Haiku Writing | ||
| I started writing a Haiku-a-Day on February 13, 2010. I use a combination of renga and haiku, favoring the 5755 mora structure, with the trailing 5 on as a personal stylism that could be interpreted as the leading mora for another 75 (as renga). Here are the Haikus so far: *My Valentine Haikku:* VD on VDay A Romantic Tragedy. Antibiotics Are my chocolates. *Arizona Day!* Statehood bore a place these: Copper, Cotton, Cattle, Citrus, Climate. *Haiku for Ray* (a friend who passed away on 15 February 2011) Oldman front porch chair Passersby cannot escape A welcome hello and your idle chat | ||
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Time is fleeting . . . | ||
| and madness takes it's toll. I have very little time left in a day to allocate some free writing time into my schedule (hence the large span between blog updates). I recently read two time use study papers that gave me some inspiration to sit down and work out some loose strings in my dissertation methodology. I'm revising the approach to the chapter on health disparities and social interaction to focus on total accumulated co-presence rather than breaking it up by relation. This will give me more space to highlight health and discuss, more generally, it's role in shaping daily social behavior. I also gain back four degrees of freedom. The drawback is that I won't be able to frame the problem as relationship dependent (health effects on time with various types of people). This is okay, as I can condemn that discussion to future research. | ||
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How this website works... | ||
| I have received a few requests for a description of how my website works. Here is a _brief_ description: The stylesheets are provided by StyleShout.com, which handle the overall look of the site. The content is served up dynamically using a combination of Wikka Wiki and some pHp blackmagic of my own invention called WikkaStrip that is inserted into the individual pages. This allows me to edit my website using the wiki, making it easier to push revisions and content to the front pages. Finally, the photo gallery is run by a program called Single File php gallery, which basically is just a gigantic php script that sits in the top-level of a photograph directory tree and serves up images based on file names and position in the tree. I'm not entirely happy with the gallery and will likely update it to something more slick in the next few months. | ||
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IRB and Informal Research | ||
| Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) play an important role in maintaining ethical behavior amongst would-be scientists doing research on human and other sentient organisms. The IRB protects subjects from harm, and protects the institutions they represent from liability. Since my research employs publically available, secondary data, it is exempt from the IRB review process. However, I have often found it useful to supplement my secondary analyses with 'data' drawn from life experiences of various folk I've met and had a chance to talk to about their social lives. This is informal research and it keeps my formal research in check - I would have serious doubts about my theories and my data if my findings were inconsistent with the lived experiences of the people I meet on the street. It is unlikely that my 'field notes' will ever be coded, formally analyzed and prepared for publication, which keeps my research IRB exempt. However, that is not to say that the informal research does not influence how I think about my formal research. I wonder what the IRB makes of the practice of informal research. Imagine a behavioral biologist who makes a discovery about the fright-flight response by observing how his or her neighbor's cat reacts to being repeatedly dowsed by an automatic sprinkler. The scientist did not get IRB approval for this excercise but it contributed to a larger project. What is the institutional obligation, on part of the scientist and on part of the IRB, to disclose the informal research? | ||
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Late Starting Schools Not the Best Idea | ||
| Teenagers need to get more sleep, claims a a Kansas based study. The PIs recommend a range of 9 to 10 hours of sleep per night, which is one to three hours more than the average adult needs. They recommend moving-up the school starting time, which is an interesting proposal because, my first reaction would be to prescribe earlier bedtimes. The reason is that changing the institutional norms of early school starts is a glacially slow process that risks interrupting the biological and social schedules of parents, teachers, and other school employees. Circadian rhythms change over the entire life-span, which is not always compatible with the relatively fixed daily schedules of age-graded institutions. If the diurnal schedules of teenagers is misallocated, I'm guessing that it is in part due to over-activity in the evening (after-school jobs, sports, social events, gaming, homework...okay, maybe not homework) rather than over-activity in the morning. When I was in high school, I lacked sufficient sleep because of the extracurricular activities I participated in, not because school started too early (though my commute did start at 5:00 am). Let's fix that aspect of teenage life before we offset a social institution that affects the schedules of everybody else. | ||
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