today i learned that "nosology" is the "branch of medical science dealing with the classification of diseases". surprisingly, i did not learn this from an episode of house

cambodia photos (postscript)

* von tells me that using photobucket (as opposed to flickr) is demonstrably un-l33t. i had not a clue.

cambodia photos

it's been long enough

thanksgiving

because of the company i choose to keep, because of the circles i travel in, i forget that out there in the world - and closer, much closer to home than terrorists and dictators - are people who are truly, incorrigibly horrid (and i use the word very intentionally -- because we're not even talking about evil, a concept far more alien and difficult to diagnose.) the kind of people who fundamentally do not care. the takers. and because i don't often encounter them, my inner spectrum of good and bad is shortened, warped, and peccadilloes and foibles get blown up and become suddenly enormous and grotesque.

thus, thanksgiving is in order. first, for days like today, when things get put into perspective. second, that these days are few and far between. and third, that God gave us the capacity to forgive -- both idiosyncrasies and hurts far more grievous.

request

can someone else please write about siem reap? the mere thought of doing that exhausts me.

edited because i can't spell

because you asked

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going"

John 14:1-4

that's why.

dinner with nl, who's headed out to nyu in the fall for a phd in computational whatchacajigummy somethingoranother. we entertained, very briefly, the idea of sharing an apartment in princeton or some such place midway between us, but mapquest very quickly shot that down in flames.

Currently reading:
Leviathan - Paul Auster

imposter syndrome

i'm positive that this is many of us. join the line for therapy.

just like old times

russell poldrack just published a paper in trends in cognitive sciences on reverse inference (a.k.a "abductive reasoning") in neuroimaging work, the chain of logic for this being:

a) in the experiment, we observe that brain region x is active
b) from previous work, we know that cognitive process z engages brain region x
c) therefore, in this experiment, cognitve process z (unobservable) is being engaged

(this in contrast with the typical inductive chain:

a) cogntive process z (observable) is being engaged
b) during this time, brain region x is active
c) therefore, cognitive process z engages brain region x)

because i had to do a presentation on the paper, i called cp to check on my general understanding of inductive/abductive reasoning, only to find that he was not familiar with abductive reasoning, and that he thought the example i gave him was logically flawed (this bit came up later over profiteroles in bakerzin).

the simplified examples:

inductive:
a) this is a cow
b) it is black
c) all cows are black

abductive
a) all cows are black
b) this is black
c) it is a cow

this last argument seems, on the surface, to be quite wrong -- but only (as i pointed out) because the set of cows is only a small subset of the set of all animals -- if you started exterminating all animal life forms other than cows, the strength of the argument would increase, and approach the soundness of deduction as the difference between the set of animals and the subset of cows approached zero. nonsense! say cp and su-lin in unison, there are no infinitesimals involved here, statement (c) is either true or untrue, depending on whether or not there is at least one non-cow animal on earth.

(note: i'm still not satisfied on the point that induction (see example above) does not work in quite the same way. (c) is either true or untrue, depending on whether or not there is one non-black cow -- yet there is a scale of strength for how strong an inductive inference is anyway.)

so i counterargue that the argument doesn't hold only because cows are discrete and countable, and that if you replaced (a) with a set that has a subset that can meaningfully have an infinitesimal difference from it, then the whole house of cards may stand up. to which cp says "what about 'all jello is red'?" and su-lin points out that just because jello is wobbly doesn't mean that it's different from a cow and we crack up.

(and cp says that instead of him teaching gp we should all of us just troop into his class and sit down and converse with each other in front of his students, which i think is a splendid idea.)

(you can check out the real story of abductive reasoning here. technically, the cow thing is right; it just sounds really strange because it's not a real world causal relationship. it is not fallacious however, merely dependent on two things: how likely it is that a object is a cow given that it is black, and our prior belief that any given object is a cow. but to prove that you need bayes' theorem and math, which will make most of you break out in a rash. scroll down the wikipedia page to the "grass is wet" example for something a bit more sensible)

Currently reading:
A Skin Diary - John Fuller
And all the Pratchetts. Again and again and again.

