Hit me, er...I mean Fold

[trickykitty]

So now I owe smokedamage because I've had a couple bad nights of Texas Hold'em in a row. Two good hands both beaten out badly. Only one really good hand, Full House, which manage to beat out two other guys' Straights. But apparently not good enough stakes to walk away ahead. I offered to put in my own money but I was told, "no, I got it," only to get it waved over my head afterwards. Damn cards just weren't in my favor. But hey, we all got told by one of the players that we're just amatures. What do you expect with only a $5 buy-in and chip values of .05, .10, .25, and .50?

In other news, I turned down the job offer in favor of not making the McNair people upset. And I finally withdrew from the C programming class. Tomorrow morning I meet with the people at the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital so that they know who I am when I start running experiments on their dyslexic children. So must go and get sleep now so that I'm in good form for the meeting.

Comments

Best journal entry title ever.

[5tephe.livejournal.com]

and here is a picture of my wife, actually (I used the wrong icon, in response to your last comment).

This one was taken in a restuarant by your lovely Man himself.

Re: Best journal entry title ever.

[trickykitty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I got a good one of him in his tux last night. He got a job working two nights a week as a doorman for a resturaunt and wanted to dress up for his first night. We took over 300 pictures while in Seattle, Vancouver, and Whistler.

D'oh!

[disgruntledgrrl.livejournal.com]

In ShitHead news I went to play the game again on line (called Go-Go-Go) and not only do you have to lay an odd on a 3, you also have to lay an even on a 4. I never knew before and I'm just ignoring that rule in favor of your 7 = lower rule.
Is that the Scottish Rite near Oaklawn in Dallas/Irving? Heck you'll be in my neck of the woods - I'm between Mockingbird and Inwood.

Re: D'oh!

[trickykitty.livejournal.com]

Oh God! NOT ANOTHER RULE!!

Our friends are going to kill us. I think we've added one rule every time that we've taken more than a couple days off from playing. Before you know it, each card will have some rule attached to it, and then we'll have to actually think while playing the game.

Yep, that's the one. They gave me directions to not exit until Motor St. because of all the constructions work on Oak Lawn. I went there today after only 1 hour of sleep for a two hour meeting about our research. I have a bad cold that kept me awake all night. When I got back home I jumped right back into bed and slept all day. Then took Smokey to work and now am deliriously typing this before nodding off again.

[isotripy.livejournal.com]

What are you researching about dyslexia?

[trickykitty.livejournal.com]

We're basically testing a hypothesis regarding a possible "malfunction" in how sounds are categorized when being attached to the letter symbols. The experiment (see previous post for a write-up of it) will entail the subjects (a) learning either a phonemic or graphemic rule, and (b) task switching to a new rule during the middle of the experiment without their knowing. The hypothesis is that if they start with a phonemic rule, it will take longer to learn but they will be able to normally switch to the graphemic rule. Whereas if they start with a graphemic rule, they will have no trouble learning it and will either not be able to pick up on the new rule or will take longer in general to learn it compared to the control subjects. We're starting with normal-reading adults while we fine tune the testing materials we will be using. We started off with two educational tests and one cognitive task, but after today's meeting it may increased to as much as 5 tests and 3 cognitive tasks once we are set to test the child population.

[trickykitty.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the ultimate goal of the research, at least for me, is to be able to create a neural network which shows the various brain areas involved. This would mostly be the hypothalamus and basal ganglia. If I can get good data from the adult population then I can get the network running and then lesion it to predict what kind of results we will have with the children before testing them.

Another practical goal is to be able to have a means of diagnosing prior to reading-level. If the children do in fact have a problem with categorization, then other non-reading tests can be administered well before reading-age. It may also help in creating tools that teachers could use across the board with all students in helping them to read better.

Most of this research is the primary interest of the post-doc who is guiding my own research interests. It's more specific than what I would prefer to be researching, but I'm getting a lot of valuable experience.