4 posts tagged “university of virginia”

Monica tagged me, like, WEEKs ago to "Post 5 things we don't know about you"

Now that I'm back in the long-overdue and missed blogging saddle - here goes (in no particular order):

1) I might not have attended as many as 30% of my undergraduate lectures at my beloved alma mater, U.Va. (but I DID graduate in 4 years...!)

2) I held the swim league record for 50 meter freestyle (for about one week) when I was roughly 15 because I was really mad at younger team mate who elbowed me out of the middle lane. Improbably I set the record from the outside/wall lane. I was considered "lame and weak" at freestyle because my event was really 100 meter breaststroke. The coach always tried to make me mad before competing there after.

3) My favorite pizza is artichoke + black olives (but Steve would rather die than share it).

4) In the long ago, distant past that just doesn't matter, I might have dated an inordinate number of guys named Randy.

5) I was a co-founder of www.cbrrescue.org. Yes, I even coded HTML and wrote alot of the content there! I've been too busy to do anything but donate $$ since 2001.

I've been known to blog about gender issues in science (no one beats FemaleScienceProfessor on that real-world topic, however) and my happy days at University of Virginia. Maybe I can combine topics this time.

The University of Virginia alumni magazine features an article this issue about research being conducted in the Psychology department by a new faculty member named Brian Nosek.  With collaborators at Harvard and University of Washington, he is collecting data online for an ongoing "Implicit Association Test."  You can register online and consent to participate in the study.  The aim is to measure implicit biases or unconscious preferences ("women are not scientists," "Republicans are not inclined to support welfare programs," etc.) using a web based application that times your response to images and ability to make word associations.  I'll have to read more about the psychology underlying mechanical response time and then linking it to implicit bias(es).  But I did register and take a few tests.  You get results that indicate the degree of your implicit bias - mine surprised me - suggesting I was more fiscally conservative in my politics than I might have predicted. Old age, sigh.

"Either you loved U2, or you liked them fine. Either you loved R.E.M., or you hated them." - D. Kois

I couldn't answer the QotD today (What song describes your mood today?), but I did laugh out loud when I saw Dan Kois' R.E.M. vs. U2 article in Slate yesterday.  I liked U2 fine; I loved R.E.M.  "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" still has the ability to transport me to Charlottesville-Virginia-1984 in the blink of an eye.

I'm at NSF today and tomorrow - hearing about cyberinfrastructure.  I did manage to learn from colleagues today what the difference between cyberinfrastructure (CI) and computer science might be. I'm still not sure I know what a cyberenvironment is. I guess I've been working in cyberinfrastructure for the past three years and didn't even know it! It's been a pleasure to talk with folks actually interested in and passionate about offering computational tools to discovery scientists....that are not driven by command line interfaces!  I think the tide is turning and both the agencies and a subset of "bioinformaticians of all kinds" are realizing that scientists deserve user-friendly cyberinfrastructure. As a result - the NSF is challenging the community to form a completely new organization to serve up a plant biology cyberinfrastructure.  The plant biologists are not all particularly happy about the effort however; it was hard for them to hear that the money was not to seed new data generation or research - but an "infrastructure" for revolutionary advances.  Music to my ears.

There is lots of grumbling in DC today though - both the Wahoos and the Redskins lost this weekend.  We're all looking forward to ACC basketball season already.