Finally upgraded...

So I upgraded my blog to the "new" blogger. So far I can tell that the editing pages looks different, and it's now linked to my gmail account - woohoo. Other than that, I'm not really feeling any life-changing results from the upgrade. The one major bummer is that many of my comments lost their authors names when I made the switch -- so my apologies for that. Now on to some actual updates.

I'm almost done reading Blink , which has been far too addictive. I highly recommend it, it's all about snap judgments that people make. I also downloaded pictures from New Years and Christmas from my cameras. I'll have to track down some other people from New Years to try to get pictures that I'm actually in, since I've not mastered that taking pictures of myself thing yet. In the mail on Friday I received my big Christmas presents -- things to hang on the wall of my condo. My parents took this picture on of their recent road trips to the West.



This week has been a lot of reading and writing. At some point in September I was invited (read: told) that I was contributing to a book chapter on familial risk of dyslexia. That's now out of the way, thanks to most of Friday and several cups of I don't quite remember what at Starbucks. Selling legally addictive substances wasn't enough to get me to stay in Starbucks, but as soon as they added free wifi access I was there! And most of Saturday and Sunday have been spent running analyses on my thesis data. In a lot of ways, doing data analysis is my favorite part of a study. It's like spending months wrapping boxes with secret presents in them for the day when you finally start up SPSS, JMP, Stata, or even SAS. Then it's a free-for-all as you try to find all of the things you said you were looking for, kick yourself for all of the things you find that are unexpected, and wish that it was more ethical to trudge through your data for other effects that will make your methods section a bit longer.

So what did I do? I basically show (as many other people have also shown) that the brain responds distinctly to various forms of reinforcement. To give reinforcement, I used pictures on a computer monitor, mostly because it's what I had, but I would be interested to see what areas of the brain light up when you give participants a puppy, or an ice cream. Maybe next time!



Continuing with the opening presents metaphor from before, there are definitely results that are way more fun than other results. For instance, my analyses are able to account for 93.170% of the variance. Other exciting results are finding major group effects or hemisphere differences in the brain. Slightly less fun are electrode differences, because it basically means that two spots on the head had different activity - and requires a bit more work to figure out just where those differences are.

Well that's about all I've got to report. For the rest of the day I'll keep working on writing up these analyses so I'll have something for my advisor next week. What's everyone else up to?