Monday, June 6, 2011

Work Commences

Day 1 at work: Meeting with Robin Dunbar (PI) on ideas for my summer project. Meet all the grad students (DPhil candidates) and post-docs, set up work space with computer. Refrigerator down the hall... Tomasch expects beer in it by Monday :)

Day 2 at work: Walk-through of experiment methodology with my post-doc (MD, MSc) partner, Cathal (great Irish accent!). Very young and funny, open to ideas to improve project. Basic design: baseline PANAS, pain threshold; comedy video; follow-up PANAS and pain threshold. Attend talk by P.I. in city centre- Veritas Forum in Sheldonian Theatre, on topic of "Social Net(works?)"

Day 3 at work: reading and summarizing background literature articles. Discussing my second project for data collection with Robin - this one is more independent, not based on stream of participant subjects. Follow-up on 1995 article published in Nature on conversational group sizes. Very interesting when you find quantitative limits on something this abstract, probably evolutionarily constrained and very obvious sex differences. Based on precedent of sexual segregation in ungulates. Department seminar from visiting Oxford professor on brain micro-circuitry influence on primate IQ.

"Off" for the weekend, still waiting on card/login WiFi access. Next week, data gathering!

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