joepa would've been so proud

last night lacey and i took what is quite possibly my favorite picture from state college to date. it reflects the miniscule amount of excitement needed to make us happy and the joepa fever that pervades the entire area. please, please love it as much as i do.

there's been a lot of grilling hubub around here lately. the summer weather preview that rolled through last week has made us all eager to be doing summer things, i think. we had two lab visits on saturday and spent the downtime in between at the batting cages on mount tussey. fun times were had by all, i think, and we definitely recruited rachel as a player for the softball team we're trying to put together. we're at five players or so now, so hopefully we can get things worked out so that we have enough for a full team. that would make me very much happy.

i also am not necessarily disappointed about the fact that two of my tentative travel dates are no longer set to be carried out. the july trip to UC Davis and the june trip to louisville have been scratched, each for different reasons, but cumulatively giving me two weeks of my summer back, which is nice. if i can get a financial footing under me, i should be able to go home? maybe? hopfully?

the other excitement came from a fiery round of bowling last weekend, when i rolled seven strikes in a row. there is photographic evidence for five of the seven. you'll just have to take my word that the first two balls of my next game were strikes also. this seems to only happen when we bowl in big groups with visitors present, because i think the last time i did it was when nick was in town.

that's it for now, i think. finals are over and this summer will be full of paper-writing time, i think. there are worse ways to spend it, to be sure, but i'm going to need a bit of my motivation back to start making a dent in the workload. and if the rationality of that doesn't inspire me, i can always try to kickstart my energy level by thinking that kara will be here in two more weeks!

sorry it's been so long

so, at lacey's inspiration, i'm going to try to get back on the blogging horse. so, how to recap the last three months. they went something like this:

work
wisconsin trip
work
missouri trip
work
vancouver trip
work
san francisco
work

now.

although vancouver was equally if not more beautiful, san francisco definitely gave us the best weather. we spent most of our time at the conference, of course, but got to take in a bit of the city the last day. we hit the highlights, i think. cable car ride. a jaunt through the shopping district (union square?), buss ride, haight ashbury, giants game, telegraph hill, coit tower, and trying to discretely change clothes in the airport. mission accomplished. don't we look happy? eighty degrees in the middle of march will do that to you, i suppose.

the other event as of late is that i've changed my hair color. i'm a somewhat-of-a-redish-brown-haired girl now. color 558 to be exact. i've wanted to do it for a while and it just seemed like a good time. spring has sprung and something new needed to go down.

this is the last week of classes here and then summer's in full swing. i already have a laundry list of things i'd like to accomplish - one of them being to get some actual time off. mostly i'm excited to have so many lovely visitors planning trips out to this gre---er--interesting state ;)

ttfn.

an abbreviated articulation

okay, second semester is in full swing. it was great to be home and i'm still a little blue about once again being so far away from everyone, but i'm going to need to be operating at about 125% by the end of the day today.

i'll do a better update later, but i thought i'd post this because our lab webpage is now up and running and i thought some of you might want to see it. it turned out pretty good (which i had nothing to do with - i can barely post these blogs, after all :)

http://emotiondev.psych.psu.edu/index.shtml

spring ahead, fall back

well, since it's the only thing that i do that isn't lab work or classes, i must say that i'm sad that this saturday's game aganst purdue was the last home football game of the season. it was an excellent game and we sat in a group of incredibly interesting undergrads. as a prime illustration, one guy came in his OWN lion costume and had challenged the true nittany lion to this and that before the game was over. it was quite fun to watch. lacey snapped what is probably the best picture to date (save only for the giant joe pa head).

following the game on saturday we headed to the sports bar to finish watching the texas vs. oklahoma state game (also excellent) alongside the navy vs. notre dame (also excellent) and michigan vs. michigan state (good, but not excellent) games. we finally had enough people to get a table topper, which lacey and i have wanted to do since our first trek out last year to find a place to watch iowa and texas on channels we don't get. you should've seen the looks people gave us as they walked by. (i don't know why i look like i have no teeth in this picture)

and because football games were not really meant to be played at noon, i went home and fell asleep by 11:00. man, i'm awesome. although in my defense, i had also spent friday night babysitting kristin's kids. . . involving some intense games of dodgeball on the wii. yup, that was just as fun as it sounds like it would be. and thank goodness for that, because it meant that will got to stay up past his bedtime :)

this week has been a long one already. i'm trying to pull together projects and presentations before i leave for thanksgiving. it's also a rush to get ahead on lab-related stuff because our staff people have to work mon-wed still, and i'm never sure how often i'll really be able to check my e-mail when i'm gone. and although it's never fun to have long, long days, it really is a reminder of how extremely lucky i am to love what i do. i can spend 13 hours in lab and at class and although i'm tired (and probably mildly cranky) by the end of the day, i don't hate it. i think that's a blessing that many people never know. it's also verification that i'm in the right place and doing the right things, which is always nice.

