An open letter:

Dear cast and crew of The Wire:

It's my understanding that you have created a masterpiece of a television show which displays the gritty, heartbreaking Baltimore drug underworld with breathtaking realism. Congratulations.

However: when you are filming on my block, and you have a 6am call, and you look around yourselves and notice that you are in a residential neighborhood, would you PLEASE KEEP YOUR FUCKING VOICES DOWN?

Thank you.

(no subject)

Every time I start work on grantwriting, I think about how interesting it would be to document the steps of the process in my LJ, so that people can see how a vague research idea turns into a fully-formed proposal. Every time, it quickly becomes clear that just writing the grant is enough of a monumental energy drain, without adding writing about the grant to the mix. So nothing gets posted because the task just seems to large.

I'm in the middle of preparing an application to the National Institutes of Health, in response to a call for research on how people make decisions about treating a life-threatening illness. I'm proposing to study how people with HIV make decisions about starting anti-retroviral therapy. In particular, I want to combat the ridiculous tendency that medical decision-making research typically has of assuming that it's a purely logical process of weighing risks and threats against benefits. I think that irrational factors often play a critical role in medical decision-making.

One factor I want to examine is the extent to which people have a cynical, suspicious, mistrustful attitude towards HIV research and treatment, and the extent to which they buy into AIDS conspiracy theories. This morning, I've been working on developing a questionnaire to measure those attitudes. I thought I'd go ahead and post my working version of it, to give people a glimpse of what I'm doing. Comments and suggestions are very much welcome. ( Read more... )

True tales of the wonder toddler.

Alex "finished" her dinner long before Michael and I did tonight, so I got one of her favorite books to keep her occupied at the table while we ate. It's a typical sort of alphabet book, where each page has multiple photos of objects beginning with the target letter.

Alex opened it up to A. She looked over the array of photos and brought her finger down on the avocado.

"You can eat this," she remarked conversationally.

"Is there anything else you can eat?" I asked her.

She pointed swiftly at the apples. "You can eat the red apple, but not the green one." Then she moved her finger to the abacus. "I can play with this."

Michael and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows.

"Is there anything here you can ride on?" I asked.

"How about the airplane? ...And the ambulance."

That's how it went for page after page. She slotted objects into categories and matched them with their functions. She even spontaneously linked the shovel and the sand castle from opposite sides of the S page, pointing out that "you can dig the sand castle with the shovel."

This doesn't sound like as much of a big deal now that I'm trying to explain it. But Michael and I had no idea that she could be so... analytical.

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She's been doing a lot of problem-solving for book characters, lately. It's very sweet. We love Sandra Boynton's somewhat cruel story of social exclusion, But Not the Hippopotamus. ("A cat and two rats are trying on hats - but not the hippopotamus. A moose and a goose together have juice - but not the hippopotamus. A bear and a hare have been to the fair - but not the hippopotamus.") On every page, Alex has a way for the hippopotamus to join in. "Hippopotamus have the green hat." "Hippopotamus just have a tiny sip of juice." "Bear feeds the hippopotamus ice cream." At the triumphant conclusion ("But YES the hippopotamus! ...But not the armadillo."), Alex recommends sympathetically, "Armadillo go home and see his mama."

Similarly, we can't get through a telling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (a story that I recite at least ten times a week) without Alex's additions: Mama Bear makes some more porridge for Baby Bear, and Papa Bear fixes Baby Bear's chair. Apparently, it bothers her to hear about Baby Bear's suffering, when the fix is just so obvious.

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Manners have made a huge resurgence lately, after pretty much vanishing for months and months. It's "Bless you, Mama," when I sneeze, and "We watch a little Sesame Street, please?" (At least, the first time she asks - if we refuse, the second time carries the threat of nuclear meltdown behind it.)

It is juuuust slightly less maddening that she refuses to eat more than two bites of dinner when, instead of yelling "no" and pushing her plate away, she drawls, "Ohhh, no thank you. I've had enough."

But only slightly.