Jumbled Nous — Colleen McCaffery's mental jumble drawer…

Stuff I’ve tweeted this week – 2012-05-01

May 8, 2012 · 0 comments

I find this avatar of me as a bird pretty disturbing... but I'm including it here because otherwise I find this blog post rather boring. Because, you know, throwing in a picture of yourself as a bird always improves things.

I’m trying a new plug-in this week called Twitter Digest, in place of WP-Lifestream2. Yeah, so there you go. I don’t know if I’ll bother to keep digesting my tweets, or posting them here, but for now I will.

Maintain your brain: The secrets to aging success: http://t.co/Mf74gvf0 ->
CBC Books – The top five regrets of the dying: http://t.co/LGREJ0Ek ->
Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers http://t.co/jv8Z4bRo ->
5 Mind-Bending Facts About Dreams http://t.co/sezAEmFq via @LiveScience ->
RT @mocost: It’s Stroke Awareness Month: A primer from the @dana_fdn http://t.co/dnXysHtX & an infographic from the @wellcometrust h … ->
RT @sospokesaroj: My mother fell through the cracks of the system and died http://t.co/dQoht5H4 via @kevinmd ->
RT @cswa_news: OTTAWA, May 2, 2012 /CNW/ – The Canadian Science Writers Association (CSWA) and the Association des communicateurs… htt … ->
RT @mindhackz: Learn to Love Annoying People http://t.co/YzM8dhCe ->
Dopamine Could Be Linked To ‘Slacking’ http://t.co/Iue99YzE ->
http://t.co/692T0lLb The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius ->
Quite enjoyed reading this 1994 interview of Margie Profet by Shari Rudavsky http://t.co/7b8mHoVv ->
Effects of loneliness mimic aging process http://t.co/mjovN32L ->
What Is Psychology? What Are The Branches Of Psychology? http://t.co/L5XY5Hb4 ->
Ritalin use for ADHD soars fourfold as child psychologists warn of untested drug cocktails http://t.co/JSWi1FAk ->
RT @neurobonkers: Is autism a disorder, a disease, an illness or a condition? http://t.co/qzkw7H3T ->
I should be outside and instead I’m blogging…or blathering http://t.co/GnO5XwiE What makes one appear smarter and more sociable? ->

Tagged as: psychology, science, socialmedia, technology, tweets

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What makes one appear smarter and more sociable (in photos)? An excuse for more navel-gazing.

May 6, 2012 · 0 comments

Nice morning… Large coffee in hand and reading What makes one appear smarter and more sociable? on judg.me blog, which I came across via Barking up the Wrong Tree blog (one of my favourites).

Very interesting, these snap judgements we apparently make about people, based on physical characteristics. Of course this gives me an excuse to apply this sort of thing to, well, myself…

warning: more photos of me forthcoming…I thought this blog would be mostly words, perhaps some in-depth ideas, but it seems it has become really an extended sort of navel-gazing with some pictures thrown in for good measure… (these analyses won’t make sense unless you read the two links above… so go do that, and then come back here…though I truly won’t blame you if you don’t… because really you should be out hiking in nature, with trees, and taking pictures, so you will look sociable and whatnot… also you should take your kids along, if you have some, if you don’t then maybe take someone else’s… err, not without asking of course, because I also just read that society is dumping stimulants down the throats of kids to get them to like sitting in chairs, indoors, all day, when really what they like is to be out in natural surroundings…)

Where was I? Oh, yes, me.

correction: I said my hair needed to be super short to be considered more "smart" looking, and that isn't correct, super-short hair apparently makes one look outgoing... (too darn busy socializing to spend time styling hair?) I may have lost the plot elsewhere as well...

