In their latest installment, the group talks about some of the fascinating projects they’ve encountered, from lattes that represent global warming to jewelry constructed from dried fruit to conducting genetic research on a home computer. The people engaged in maker culture use existing objects and technologies in new and creative ways, putting their own individual stamp on the result.

When Mark originally asked me to respond to Maker Culture from the point of view of a psychologist, my first reaction is that Making might just tap into some evolutionary sense of pleasure at building one’s own cultural artifacts and technology. We do not have any cultures, currently or historically, that did not develop characteristic ways of preparing foods, constructing clothing and shelter, and designing ornaments and tools. Perhaps the universality of these behaviors arises from some hard-wired positive response. We hunt, fish, and tend home gardens when ample food is just down the block at the supermarket. A quick trip to your local hardware store should convince you that people like to do home projects, even if they can afford to pay someone to do it. Gamers build their own from-scratch computers when huge selections of CPUs grace every electronics store.

In addition to the evolutionary reward aspect, it seems to me that Maker Culture also taps into our need to be individual. Anyone can eat at Red Lobster, buy a computer at Best Buy, or a bottle of wine at BevMo. Cultures have become increasingly homogeneous, with Colonel Sanders gracing a street corner in Auckland, New Zealand, and Starbucks in Beijing. Maybe by making something unique for yourself and your loved ones, we recapture that little bit of specialness we call individuality. As I write this, Mr. F is off expressing his individuality by making the ultimate tiramisu. I’m going to have to express my individuality to find a technical solution to sending a very large soundfile off to daughter Karen….What are you going to make?

"Super Recognizers" Can Even Pick Out Familiar Faces In Blurred Photos Like This One

If you want to test your face recognition abilities, the BBC has a fun test here.  I have never believed that I’m very good at remembering faces, and I was surprised at how well I did on this test.

The biggest job we face is to run a formal assessment of student demand for the program. We know it’s out there–my BioPsych students are always asking about what they can take next–but we have to document numbers for our administration. Still, it’s a great opportunity for students who want to get some practice in questionnaire design and implementation.

So hopefully, in the not too distant future, we’ll be able to give students not just the courses, but the label and identification they’ve wanted for a lot of years. Hats off to Cal Poly alum Zac Tabb, now serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, and current president Bryan Brandon and his hard-working officers for helping to make this a reality.

In the meantime, I think that publishers are doing a great job now of getting materials into student hands at reduced costs. As you can see from the image below, my bio book is available in several formats. Students seem to really like the rental option, but my favorite is the eBooks. At first, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of reading on a computer screen, but was won over by a student who pointed out you can SEARCH using the eBook. Wow. How that would have changed my student life! The eBook comes with the study guide materials included, too, which is a big savings.

Lots of Textbook Options

I’m hoping to ask a quick clicker question this week (our third of the quarter) to see what students have opted to do about books. Should be interesting!

Of course, the big boys (aka the commercial booksellers) are already in threat mode about the publishers providing direct sales to students. I read recently that one big chain was offering more textbooks for rent, too. They must be scared. The big difference is that when you rent or buy from the publisher directly, you’re actually helping to keep textbook costs down, but when you rent or buy from a campus bookstore or other retail chain, you’re making books more expensive. When the big boy retailers recycle our work, they don’t pay us a dime, which means that we have to pay the artists, editors, indexers, photo researchers, and all the other people who contribute to the work by charging more for new books. I don’t think the chain prices are much less, either, in spite of the fact that they’re getting all of our hard work for free.

So between you and me? I’d choose the publisher direct option. It’s only fair, and in the long run, it’s the only way to make the cost of books come down. Nobody resells Harry Potter, which costs about $20 because the publisher can spread all costs across all users. The more people who use chain stores for textbooks, the fewer actually support the costs of production, and books have to be more expensive.

Kristin, Karen, and I check out the "I Did It" bulletin board at Jenny Craig prior to our interview

Once there, the journalist conducting the interview asked who wanted to do most of the talking, and unfortunately, everybody pointed at me. I guess I do get paid to talk, so that’s probably fair. After we did a short interview about how Jenny Craig helps us meet our weight loss and maintenance goals, the journalist took some more video, including Mr. F’s feet as he stepped on the Centre scale. As one of our family’s favorite films is Zoolander, Karen had to ask if Dad’s feet were able to do “blue steel” or “magnum.”

