sounds kind of like I get to pick what I want to study, which YAY.