San Diego Day 1 26/01/2012

I was all prepared to bear the wrath of a terrible jet-lag borne from 20 hours of traveling, but awesomely after a solid night of sleep it was gone. I was set to go at 10am today!

One night, and this is what a guy does to his room.

A view of my accommodation from the outside bathed in the light of day.



Sunny sunny San Diego, with it's cool breeze, is about a very comfortable 15 degrees Celsius in the day.

Psychic services just around the corner of my inn. Amerika!



Nothin' comes close to the Golden Coast!


I'm located right next to the inspiring waters. I need to go for a run here one of these days!


Just a submarine.


Just a ship turned into a museum.


Just some old school pirate-looking ship.





Found a place selling hotdogs. Did I mention that I love hotdogs covered with mustard and sprinkled generously with onions?!





That's just a miltary vessel with chinooks.


And just some fighter planes.



That's a giant statue replica of Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous photograph of the soldier's kiss, showing a soldier passionately kissing a girl on the street when WWII was declared over.




Just a carousel. These shots above are shops and eateries at the Seaport Village along the harbour.


Just a frickin' horse.



As I walked along the port towards the San Diego Convention Center, this tiny blue tank-top jogger kept lingering nearby. So I conveniently snapped a shot of her.


Stairs leading up to the convention center.



Another view of the convention center.


I got worried for a moment that I was at the wrong conference!


After registering, I decided to take a walk around the historic Gaslamp Quarter while waiting for the conference poster sessions to start. The name "Gaslamp Quarter" is a reference to the gas lamps that were common in San Diego in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The place features nice cafes, shops and picturesque architecture.





Found this hostel. At US$22 for a shared dorm, it beats the usually very competitive Hostelling International, which offers US$28 for its cheapest room. I'm thinking of shifting to here after the conference ends on Saturday! Or maybe I'll just trek to some other part of San Diego and see what I can get.


Jacques Lelong is having a 50% off lelong.


Another photo of the trolley tracks, transporting those mini trains through the roads of the city.


Spotted a zeppelin in the sky, which can only mean more advertising going on. Amerika!


Moving barriers and traffic lights, specially made for guiding trolley/car traffic, prevent cars from crossing the tracks while the trolleys are passing.



This was a big-ass pizza slice for US$3. Keeping my meals cheap!



The lit sign actually says Dick's Last Resort. I must check this out one of these days before I leave Little Italy.



Looking ace. Ready to take it away for the poster!


Finally, I'm at the conference proper in the evening, and I'm presenting my poster on the first night! As my Nokia phone camera is not quite the DSLR, I enlisted Jolene's help in taking a picture of me next to my poster with her iPhone, so that one will have to wait. Meanwhile, here's a picture of my poster, made up of A3 sheets of paper, an upgrade from the cut-up A4 papers when I was at APS!


Just a picture showing that the dude next to me is old school, cool and uses A4 paper too.

His poster showed that when people (both men and women) are primed with "ideal models" - i.e. very attractive same-sex persons - they were more likely to buy image-enhancing products, like clothes, make up, etc. We chatted, and mused about our lousy poster location - a secluded corner that did not have good human traffic - and our unsexy poster titles. Mine was "The Effects of Birth Order on Social Group Formation"; his was terrible, something like "Alterations in Consumer Behavior Due to Ideal Model Exposure" (that's a lousy attempt on my part to recall his title but it's something as dry and unappealing as that).

While standing there waiting for people to come by and chat about the poster, I thought of a hook. Whenever somebody walked by and looked vaguely interested in reading the text on the poster, I'd smile at them and say, "are you a first-born?" It did not matter whether they were first-borns, later-borns or only children - asking them the question and getting a reply did the trick 100% of the time, making them to stop and find out more. Just another one of those typical psychological hacks that exploit human social behaviour. One curious girl exclaimed, "No! Why would you think I'm a first-born?" And I replied, "well, there are naturally more first-borns in the world, since first-borns would have to come first before later-borns, so I was just trying my luck with a reasonable statistical chance of success." She couldn't stop laughing for a whole minute LOL. And it was indeed true; most people I threw that question to replied affirmatively that they were indeed oldest children, and my seemingly 'amazing' ability to predict their first-bornness probably made it more interesting to them. Additionally, if the research confirming birth order effects is true, there should be more first borns in academia anyway because first borns are supposedly more intelligent, conscientious, introverted and conservative - traits required for and associated with pursuing an academic career.

So, by the end of the poster session, I'd spoken to about 15 people and gotten 8 emails (poor ideal models dude had 3), pretty decent! One reason why I don't like to print handouts is because it allows people to get away without leaving a contact. By getting people to leave their emails on the pretext that I would send them more details on the study, I can establish contact for further collaboration. Interestingly, a girl from MSNBC (who wasn't a psychology student or academic) came for the conference to get ideas for her various columns and stopped by to chat, and was keen to follow up on this birth order effects research. Some potential media exposure sounds just about nice and useful to me!