From the Penn psychology graduate handbook:

A thesis, being unaffected by the cost of printing, may be redundant when redundancy is an aid to clarity. It may indulge in speculations that are interesting but that would be deleted by an editor who is unable to find room even for all the truths that are submitted to the journal. But the writer of a thesis should remember that it is only its pages that are unlimited, not the reader's time.

ooh...i get to choose a colour scheme? that's something new. i thought we all had schemes allotted to us already.

what about penn colours?

grad school, finally

because i’ve spared you about fifty entries on the matter of grad school applications over the last 3 months, i feel that I’m entitled to one uber-long self-indulgent post telling the entire story from start to finish. over the past couple of weeks, especially, i’ve not felt like blogging much because every time i’ve sat down that’s pretty much all i could think of, and we all know how boring i get when i start on a subject and refuse to let it go. at least now you’re getting it all in one shot.

(though by the time you finish reading all of this, i hope you’ll have come to agree with me that the concatenation of events that got me here is pretty damn remarkable.)

so everyone remembers how I applied to nine schools to do a phd in clinical psychology in fall 2003 and how i was accepted by the university of minnesota. how I visited the place and then spent a month in agony trying to make a decision about whether or not to go. not all of you know that I was also accepted by the university of wisconsin the following year, an offer that I turned down for pretty much the same reasons that i did the first school. they were good programs – among the best – but I just couldn’t see myself living in minneapolis/madison for six, seven years. during some of the harder bits of the last couple of years, i sometimes regretted turning down those two offers (in much the same way that I occasionally regret not having tried for a government scholarship), but I’ve long since learned that regret is not to be trusted.

(i also felt a little bit guilty – i’m sure those two schools are dream programs for many people. please don’t murder me for trying to be happy.)

now for the extraordinary bit. over the next few years, a number of things happened to manoeuver me into a rather happy situation – the kicker being that none of these events seemed particularly felicitous at the time. you’ll recall that I started out looking for psychologist positions, and that I was turned down by the ppu and gsk. I dare say that had I got either of those jobs I would have worked for them for a good number of years, but in both cases something went wrong after the very last interview, at the stage where I was 99% sure i had been hired. jh’s aunt strongarmed me into applying to [that place], an organization I knew I was going to leave as soon as I found something else.

now recall the brief period that I spent in nie. because i was there, I was introduced to this man’s lab, and first entertained the idea of going back to work on fmri research (which I did not think even existed in singapore). when a place actually opened up in that lab in march last year, i applied, and would have got the job but for the fact that one of my referees (one of my profs from duke, bless her soul) didn’t manage to get a letter written for me on time. he gave the position to someone else.

what this accomplished, though, was to put me in a place where I was prepared to take on any psychology-related research job. (the horror of spending nearly 2 hours getting to work every morning was also taking its toll). things then started happening very fast. minz and her cousin helped me take a good hard look at imh, where i discovered a department that was hiring RAs. at almost the same time, i stumbled across the ad on the singapore psychological society’s website for my current position, and applied to that too. of the two, i was more inclined towards imh (you know, with there being actual sick people there and all).

i went through both interviews, and got both jobs. the call from the cnl came first. i told them i was interested, and signed the papers with the full intention of backing out if the imh deal happened (6 months in hr had taught me that people do bastard things like that all the time. all the time. no guilt, no qualms, and i'm not listening to anything anyone has to say. lalalalala) imh got back to me with an offer – of a really low salary. i told them that i was very interested in the position, but that something more befitting a graduate with 2:1 honours would be nice. I began negotiating for something better – and after a whole lot of backing and forthing and miscommunication and bureaucratic bullshit on their part, they managed to give the job to someone else, despite the fact that i had already verbally accepted it. screaming, ranting and a strongly-worded letter of complaint brought me no joy, and that’s how i ended up where i am now.

so everyone knows that i started on the sleep deprivation research. i actually did not like the lab in my first couple of weeks on the job (for reasons I shall not write about here), but i got used to the unpleasant things and made a few good friends and before you knew it i was actually rather glad that i had taken this job and not any other. for one thing, the work-related discussions we had were surprisingly intelligent; for another, the people around me weren’t idiots, and i wasn’t being treated like one myself (never take this for granted).