Also, I found it interesting, and not surprising, that when people are seen in photos with other people then they are perceived as more “social”. They are so darn social that they cannot even find a picture of themselves without other people in it. I often find myself noticing when people have Facebook profiles photos with other people in them, and wonder why they do that? When I see a man doing that (i.e. a man’s profile with his girlfriend or wife) I either think “oh, displaying the trophy wife” or else I think “oh his wife/girlfriend makes him include her to signal to others that he is “taken”… which I suppose is probably just a reflection of my jaded viewpoint…otherwise why wouldn’t I just assume it is because he simply loves her a lot?) Because I tend not to be as “social” as some, it wouldn’t occur to me to have a picture of my husband in the Facebook photo with me… (Though I would and did think to have a picture of my kids/husband in the background photos, but I tend to think of the profile picture as identifying the person in question.) I think there is something to this… many people think of themselves in terms of “wife” or “mother” or “husband” and “father” or “friend” first, and think to present themselves that way… (but there is indeed the trophy wife dude, as I said… or trophy husband women, oh and then there is guys with the “car” in the background… which reminds me of a study I read recently entitled Peacocks, Porsches, and Thorstein Veblen:Conspicuous Consumption as a Sexual Signaling System…)

So, there you go… try and keep all of this in mind when selecting photos of yourself. Or forget the whole thing and go on a hike instead.

This week’s internet goodness – May 1, 2012

April 30, 2012 · 0 comments

I am testing a new plugin (WP-LifeStream 2) which creates a post (at a daily or weekly interval) of your social media “events”…. not so much because I think the world cares about what I tweet or post, but just for fun. I try out plugins for fun… the way some people go golfing or whatever.

In any case, adding Google+ as a service didn’t work–even though the plugin had an option for that–it kept coughing up furballs so I tried a workaround by creating a feed for my Google+ stream with gplusrss and adding that as a generic RSS feed. But I notice below that the Google+ posts aren’t displaying nicely… they merely have a hyperlinked date and time, and no excerpt at all (this is because in Google+ I often just post a link with no accompanying text because Google+ pulls the image and excerpt from the post and therefore there is no need.)

Also, I notice that retweets that are longer don’t show the links, which isn’t good.

I don’t think this plugin is going to work… unless I can change the display somehow and I doubt I’ll bother trying.

Funny, I originally choose WordPress so I could use all these plugins and so I could have custom templates and these are the very things that tend to annoy me the most.

Anyway, I’ll leave the post here regardless, in case there are some links of interest. (Don’t be worried that the titleless links will send you off to penis enlargement sites or something… they won’t… and I’m sure your penis is just fine.)

	Posted 19.04.2012 17:49.
	CharityVillage® Research: An Insider’s Guide to Social Media Resources for New Nonprofit Professionals: http://t.co/kMmYCiAv
	Why Clingy People Feel Colder http://t.co/UFqbtQyr
	Posted 19.04.2012 19:49.
	Unhappiness Is in the Eye of the Beholder – ScienceNOW http://t.co/3DwUWyzX
	Posted 19.04.2012 20:39.
	Do you raise your claws or scoot backwards? http://t.co/J382onrJ Scientists find that neurological changes can happen due to social status
	Posted 20.04.2012 15:22.
	How Thinking About Death Can Improve Life \| http://t.co/M0VCsgTE
	How Western Psychology Needs To Rethink Depression \| http://t.co/ZRbB3v4S
	Posted Doctors with the ability to stand back and pattern match… we need more this big picture approac….
	Posted 20.04.2012 15:45.
	Posted 20.04.2012 16:05.
	Neuroscience shows adolescent brain still developing…should that influence the sentencing of juveniles? http://t.co/07Av7NHy
	Posted 20.04.2012 16:09.
	Posted 22.04.2012 02:28.
	Posted 24.04.2012 05:19.
	http://t.co/MuPU3grI When You’re Evil, the Whole World Looks Dark
	Now THIS is a resume ? http://t.co/EpwVek6K
	Posted 25.04.2012 00:11.
	How to get involved in public engagement / science if you are a PhD student / post-doc … http://t.co/J5yV0CCS
	RT @ScienceBlogTwit: Fish-flavored Listerine?: Periodontitis, inflammation of the tissue surrounding the teeth, affects more than hal… …

