Update

Ok, so I’ve been busy. Sorry to be out of touch. Working in this ‘lab’ is so cool. Great advisor, total independence on projects. One of our meetings had to be pushed back because two Russian TV networks showed up to interview Robin. Did I mention my awesome colleagues? After every journal club, lab meeting, or research seminar we retire to the back garden or the local pub for drinks and LIVELY (my type of nerdy) discussion. Just to get you up to speed:

Week 3: Ridiculous amount of background literature research for the laughter project. First group of subjects for the experiment, but after this pilot with first twelve people we realized we completely need to revamp the methodology for clear research results: structure of ultimatum game vs. dictator game, groups larger than four, more natural settings for laughter, yoga vs. game vs. improv vs. stand-up video as elicitors, requirement of strangers vs. friends or other method for in-group/out-group, measuring laughter by observation vs. dictaphone recording.

Week 4: Additional side projects added onto laughter experiment. One for massive data collection on sexual segregation in conversational groups, and another that I can’t post anything about yet- until publication, probably. It will be fun to analyze the stats, but I’m wondering exactly what this will contribute to the field. I’m not an anthropologist yet, so it’s hard for my mind to extrapolate ungulate feeding-migration behavior to natural human conversation. I also keep asking myself, why does it matter? I’m sure I will find an answer.

Week 5: In France, family anthropology. Dear Sara, I took 400+ photos on a 5-day trip. Beat that.

Week 6: In London for the 7^th Annual UK Social Networking Association conference. So far I’ve attended a pre-conference workshop and learned the basics of data mining, data analysis, and data visualization with a free online SNA software called NodeXL. The image I’ve posted is my first product with the program. It’s a Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm representation of my Facebook friendships. 1,233 nodes. 31,000+ edges. 4 main clusters: Emory (if you couldn’t guess, that’s the gold & navy blue), Duke summer program 2009 (light green), hometown (dark green), Oxford summer 2011 (light blue). All the clustering was performed without information other than friendship connections. Cool, huh?