After the poster session, Jolene, Sharon and I went for the SPSP social night held at Tivoli, a bar at Sixth Avenue and Island Street. Laysee just concussed, falling victim to jetlag. Compared to APS's social night place (named something-Buffalo), Tivoli was crappy because it was small and very warm. But we tried to make as much of the night as possible happen, having good laughs and trying to get happily married Sharon, who claims she's left her drinking and smoking days behind, to drink more. San Diego is apparently famous for its India Pale Ales, but IPA tastes like sour piss to me. Their brown ales are really good though! We ended the night at an early 11.30pm, as jetlag started getting the better of Jolene and Sharon, and Sharon has a poster to present at 8.15am tomorrow anyway. As bad as I might feel about it, I'm sure I won't be up to support her haha.


Snapped this on the way home. This 7-11 looks like a resort. Bought myself some burritos to microwave. Yums!

San Diego Day 0

So I set off for San Diego! Getting up at 5am to meet a 8am flight, a grueling journey ahead awaited me: 6 hours 50 minutes from Singapore to Tokyo, a three-hour wait to transit, 8 hours 15 minutes from Tokyo to San Francisco, a seven-hour wait, and finally 1 hour 10 minutes from San Francisco to San Diego.

As usual, I'm having my drink of choice - crappy 2010 cabernet sauvignon - on the plane, in hopes of being able to get some sleep. Didn't work this time.

The first meal I got myself - a 6" buffalo chicken Subway sandwich. Nothing fantastic about it, but the Subway menu is sick with 3x more choices than the one we have in Singapore. That's a coffee from Peet's. I will have to endure tasteless, thin coffee for the next week or so.



The San Francisco airport doubles up as an exhibition centre; pretty cool! Those are classic biplanes hanging off the ceiling.



More exhibits, presumably depicting San Francisco's pop culture over the years.


The view from my travelator.

I'm finally in San Diego! One thing that traveling teaches me is the art of time-wasting. I think I'm quite capable of making hours go by like minutes while flying or taking long coach rides now.

Flying with airlines that provide video entertainment also allows me to catch up on movies. I watched Real Steel and Crazy Stupid Love - titles that I thought wouldn't be too mentally and emotionally heavy. They turned out to be pretty engaging shows! Irving and Phylicia kept waxing lyrical about Real Steel when they caught it last time, and I must say that I became a kid again because I can be a sucker for silly movies featuring fighting robots, idealistic kids and father-son related themes. I thought Crazy Stupid Love would be a really retarded romantic flick (and yeah I guess it was), and nothing else, but it turned out to be quite a funnily spun tale where it seemed like the director(s) just wanted to troll all the characters involved. Had a good laugh, and after The Ides of March I had a pretty good impression of Ryan Gosling's acting. Plus it's always fun to watch a satire about pick-up artistry.

After checking out of the airport, I waited for bus 992 that would take me to Old Town, a more central part of San Diego. I'd read in the travel guides that Little Italy featured a cluster of inexpensive places to bunk in, so I was headed there. While waiting for the bus, I got to know Karolina from Poland. It wasn't hard to see that she was headed to the SPSP conference too - she carried a huge tube that read -MPRESSION FORMA-. The 20 minute bus journey passed in a flash as we chatted. Along the way, two asian girls hopped on, and from the accent of one of them I immediately knew she was Singaporean. Might be another SPSP attendee!



I reached Old Town at about 8.30pm. It was like a ghost town, with all the shops closed and hardly a soul about. I approached a man with a baby and asked him for directions to Little Italy, and he said it's near but told me to walk indirectly around a couple of blocks. As if sensing my curiosity about the recommended route, he added, "it's safer to go by that way. I would if I were you." Hmmmm.


Anyway, there are these things called "trolleys", pseudo-trains that intermingle with traffic. It's a really nice touch to the city!

So, I set off on a hunt for a place to stay. After some shopping around for an hour and a half, I finally settle...



At US$50 a night for a private room, Harborview Inn & Suites totally trashes the rest of the competition for low price (the average price, after checking out 6 other low-cost hostels and inns, is US$70-80). This definitely doesn't beat the price of a shared dorm, but for the duration of my conference I wanted to have a private place to stay. This will work very well, thanks!



Room is ace!



There's even a microwave. Nice.



For some stupid reason, my universal plug can never get stuck into the powerpoint socket (same happened in Taiwan). So I did some improvisation.



Stocking up on grub. The chocolate milk is sinfully good.



All set for my San Diego adventure!