We didn’t stay up until 11 p.m., when the segment was supposed to show, because we had to get up at 2 a.m. to get Karen to her very early flight out of Santa Barbara to go back to school. We’re guessing that Mr. F’s feet may have been the part that stayed in….

The key for me is to choose something doable, but not so easy or hard as to be pointless. I think the Stairmaster one failed because I usually walk about 4 miles a day, so my brain tells me that I’m okay in the exercise department. I thought about choosing to maintain my weight loss, but I’ve done that successfully for the last 2 1/2 years anyway, so it doesn’t seem like a fair challenge.

While I’m choosing between the many other things I need to fix, I did run across some interesting weight maintenance advice from an unlikely source–the Better Homes and Garden cookbook Mr. F and I bought new for $6.95 when we were newlyweds in 1972. In the back section of the cookbook, the authors included lots of helpful nutrition hints, among which was the following advice. According to the book, we are supposed to maintain whatever weight we are at age 22.  To identify the daily calories you need, you are supposed to multiply this ideal weight by 16 for women and 18 for men, then subtract 10 calories for each year over 22. For me, that’s a “whopping” 1746 calories per day. I’m pretty sure I eat more than that, probably about 2500, but maybe the 4 miles of walking helps. The book does acknowledge that “additional calories will be needed by those who regularly engage in strenuous activities” but also warns that “many people tend to overestimate their energy requirements.”

Our Cookbook Is the Red Plaid One--For $6.95

This advice is quite different from what we hear today. A quick search using “weight gain” and “age” results in lots of pages stating that moderate weight gain during adulthood is “normal,” because metabolism slows. My own doctor mentioned several years ago that “everybody” gains weight when you get older. What I find interesting is that people in the 1970s seemed to realize that you needed to compensate for this, while today, we seem to hear that it’s okay to go ahead and gain the weight. Coupled with today’s fashion vanity sizing for women (add 8 to today’s sizes to get the 1970s–1980s size, e.g. today’s 4 is yesterday’s 12, and to buy anything larger than a 14, today’s 6, you had to go to Lane Bryant), it’s not too surprising that so many people think big is okay.

So if you’re still looking for a resolution, maybe this is the year to think about weight the old-fashioned way.

Physiological Psychology by Dr. Ladd (1887) once owned by Joseph Jastrow

What makes this book especially meaningful to me is that it was once part of the library of Joseph Jastrow, a student of G. Stanley Hall’s at Johns Hopkins, who is credited as having obtained the first Ph.D. in Psychology in 1886. So two firsts collide–a first textbook and a first doctorate.

I’m not sure if perusing the pages of Ladd’s book, as I often do, or the thought that my book might have once guided Jastrow in his thinking about psychology will help me in my own writing efforts, but surely it can’t hurt. The writing style, of course, reflects the time, but one can’t help but marvel at what these early psychologists accomplished without the word processors, internet resources, and photography that we enjoy today.

Handwritten notes in the Perception chapter are likely Jastrow's own.

The new web>clicker will look great on an iPhone!

This morning, i>clicker’s Chad Moeller kindly walked me through the process of how the new web>clicker works with a very helpful WebEx. Daughter Karen, home from her doctoral studies at UT Knoxville, sat in on the WebEx with me, even though it was at 7am our time. I’m hoping Karen will have a chance to use the technology in her teaching, too, although her classes run pretty small (20-25 students or so). I took a screen shot (above) so you can see what the web>clicker registration will look like from the student side. I should have taken a screen shot of the voting part, but didn’t, but the pdf Chad sent me had this image:

Voting with the web>clicker!

I polled my students (all 165 of them) and quite a few of them were interested in using web>clicker instead of the i>clicker. But here’s another issue interested faculty should consider. Our campus tech people are worried that we will overload the wireless system. I think I’ve learned more than I really wanted to know from watching the emails go between i>clicker and our campus ITS. Apparently, our classrooms are not set up for wireless access for more than about 20 simultaneous users, and to add further access would cost money, which of course, California has none of. Apparently, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a phone or a laptop–both tap into the campus wireless system as a default. Fortunately, my poll is showing that we should be okay–so far each of my classes is running at about 20 interested students. However, I’m guessing that this option will become increasingly popular, so we’re going to have to deal with the access issue.