and it was through the lab that i got to know this man, one of our collaborators, and learned that he advises clinical psychology students, and also that the university of pennsylvania allows candidates to reactivate their applications with little fuss (well, US$70 and a new personal statement worth of fuss). and i was like: why the hell not? i told my boss what my intentions were, and he was extremely supportive, and packed me off to penn after the conference we went to in november, and put in a good word. and dinges, for whatever reason, really liked the idea of me working for him, and he helped to grease the wheels. all sorts of other strange and wonderful things happened too – connections turning up between my recommenders and people on the graduate committee, having been a medic counting as “previous clinical exposure”, the fact that the graduate group just so happened to need someone with experience in mri this year. and everything sort of slotted itself into place like a soma cube and before you knew it, i was in.

so there you have it, i’m headed off to philadelphia in the fall to trade the real world for thirty-page papers, 16-hour days in the lab, cheap facsimiles of home cooking, and endless whining about my stipend not being large enough. and all you guys back here doing ot and reservist and reverting to emails will write to me and tell me to shut up, and in reply i’ll pen million-word blog entries explaining my problems in excruciating detail. and cp has already told me that unless i send him regular and expensive presents leaving his umvelt will mean departing from his consciousness. and despite all of that, or perhaps partly because of it, it will be good. i can’t wait.

plug

hey guys...go and watch big love -- it's quite something (vm fans especially: amanda seyfried's in it).

12/3, 1229h - killing fields

there are all the usual ways of thinking about it.

maybe you choose the easiest to swallow and the most impoverished -- numbers: 20,000 dead bodies in dozens of mass graves, 25% of the population of the country killed in all, 16-hour work days in the rice fields for those spared, as many landmines as cambodian citizens.

or perhaps your mind drifts to considering the human capacity for evil, zimbardo's totipotentiality, that believing in the tabula rasa necessarily means that for every saint, there will be a sinner. cosmic balance -- evil complements rather than negates good. a fair consolation.

or anger -- except that getting stirred up over something that is so far beyond anything you've experienced or understood seems terribly inappropriate as well -- you cannot rage 2 million times as fiercely as you would against a single unjust death.

so maybe you stay silent and placid and consider, impassively, the stupa with its impossibility of skulls, the leg irons and manacles, the crunch of brittle bone underfoot. you consider how the cambodian sun whitewashes the landscape, and you allow that, too, to relieve you from feeling. you take the guide's words and parse emotion from meaning and absorb only the latter because it really is too much to think that he had friends and relatives who were brought to places like this and systematically, brutally, offed. you walk amidst the mass graves filtering words through your head and pictures through a camera lens, and maybe that makes it ok.

and what else? seeping through: deep revulsion, superstition, all the stupid baseless cultural fears of mortality, interfering with what little sympathy and sadness you can muster. hating the gift shop because you think it's exploitative and then hating the system because that exploitation is the only thing that puts food on the table of those who survived, and then maybe even hating yourself because you can't bring yourself to buy anything. all rolled up in the general feeling that you should never have come here in the first place because the killing fields should not be commemorated or memorialised, that there are certain episodes in history so ugly that, although we cannot as resposible human beings forget them, there is no acceptable way of remembering them either.

15/3, 1123h

one to add to minz's collection

15/3, 1312h

the other thing we regretted

12/3, 1522h

Phnom Chisor

this was one of two things we sort of regretted. as we discovered, unhappy-su-lin = su-lin + x, where x = 412 steps.

unhappy su-lin

16 kids trailing behind us looking for handouts didn't help matters. at least there was the view.

we finished data collection for our experiment today - our marathon five-month-long experiment - and were so relieved that we just had to go for beer (well, the boss was away too, but, you know, details). brewerkz with wc and m_____ and g_____ (this is getting tiring), where there was blueberry beer (gross) and proper beer and nachos as stiff as polystyrene.

wc, a md who's worked in the lab on and off for about 5 years now, is moving into the "off" part of the cycle and starting his own business. house calls he's selling (a.k.a. pills on wheels). i'm not sure if i would ever personally pay x times more money to have a doctor see me at home, but he seems to think he'll do a roaring trade, so yay. i hope it works for him. all of us will miss him rather terribly, not just because he's kind of funny, but also 'cos he's the only person who can really do stats (and m_____ is pissing his pants because once i leave he's going to be big kahuna of the sleep team. well, only kahuna. i know, nice timing.)