i'm not sure that i mentioned it before, but i was asked to be the student member on the facutly search committee for a new social development faculty member. it's been a really great experience so far getting to see the process from the get go and it's great to have the knowledge about how things work. it's really indimidating to see some of the applications come through and to see 1) how many things some people have accomplished so early in their careers and 2) how easy it is to distinguish the "i'm just finishing grad school" candidates from the "i finshed graduate school and am now doing postdoctoral research" candidates. there was a time a few months ago when kristin, in passing, said something about how by the time i graduate she thinks it will be necessary to have a postdoc under my belt and although some people are outstanding, they are so because it's not the norm, so she's probably close to correct. we'll see. we know how much i love moving (insert sarcastic tone as appropriate).

i'm too tired to make this much longer, but i will say (before signing off) that my countdown to my return home has entered the single digits!!! yay!! :)

behind enemy lines

you'll notice a drastic lack of sunny-ness in these tailgate pics compared with previous ones. i played football as much as i could to keep warm. it was super fun, though. kristin and erik hosted which meant that we were in the super-spacious non-student tailgating section (i.e. the hilton of the tailgate) AND further means that i have a fun tailgating picture with my advisor, although you probably can't pick her out from the restof us in the picture. if you need help, the above pic shows caroline, rachel, me, kristin, and lacey, respectively. this should also resolve two additional issues back at home, the first being that kara has only a scary image of kristin persisting from the night they first met at a halloween party and the second being that my dad was concerned that i never had a drink at any of the tailgates. both of them should feel better now (and daddy's girl should get bonus points for drinking from the correct beverage family, right? :)

even though it was cold, the night game did turn out to be super fun, unique experience. the stadium was packed with students dressed in their "white-out" gear. believe it or not, i was a part of the largest attendance in beaver stadium history. don't quote me, but i think they said attendance was 110,146. i tried really hard to remember, but it turns out a lot of numbers go by during a football game. go figure. and since i did a shout out to dad, i should probably shout out to mom as well that we were nice to the people from the other team. and it turns out that they were pretty nice as well. and that that guy hugging the pumpkin cracks me up every time (i bet people from u of florida are still wicked-mean, though...)

aside from the tailgate, last week was a pretty good breather after the week before (no midterm exams this week!!). friday was really busy with meetings, but all in all a good day and the late game on saturday meant that i actually spent a whole day away from the office, which felt fantastic. sheri and i have received a data set from another professor on campus that we'll be collaborating with (again looking at factors that are believed to be antecedents to early puberty) so i'm really hoping we'll be digging into that soon. i have heard nothing back about the application i submitted to our Internal Review Board about using the adoption data set, so that's disappointing. we've actually found a third data set that we'd be able to use because it is publicly available online (since it was funded through federal grant money that data becomes available for public use), but i've had some technical difficulties pulling a good data set together (the file requires you to sort through over 800 pages of variables and info about variables to find the 15 that we actually want and the system of then pulling only those 15 into a usable data set is what's been really tricky for me).


kristin and i have discussed yet another round of changes to the analyses for my thesis. this week i'm running models that look at how composites children's distress changes every minute within the tasks they perform in the lab (although the data i'm working with is from kristin's lab in wisconsin, so if you've heard me talk about our lab visits, these are a bit different). i'm also still training in the EEG lab. i can successfully apply the 128-channel neural net although i cannot successfully collect data. who knew thick hair and brain waves could make for such a complicated procedure? i keep warning potential visitors that i'll probably want to hook them up to the EEG. perhaps related, my number of visitors has begun to drop off :)


last week and this week have also brought the Human Developmental Neuroscience Initiative to some of us. since the department will be getting an MRI in the next year, there's an understandable push to start educating people on how MRI works, what the procedure looks like, how data collection will look, etc. supposedly, kids are nearly impossible to run in a magnet (we were told on friday that an 8mm head movement during data collection makes data unusable, so that pretty much rules out our squirmy 2 year-olds). it's been really informative, though, and i'm interested in what kinds of this friday will bring about...



this is getting really long, but because i told some of you about our creative halloween costumes, i'll include a pic. academia is full of pun-laden (i.e. inherently nerdy) costume ideas, and ours was no exception. in case you don't get it figured out, we were "ceiling fans. just mull it over in your head for a bit...

Don't Mess With IoTexConnYork-a

In case you're wondering, this is the image of our champion flip cup team. This was an interesting and fun weekend - I was completely unaware of just how much it was needed. There was about five minutes of friendly chit-chat upon arrivale at pictured tailgate and then Lacey and I "suggested" that some games be started. The teams were random, but my team (L->R: rachel, me, lacey, mike, james) took our opponents in a 2-1 series. it's really all you could expect from a team that holds two iowans, a texan, and a couple of new englanders who can really be competitve when needed. Honestly, it was just fun to be focused on something other than work. Something that gets started and completed in the same sitting. Well, and admittedly it's much more fun when that thing is something that you win :) I think it was later, while playing beanbags, that I yelled across to my partner, Lacey, "I really don't like to lose." To which she, of course, responded, "me either." Fear not, we came back from our deficit and went unbeaten in beanbags.