I’m sure there will be a learning curve with this–it’s quite new from i>clicker’s end, and it’s obviously completely new to me. But I like new things! Hope the students do, too!

I especially liked the way David DiSalvo did his research for the article. He described the empirical work of danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, Andrew Campbell, and John Cacioppo. In contrast, so many reports of social media are purely anecdotal, like the remarkably statistics-free recent piece in the New York Times (To Deal With Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook).  In our research, we have run into students who quit using Facebook, and hopefully, someone is doing some research on this phenomenon. But interviewing a handful of students without any data, as the NYTimes article did, is hardly going to give us the big picture. Senior project anyone?

In the meantime, we just found out that our project for this year’s APS convention was accepted. It’s on a different line of work, but still fun. It’s going to be hard to top our “connect with me” LinkedIn t-shirts from last year, but we’re going to try.

Karen's Baklava for Greek Night Is Worth Planning For

I did a quick search online for bits of advice for holiday dieters, and most of what I saw was frankly appalling. Here are some of my LEAST favorites with my own solutions:

1. Eat a small meal before going to a party. Are you kidding? People get fat in the first place because they have learned to tune out their biological signals of fullness. All this pre-eat will do is ensure that you have more calories for the day. Instead, I’m all for portion control. Instead of taking a whole serving of something at a party, take one bite of everything you want. Recent research suggests that just eating a food triggers mechanisms that make the food less appealing. The first bite is the best–you don’t need the whole thing.
2. Make healthy choices–This is not the time. Talk about unrealistic. Like you’re going to pass up that gingerbread for a slice of fruit? Instead, be mindful of your choices. Have the gingerbread (in a small quantity on a small dish), but be picky about how you use your calories. You don’t have to “holiday eat” every day–know when goodies are going to become available, and plan to enjoy them. Make up for it by being extra strict on “non-goody” days.
3. Don’t skip meals. Normally, I would agree. But the bottom line is that you can’t eat a large meal and then follow up with your normal eating and not gain weight. When we celebrate chez Freberg with one of Mr. F’s special dinners, we usually do so at lunch. Then I have a pact with myself that unless my stomach is actively growling, that’s it for the day.

Here are some pieces of advice that I thought were truly helpful:

1. Use small plates–Brian Wansink has shown that this can be a huge help. You do not feel deprived, and you are much less likely to overeat.
2. Eat slowly. Take time to enjoy your food. Focus on the conversation.
3. Avoid alcohol. Nothing puts on weight faster, and alcohol lowers your inhibitions in general, and that includes eating more food than you need. It nukes your taste buds, too, which means the food you eat won’t taste very good (hence those dreadful spicy Chex things people persist in making for New Year’s Eve, even though I’ve never met a person who actually think this tastes good.)
4. Walk, walk, walk. Yes, we live in California, which makes walking easier, but you don’t need to hit the gym either to lose weight or maintain it. Park your car at the outer edge of the parking lot. I think it’s so pathetic to see people jockey for places nearest the store. Walk around the block while you’re waiting for the turkey in the oven. Walk after you eat to admire your neighbors’ holiday yard displays.
5. Just make a pact that you will not eat anything on impulse. If it’s not planned, it’s not eaten. Once again, our friend Brian Wansink has observed that a major difference between fat and slim people is that the latter are very systematic about their intake. After awhile, it just becomes habit and you don’t have to think about it anymore.
6. Beware the evening. Apparently, our willpower is at its best in the morning. Most people do not have trouble making healthy breakfast choices, but as the day wears on, that might become harder to do. The more choices you make, the faster your willpower breaks down. Again, this is another area where a system helps. If you have a system, you make one decision–follow the system.

For me, the best strategy is to focus on people, not personal pleasure. I am delighted to be spending the holidays with all three of my daughters for the first time in three years. I plan to soak in every minute. Yes, great food is part of the fun, but it’s not the focus. Good luck and Happy Holidays to all of you!