	I’m doing my part, by just trying to get my BA. http://t.co/PeHo5WmI The world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?
	Posted 26.04.2012 02:34.
	Posted Good article. Intriguing ideas..
	Posted 26.04.2012 17:46.
	Posted via @cswa_news.
	RT @cswa_news: Where Are The Science Communicators? Interactive Map of 1000+ #SciComm Twitterers http://t.co/G9Dqm6Ta
	RT @mkonnikova: Why your coworkers don’t like you, ” taking note of the mess on your desk, how loudly you chew, even your word choices” …
	Should Facebook should have gone public already?http://t.co/sR8XoGm9
	Why Do Companies Go Public? An Empirical Analysis http://t.co/fW6cNcdU [abstract]
	RT @carlacasilli: I’d say more like dataphilia. RT @andrew_zolli: Meet the new metrosexual: the urban datasexual. http://t.co/5CsqKoWu
	Posted via @carlacasilli @andrew_zolli.
	HR Managers – a growing profession http://t.co/V5rtoJ6n via @SmartMoney
	Posted Best bet for being employed: Being a HR Manager in the medical field, with an actuarial side busi….
	Sex After a Field Trip Yields Scientific First – ScienceNOW: http://t.co/vQ65iwLs
	Why Women Leave Academia \| Inside Higher Ed: http://t.co/LvctwNPJ
	Posted Having trouble lying down while walking in a circle http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/04/five-effortl….
	Citing a Tweet https://t.co/QxmtjtbS’s-not-just-for-twits/
	Posted 28.04.2012 15:57.
	Posted 29.04.2012 00:34.

	Posted 29.04.2012 03:26.
	Posted 29.04.2012 04:29.
	Posted “…Our results suggest that many, if not most, women primary-care physicians do not work enough ….
	Posted 29.04.2012 05:14.
	New paper slams UK media for routinely misrepresenting neuroscience research to further ideological agendas http://t.co/R6MtvnKT

	Posted Apparently the trend is to wear no actual blouse to work this spring..
	Analytic thinking can decrease religious belief: UBC study http://t.co/Gj84Cwds
	Museum of Social Media http://t.co/D8E1enli Free from Wiley (video/check out books/free journal articles related to social media)

Tagged as: gplusrss, inte, internet_goodness, socialmedia, technology, wplifestream2

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Good Housekeeping bums me out by showing me that I look better at a much lower BMI

April 10, 2012 · 0 comments

It would be nice to think that I am so busy contributing value to the world, that I wouldn’t feel the pull towards clicking on links that promise to give me virtual weight loss makeovers. (Though certainly virtual weight loss sounds easier than in real life weight loss so I figured what the heck…there is no jogging involved, merely the click of my mouse.)

So I clicked on this: Virtual Weight Loss Makeover – Good Housekeeping

And at Good Housekeeping, no less. (I was surprised that still existed… certainly I had no business visiting the site, or reading the magazine, because good housekeeper I am not.) But it isn’t just about housekeeping, apparently… it’s also about beauty and weight loss and apparently I must care about that, even if I don’t care about the mildew stains on the tile in our bathroom and cooking from scratch meals for my children and my man (I have no idea if that is what Good Housekeeping was or is all about… that is just the off the cuff impression I have of the publication).

And it would seem I do indeed look better at a much lower BMI. Not that I didn’t already know this, but I think one really does get used to the extra weight over time and perhaps I am even guilty of not really looking at the whole picture in the mirror. (Hah! Don’ t we ALL do this? I’m sure you don’t march into the stores and stare unflinchingly at yourself in the change room mirrors… I recently caught sight of myself in one of those three way mirrors in a change room and actually got a bit of a start because I didn’t recognize the back of myself and thought I was seeing someone behind me! No… turns out that ass was mine… sadly… I promptly went and had a cinnamon bun and coffee in order to recover from the trauma.)

I notice the virtual weight loss program doesn't seem to reduce the size of the arms... so it looks kind of funny because my arms are disproportionately large in the "after" picture... heh... Also, I lately turfed these jeans because they had that "mom jeans" look going on and were REALLY uncomfortable due to some sort of tummy reducing panel thingy... it seems all it did was move the bulk up and over the top resulting in the classic muffin top situation...

