Recent Entries Garion born; thinking of doing video logs - 2012-09-01 I'm married, I'm a prospective father, wow I never update - 2012-05-22 Got the job at the NIA; mother complicates wedding plans - 2011-10-13 Scrawl - 2011-08-05 It's never been better - 2011-06-02
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Starting the emotions paper 2004-10-24 - 11:57 p.m. 
I think I have officially more-or-less-kinda-sorta finished researching my emotion paper! And the grand total I've read is:30 articles, at around 6 pages on average. 6 pages which read like so: "In addition to their peripheral actions, IL-1beta, IL-6, and TNF-alpha exert numerous central neurochemical effects. In this respect, IL-1beta increases NE turnover in the PVN, as well as other hypothalamic nuclei. Likewise, IL-1beta increases the accumulation of the serotonin metabolite 5-HIAA in the hypothalamus, as well as prefrontal cortex and hippocampus and may alter hypothalamic DA utilization" That's actually not a bad paragraph at all compared to the mice and chocolate milk article. Imagine injecting rodents with three different drugs at 7 different brain sites in three different experiments. And reading the results. It's like the grocery list from Hell, lemme tell ya. Took me a few hours to read that bastard. I've now done my basic outline, organized all my articles in folders that follow that outline...and I even wrote the first page today in under a few hours. I gotta be less stressed out about the process is all, then I can easily see myself doing 3 pages a day. So, anyway, not bad for a little under a week plus stats homework and reading. The only thing I have tomorrow is my brownbag "listen to Prof. X or grad student Y give a talk" lunch hour. It's usually very informative. There's also seeing if my advisor thinks I'm a scatter-brained nutball. I spent two hours the other day coming up with an experiment that I thought was ingenious at the time. And actually, it's a good experiment. Problem was that I left out something kinda sorta critical in science: a control group, or what you might call the 'hasn't been fucked with' group. Useful thing if you're looking at changed behavior, no? So just now I wrote an addendum to my advisor. It's short, not confusing. Unfortunately I get this feeling like he'll read over my one email, then the other and think I'm out to lunch. Still, it's a dirt cheap study with the potential to be very insightful. In conclusion, I'm going to go to bed and rejoice in my having done a basic outline, organized all my papers into sections reflecting that outline, and my first page. Yay to me and my tired ass. |