There should be no mistake, though, that it was football saturday and thus the main event of the day was the football game. Just as disappointing as last weekend was for teams I am a fan of, this weekend was full of pleasant surprises. A win for Penn State over Wisconsin and a win for Iowa over Illinois. This may or may not bode well for the big ten, but it's nice to see some love for my unranked teams. I believe that I also know several souls who would love to see Chicago get another shot at their - um - disappointing weekend last weekend. But I can really only ask for so much at once :)

Otherwise, it seems that the most strenuous part of my days are classes. Not because they are more work, necessarily, but because they are consistently representative of time that I am not spending doing other things. I am at that unavoidable point in the semester where it seems like numerous papers and presentations will not come out of me, but it also feels like there is an end (to the semester) in sight. In a month, it will be Thanksgiving. Four or five weeks after that, it will be Christmas and all of this will be done. Well, not ALL of this, but all of THIS - if that makes sense. And if I did get anything accomplished this week, it was almost completely reorganizing my schedule for next semester so that it will be equally as busy as this semester, but will officially be my last semester of classes. That will be wonderful.

And because I'm clearly in need of more and more things to do, I started to new projects this week. (perhaps I am masochistic in some way?) On Wednesday, I started my training for the EEG study I'll be doing with Kristin. For a while, I'll just be practicing being able to put the net on people in a manner that is both timely and accurate and, I suppose, nondestructive. So, if you've got any notions to visit in the next month or so, be prepared for me to ask you to do something that will result in you looking like this little girl (i'm certain her parent is a researcher). Now imagine all of the horrible things that my children will be guinea pigs for. :)

My other new event deals with changes in cardiac activity during social and non-social activities. Some of the literature suggests that increases in heart rates (or the parasympathetic component of decreases in heart rate, called RSA) are good for emotion regulation; others suggest that decreases in RSA are good for emotion regulation. People have recently been interested in the way that social context might help to explain the discrepancy. I'm hoping to be able too look at this along with some other variables that I think might be relevant in a data set that we have. For some reason, I'm not sure I adequately conveyed how excited I am about that, but I'll stop before I come off as completely nerdy.

This week should be a lot like the last, but without the football game and with a midterm in my statistics class. It's kind of that point in time where if I really buckle down, I will save myself some stress later on in the semester. Much easier said than done, though, as I'm sure you would assume. The real kicker would be if I finally figured out how to do everything at once. We all have to find the balance, though, at some point. Nobody will read this who is not busy. So, those who have already found it should shed some light for those of us who are still searching...

visitors = tangible happiness

wow, i got behind quickly, didn't i? i'll try to keep a more steady pace. i don't, unfortunately, have the electronic versions of pics with my family during last weekend's visit from my parents and my grandma. i may try to steal them off of my mom's camera at some point, but that will obviously necessitate me being home (i'm on the verge of starting a countdown for that as it is; having the holiday stuff out in stores is making me antsy).

so, having my family around was absolutely spectacular. i knew that i was looking forward to their visit, but i don't think that i was aware of just how much i would enjoy their company. i was exhausted at the end of the weekend (as, i'm sure, were they), but it was just everything i hoped it would be. i'd let them come back again :) we toured state college, penn state, bellefonte, and penn's cave. we really did take pictures - just not on my camera.

then this week robby was here for the iowa game, which was also a bunch of fun. it was also beautiful out - but super hot, hot, hot! we were the yellow and black in a sea of blue and white.

so, as you can imagine, the weeks in between were packed full of stuff to finish up before i could have days to play. somehow i managed to finish both proposals for icis posters and get them submitted by the deadline. we should hear back by the end of november with some idea of if our proposals were accepted or not. the plan for analyses for my thesis have been changed in some form or another yet again - i've lost count of how many times that makes. luckily, my committee thinks i have a good question and interesting idea, it's just tough to pin down the exact best way to go about things. the good, exciting things are always more complex aren't they?

the project sheri and i are doing on kids with early puberty has sort of ballooned into some bigger ideas, which is great. there are a few other data sets that we'll have the possibility of working with now. the good news is that those analyses should be pretty straightforward once we pin down our exact quest5ions. i've actually been working on the protocal that we'll give to the institutional review board (IRB) here at penn state. they're the body that has to approve all of the research projects that are done here to make sure they're in line with the standards and ethics set forward by the college, the field, etc. It sounds like and actually is a good idea, in theory, but always ends up being more complicated than it needs to be. sheri and i will be using an old data set - collected years ago by people in colorado - and it's really wierd to try to fill out a form explaining how we're recruiting participants when we're not recruiting any participants. it's weird stuff like that, you know? but hopefully the people i've talked to have all been the right people and told me the right things and i've done what i needed to do so that we can move forward. it's a pain to be tied up in the bureaucracy that i'm not even used to being a part of. i just ever wanted to be a scientist. i just want to do the research.

instead, i have a lot of articles that need to be read for classes this week :) ahh, the hurdles that need to be knocked down before you can really run... it's fine, though. i'm in an "i can do this" mode. so, watch me fly...

let's put another pic from the weekend up, just for good measure and just to make sure this is ended on a happy note! (this one with rachel, who some of you have met already)