Decorating my apartment: on a budget

So when I moved into a new apartment a few months back, I got a chance to rethink what I wanted to do with all the bare walls in my new apartment.

Here's a few options I endorse that are way cheaper than buying original artwork, and allow you to have a bit of fun in the process.

For the living room:

1) Purchase a large piece of canvas. You can get this at a local hobby store. Throw on some paint, magazine cutouts, glue whatever you want to it really, it's your own work of art. Put that on the wall and you'll have lots to talk about when your friends show up at your next party.

For anyroom:

2) Buy colored contact paper. Glue it to the wall in any arrangement you like. Use bright colors and aim for a repeating pattern, but not too obvious.

3) Hang photographs in a very structured, organized manner. It can add color to any boring wall:




4) "Rasterbate" a photograph, then put it on a wall. Think of this as your own personal Seurat-like painting. See pictures of what these look like, here.

Here's an example:





So that should get you started with how to add some spice to your wall-space.

Go out there, have some fun, optimize.

I'll upload some photos once I've finished.

Impression Management: aka Acting Smart

"All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players"
-William Shakespeare

Academia is a wonderful place to be.

When you're not impressing others with your research, you can impress others by "acting smart".

In the business-world, this is referred to as "impression management".

So, like a good scientist, I looked to see if there is any empirical validity to the behavior of 'acting smart'. Does it help? Can it really be that important?

The single study I managed to find indicated that it does or doesn't help, depending on who you ask.

This study manipulated one group into 'acting smart' during a social interaction and compared them to controls.

What it found was that people who were instructed to "act smart" manipulated a few particular behaviors, but these had no influence on the IQ ratings attributed to them by the person with whom they were talking.

What this means is that, if you are in a one-on-one conversation, your partner is probably too busy thinking about the conversation to give any attention to your smart-acting behaviors.

However, when judges were asked to rate videos of the conversations, the people in the "act smart" condition were rated as slightly more intelligent.

So if want to use this knowledge to optimize your life, what you can take from this study is that if you are talking to one person, don't worry about behaving intelligently.

But if you are having a conversation with someone, and happen to have an audience, then, by all means, act as smart as humanly possible, if that's your interest. Your audience just might buy it.

As for impressing that audience, these data suggest that "looking while speaking" is used as a cue for intelligence. And having a "serious face" was not.

So go out there, stare people down while you are speaking, and deceive others into thinking you are more intelligent than you really are....

Until next time...

Control your exit -- it's good stuff

Found this article over at happiness-project.com

It's about controlling your exit.

In sum, when you go somewhere, or attend an event, always have a quick way out, so that you can leave when you want to.

I think this might apply to lots of situations.

Because we all know how awkward it can feel when you get trapped at a bad party or in a failed conversation.

Think about it.

And plan accordingly.

Personality...

"Personality is and does something... It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual" -Gordon Allport

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As a scientist, I am fascinated by the goal of reducing personality and behavior to brain systems and neural structures. Biological reductionism, if successful, would be pretty amazing if it can explain what's going on in there.

But as a human who believes that others are more than just the sum of their parts, I hope that biological reductionism, as a way of explaining personality, fails.

And I also hope that neuroscience finds a way to preserve the 'soul' during its quest to reduce everything to brain activity.

*Shhhhhhh*
====================================

Things I've tried to do to fix my wet cell phone

So I was trying to talk on my cellphone near a sink, and this resulted in the phone slipping out between my ear and shoulder and into a large amount of water.

And now I'm going to show you the (unsuccessful) ways I've tried to fix it:

#1


For me, this method did not work.

#2 Immersing the phone in rubbing alcohol.

This one, also, did not work for me. My engineering friends suggested it as a way of purging the phone of water, and the alcohol will quickly evaporate.

I believe that in some cases, these techniques will work to fix a broken phone. Try them at your own risk. (In my scenario, it was obvious that my phone was broken, so I had no problem submerging it in rubbing alcohol ---- c'mon, I love testing hypotheses!)

----------------------

With that out of the way, let me tell you something that I've learned over the past few days.