(full story, as promised, coming very soon)

i think i've said it before, but i'm really glad that i have some colleagues whom i can get along with. in a large department, odds are you're going to find at least a couple of people to talk to, but in a small lab you really are taking your chances. it doesn't even really matter how much of a people person you are - without numbers there's still the risk that -- through no fault of your own -- you may just not hit it off with anyone. i suppose that's one of the strategies of the civil service. pack enough people into a building and odds are no single person can either (a) hate everyone, or (b) be universally despised. instant team morale! very clever, now that i come to think about it. (sociologists: please don't email me to tell me that this was discovered 167 years ago.)

actually

-- don't click on that link. i'm almost ashamed that i put it up. also, i'm probably headed in the direction of severe chastisement.

11/3, 0900h

posting this feels very much like something cp's students would do on their blog (link taken down because i was right about the chastisement)(go and search for their entry on him, btw), but i am weak, and give in easily to temptation.

so, the horror movie still:

no place like home, etc.

pictures to follow. i've suggested tag-team blogging to avoid needless repetition, but i'm sure we'll eventually just have a free-for-all, as is our wont.

indeed. but you're going to have to wait till we get back from cambodia for all the details. it's been a very bad time for blogging what with first being on tenterhooks and not wanting to say anything about it, and then being at work every other night, but i think we're finally good to go now. this holiday will be fantastic.

apropos of what i just wrote, i can't believe that our cambodia trip is next week. just yesterday i was telling my sgh psychologist that i could see him next saturday, and it was only after i had got on the train fifteen minutes later that i was like, oh, not really. i feel in dreadful disarray. have been trying to hunt down guidebooks in the nlb except that they are either (a) borrowed out or (b) published in 1972. still no idea what kind of clothes to bring - i seem to have heard somewhere that they are fussy about tourists being dressed properly around angkor wat - and the only other information i seem to have obtained is that we do not need vaccinations.

if this is going to be a bear-went-over-the-mountain kind of trip, that's ok, but i do at least feel like i need to be physically prepared. you know, like, the always-have-a-towel-with-you kind of preparations? maybe we should have lists. i find that those little boxes of cheerios often come in handy.

Currently reading:
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest J. Gaines

whatever happened to february? it seems that a whole bunch of days that should have been there just kind of vanished while i was worrying myself to a thread.

drama feste - notes

1. his name was vincent

2. flight a bildungsroman?? that's stretching it just a little, don't you think? i mean, as someone acknowledged himself just the other day, it was mostly an excuse for said someone to get people to take their clothes off. on stage

3. as for bloodshed, probably.

4. interesting sidebars about five people sitting round a table arguing (whole title spelled out so that industrious people googling this name in the future when i'm rich and famous will be rewarded) --

a) my memory may be failing me, but i actually do think we wrote and edited the entire play in a matter of days. however, i do also quite vividly recall von's copy of the script which was so thick with cancellations and notes in the margin that you could barely see the printed lines, which means that what you saw on stage in '95 may have little or no similarity to anything that gets printed in the future.

b) the play-within-a-play does exist. it was, in fact, my original submission for drama feste script, a piece of writing that sucked so hard that i nearly left school immediately after producing it to go look for work as a writer for daytime soaps.

c) it was not autobiographical. i think it was called the dying of the light. god, it sucked. excuse me while i go and throw up.

d) we actually did have numerous discussions about how the original play should end, some of them not dissimilar to the ones that ended up in five people. i must thank ms. low, by the way, for being nurturing and kind through all of that ridiculousness and allowing us to come to the conclusion that our original script should be trashed on our own. now that's education, folks. vygotsky would have been proud.

5. and yes, it is just like old times. ah, old times, how we have missed thee.

so...remember when i saw miss quah a couple of years ago and she was all excited about publishing a drama feste anthology? yeah, guess what? as yidong put it: "this thing, like bela lugosi, seems to keep coming back from the grave."

island creamery

-- now has horlicks and kung pao cashew. if you can't imagine what the latter tastes like, you're apparently in very good company.