Anyway, it got me thinking a bit about what my ideal weight is. I am only 5’1 so the fact that I can lose 38 lbs and still be almost in the normal BMI category is sort of staggering. Though I recall what I looked like at around 105 lbs. and that was about the weight where I didn’t feel overweight (i.e. I didn’t have to walk around holding in my stomach all the time.) But then again when I was in my teens and athletic with a lot of muscle, I weighed around 115 lbs. and also looked slim.

A few years back (2007) I started to exercise and managed to lose weight and I dug up a picture of me at around 130 lbs. and I think I look healthy at that weight so at this point I plan to at least try for that (I was walking, hiking and using a stationary bike.)

Happy and not having to hold in stomach with panels or extreme breath holding

In any case, I came across a great website that shows bodies at all sorts of BMI’s/weights/heights etc. I found it really helpful to get a sense of what REAL people look like at various weights.

Take a look: http://www.mybodygallery.com/index.html

Some further reading about BMI’s:

Calculate Your Body Mass Index
BMI and Self-Rated Attractiveness
I think I’m healthy but my BMI says I’m overweight
And I could be screwing myself out of jobs by admitting my weight online if this anything to go by: Should employers discriminate based on workers’ waistlines?
Beyond BMI: New obesity tool better at predicting risk of death, studies say
And be careful of being of a fat-skinny person: The BMI myth? You might be fatter than you think
Why the Body Mass Index (BMI) is a Poor Measure of Your Health

Tagged as: beauty, bmi, career, health, navel_gazing, photos, virtual_makeover

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I fell down a sad internet rabbit hole…

April 9, 2012 · 2 comments

It’s a lovely day… perfect temperature (as far as I’m concerned anyway, warm enough to only need a sweater or light jacket but cool enough that you don’t fry in the sun or sweat) and it’s also a long weekend and yet I’m sitting here trying to stop crying and wondering how I’m going to go out and buy hiking shoes with my eyes all puffed like this. I suppose sunglasses will do.

I’m crying because a man I didn’t know died last year in Vancouver.

Perhaps it resonated because he was my husband’s age, and his children are around the same age as ours. Maybe it resonated because he is Canadian and I am Canadian. It might also have resonated because I’m starting to realize that people my age get cancer, and die of it… I realize very young people do also, but not nearly as much.

Mostly it resonated because I have a prefrontal cortex and with it comes that pesky empathy thing.

Interestingly I had come across the penmachine blog before, not sure when, but a while back when I was looking up something about punctuation. (I think it was this: Six reasons to stop typing two spaces after a period.) I quite honestly didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to do that any more… 29 years of touch typing one way makes undoing it very hard, but I’m trying. I read quite a few articles on Derek’s blog but then I admit I didn’t return there because, well, I found it hard to read about his terminal cancer. I am particularly affected by things I read and see on the internet (or in movies for that matter), so I tend to try to limit the distressing stuff to a certain extent… in particular disease related because I can sometimes be a little hypochondriacal (though I’m generally fine with reading medical journals and writing/posting about medical topics… but not as fine reading about harrowing personal experiences).

And then yesterday I landed back on penmachine quite by accident doing a search for information on the MovableType blogging platform. I fairly quickly remembered Derek and his situation and while reading the post on MoveableType I kept thinking to myself that I should refrain from hitting “home” after I was done to see how Derek was doing. Because I suspected he might have died.

I couldn’t resist finding out so I clicked “home”, and indeed found out he had died (and had asked his family to post his last blog entry after his death, which made it particularly moving and apparently I’m not the only one to have thought so since it seemed the post/blog went viral as a result). So I stayed a long time and read through his posts and watched the slides of his living wake and was sad, and amazed, at the power of this social media stuff and how I can be sitting here in Oakville crying because someone I never knew lived and died in Vancouver.

So… yeah.