For me, being unreachable has been pretty spectacular. In retrospect, I've come to realize that I spend a lot of my time sending text messages and making calls that I could do without. In this regard, these are time-wasters. Personally, I think it's possible to go off the grid, and live my life by using a landline only. And how retro is it to give out one's home phone number?!

So until I get a new phone, I'm free from (cellphone) distraction. And it's pretty amazing.

Try this for the next few days: Turn off your cellphone, and go without it for 3 days. See what you learn.

Optimize (by simplifying) your life.

Your daily dose of science: Live-blogging an academic talk

4:04pm: I missed the beginning because I was running an experiment that went until 4. When I arrive, the speaker is in the middle of a description of the procedure, which is designed to elicit feelings of gratitude (I think, but I dunno---I missed the beginnning..)

Anyway, today's colloqium speaker is Dr. David DeSteno.

wooohoooo!

4:06pm: He's now talking about how gratitude mediates helping behavior. ("gratitude as a facilitator of costly reciprocity").

4:07pm: Study #2---> The goal is to show that gratitude, and not reciprocity concerns, drove helping behavior. In other words, if gratitude mediates helping, it should do so for a stranger as well.

Talking about effect of gratitude on helping behavior. Read the paper here (Desteno & Bartlett, 2006)

4:11pm: Cooperation vs Competition What happens when one's money is on the line? Will people help against their own financial interests?

Gratitude predicts how much money you'll give to the other person.

4:16pm: Maybe it's because I missed the beginning, but I feel like I can't keep up with the talk.

4:17pm: Speaker is talking about a current experiment that focuses on demonstrating that pride will increase perseverence on a task.

4:18pm: I like how all of his emotional manipulations are situation-based. For example, experimenter induces pride by telling the participant that they are in the 94th percentile on the task and the experimener presumably gives positive (and nonverbal) feedback indicating that it's good...

4:20pm: People who feel pride, perservere longer on a difficult task.

4:24pm: Acclaim feedback on a task increases perserverence. Question from the audience: to what extent does positive feedback during that condition increase motivation for the subsequent task. i.e. if we give a rat positive reinforcement after a behavior, we increase that behavior. in this instance behavior = persistence on task. I dunno. Something to think about.

4:25pm: Q from audience: What is the connection between the first task and the second task? answer-> both load on a visual factor.

4:26pm: Speaker's argument is that pride is adaptive. -> builds skills, makes one valuable to a group.

4:32pm: pride => dominance behaviors.

4:39pm: a slide demonstrating a mediational analysis, I understand it to mean that compassion motivates helping behavior.....

4:43pm: people moving in synchrony increases helping & liking. What does this tapping-in-rhythm task generalize to?

4:44pm: Conclusions---Humans possess discrete emotional responses that are sentiive, or tuned, to short-term vs. long-term payoffs.... these emotional repsonses lead to increasing social capital, etc...

4:45pm: Question & Answer time! yeah!

4:49pm: Speaker indicates that, for him, emotions are cognitive states, that increase response tendencies. May be conscious or unconscious.

4:41pm: Talking about Dalai Lama & Mother Theresa... Everyone is the same, it's a benefit to the self to help others?

4:57pm: Why do people feel pride for things that they aren't good at in comparison to other people? Lots of cross-talk about evolutionary adaptiveness of emotional states. I'm a fan of post-hoc evolutionary arguments.

This talk was really fun, and I'm glad that I was here for it.

Until next time!

Late to bed, late to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy...

I fundamentally disagree with Ben Franklin on the following point:

"Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

I offer to you, a different approach, if your work environment permits it.  (Some places are just set on imposing the 9-5 style, if you are able to break out of the mold, do so, if not, follow Ben's advice).

I'm a night-owl.  And I don't plan to change, because I am most productive after everyone has gone to bed, where I have a nice large chunk of quiet time to write.

And I never have to worry about interruptions.

Now, some people take the alternate approach, where they do all their writing in the morning.  And if that works for you, great!

However, if you find the mornings too distracting (or groggy!) to get in your quiet, work time.  

Flip your schedule.

Optimize!