I’m off to buy hiking shoes now, and I’m suddenly pretty damn happy that I can do that and go for a walk with them on this perfect spring day.

And I’m very sorry that Derek K. Miller can no longer do that. And I’m very sorry for his family as well.

And I’ll be hugging my kids really hard on the way out to get the hiking shoes.

I think I need to sleep more… and perhaps to blog pseudonymously… and not have cereal in the house…

April 5, 2012 · 0 comments

According to http://sleepingtime.org/ I sleep between 2am and 8am. Which is accurate, and is a good reminder that I need to sleep more. And it’s sort of creepy that an app knows this about me. But then again all kinds of technologies are creeping me out these days (eg: Facebook users can now expect to get date requests from strangers and This Is Your Life: Timeline, Facebook’s latest bid to keep you in its grasp, is unsettling — and unexpectedly beautiful and Stalker app Girls Around Me hunts women via Facebook, Foursquare.)

). (Also: A couple of weeks ago an interviewer brought something up in the interview that I hadn’t mentioned and so I paused and looked at him quizzically and he said “I read that on your blog” and I had a moment of the WORLDS COLLIDING feeling… which is rather silly considering I am publishing openly on the internet and so of course it’s there for all to see… that was sort of the point… which apparently doesn’t make it not weird when someone I know does read it…)

Which reminds me that I read something about light and diabetes… let me go dig it up…

Here it is: Should we blame the diabetes epidemic on lightbulbs? It isn’t related to sleep, per se, but people who are awake when they would typically be sleeping (i.e. night-shift workers or those compulsively posting on Twitter, Google+ or blogs during the night) tend to eat during times that would ordinarily be fasting periods (because it’s hard to eat a sundae while you’re sleeping).

(You what else is hard to do? Eating multiple bowls of sugary cereal while trying to tweet… you know, between two and eight… it was hard enough to do before I had two cats… typing and eating cereal is tough… but now the cats literally swarm me when I even THINK about eating cereal… the other night, in an attempt to eat my late night bowl of cereal–okay, okay, multiple bowls of cereal–I actually tip toed upstairs and carried the bowl and spoon and box and milk down to the TV room and muffled the sound of the pouring with pillows and stuff… I figured that would do the trick because the cats were two floors up all curled up asleep… NOPE… they were down in a shot before I got one spoonfull in… And I feel I should explain the multiple bowl thing… it isn’t that I’m a binge eater or something… I just have this silly thing where if there is some milk left when the cereal runs out that I feel I need to add a bit more cereal… you know, to use up the rest of the milk… but then I put too much cereal in and then have to add some milk… and then there is some milk left and I have to add some cereal… before you know it there is no more Honey Bunches of Oats cereal or milk left and my husband is sort of baffled because didn’t he just buy some yesterday and ????)

So anyway, you get the idea.

And perhaps this also: Do social networks make us sick?

Well, that’s all I have time for. Take care for now.

(If you like those links, I post a lot of similar stuff on Google+ or Twitter… you know, when I should be sleeping and not eating cereal…)

Tagged as: blogging, diabetes, facebook, Google+, health, psychology, sleep, technology, Twitter

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← Previous Entries

Colleen McCaffery's mental jumble drawer...

What makes one appear smarter and more sociable (in photos)? An excuse for more navel-gazing.

Good Housekeeping bums me out by showing me that I look better at a much lower BMI

I fell down a sad internet rabbit hole…

I think I need to sleep more… and perhaps to blog pseudonymously… and not have cereal in the house…

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Colleen McCaffery's mental jumble drawer...

Stuff I’ve tweeted this week – 2012-05-01

What makes one appear smarter and more sociable (in photos)? An excuse for more navel-gazing.

This week’s internet goodness – May 1, 2012

What Employers or Recruiters want to see on your resume… in case you need to care about such things…

Good Housekeeping bums me out by showing me that I look better at a much lower BMI

I fell down a sad internet rabbit hole…

I think I need to sleep more… and perhaps to blog pseudonymously… and not have cereal in the house…

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Archive

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