But this ain't SeaWorld, this is as real as it gets!!! (haha those who know it will get it)


American TV is generally very amusing and entertaining, but after a while, there is an air of over-the-top-ness about it. Watching the box feels sometimes like I'm always being sold something - an idea, a product, a value. Their advertising efforts are crazy.

SPSP 2012

Time to bring some heroes down to ground.

Just Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Relative

When a good man and a good woman
Can't find the good in each other
Then a good man and a good woman
Will bring out the worst in the other
The bad in each other

Lab Rats that can Create their own Brain Stimulation Levers

For some weird reason, I think I was dreaming about lab rats pressing on levers to electrically stimulate their brains' pleasure centres, so while lazily rolling in bed before I got up today, I was thinking that's how humans are basically behaving as our world gets more and more technologically complex.

With insights from science allowing us to reduce huge, complicated and dynamic systems into their simple causes and effects, we're able to know what causes what to a very accurate degree. We know what drives us at the deepest level. We're not that different from animals. From the studies of laboratory animals with electric nodes wired up to the pleasure centres in their brains, it was found that the electrical stimulus was reinforcing and can override behaviour. Laboratory animals will press a lever at high rates (> 6,000 times per hour) to deliver brief stimulation pulses to brain regions. The reinforcement from direct electrical activation of this reward substrate is more potent than other rewards, such as food or water. The potency of this electrical stimulation was most dramatically shown in a classic experiment where the animal subjects suffered self-imposed starvation when forced to make a choice between obtaining food and water or electrical brain stimulation (Routtenberg & Lindy, 1965). The second distinct feature of reward from electrical brain stimulation is the lack of satiation; animals generally press to stimulate continuously, taking only brief breaks. These two features - super-potent reward and lack of satiation - are important characteristics of direct activation of brain reward mechanisms.

Unfortunately in this sense, I suppose, science and technology co-exist and advance each other accordingly. Every new item on the market is sold to reproduce that kick from activating our brain reward mechanisms and promises, in fancy marketing language, to give us enhanced kicks. These include nifty new gadgets and websites promising entertainment that suck us into hours of unproductive, addictive fun. But this is not limited to technological products - the market reflects peoples' demand for novel and better ways to activate their brain reward mechanisms (obviously), and with that we see flashier cars, harder drinks, trendier clothes, swankier clubs, bigger brands, super-sweet foods, etc. These things do not satiate us, and they replace our otherwise normal behaviours.

Whatever is "better", on average, ultimately boils down to what activates those brain reward mechanisms more and faster, and people are willing to pay good money for it. An immediate distinction between now and the past is that, with our advances in ideas and technology, we're getting more and more capable of delivering those quick-reward ends compared to other periods in our history. We've become laboratory rats who are capable of creating our own fancy brain stimulation levers, and we're psychotically pressing them. In contrast, a caveman was capable of only activating his pleasure centres by doing the menial but traditionally sound things that led to good feelings - seeking friendships, taking care of relatives, falling in love, communicating with others, finding food to eat, etc. These days, who needs such longwinded activities? They take too long before they lead us to the promised land.

A Cold, Hard (and Amoral) Look at Leadership

When properly looked at, natural leadership occurs when a dominant person acts in his/her own self-interest and, in the process, enables followers to benefit from his/her self-serving behaviour. In ancestral times, as a silly and simple but relevant example, perhaps it was a man who knew where the watering hole was, and wanted to get there anyway. Followers who were less competent in finding it could help him carry his goods while he led them there. This natural process selects for competent, capable leaders who could articulate to followers how, by being subservient and giving up some autonomy and self-interest, they could gain something from his capabilities. Leadership and followership evolved because it was an efficient process that eventually led to a net advantage for whole groups over the course of social history, both human and animal.

Servant leadership is the idea that leaders should want first and foremost to serve followers and are held accountable by the people the leader governs, in pure altruistic fashion. Like many other modern good-to-haves, servant leadership is unlikely to have emerged simply from rational thought alone - its formulation was forged from a drastic need to deal with the fact that the influential ability of leaders meant that leaders could also get away with many dastardly things. The evolution of leadership wouldn't be complete without a counter from followers, who adapted by evolving emotions that made them upset, angry, cheated and disgusted when leaders become corrupt. Servant leadership is a socially constructed dynamic that actively suppresses the tendency of leaders to put their own interests ahead of their followers' interests.

But just as much as we have those emotions acting as alarms to warn us against being too unfairly taken advantage of, people far and wide still see confidence, dominance, assertiveness and aggression as virtues in leaders. When we can potentially see these traits as attractive in a leader, we allow him or her to get away with doing whatever it takes to "get shit done." A tasteful mix of these characteristics in a person makes him or her charismatic, and we often forgive charismatic people for taking a little more than their fair share of the pie.

Because at heart, the propeling force of leadership is self-interest. Lots of it. A person wouldn't last as a leader without it, and simply bestowing a fancy title on anybody doesn't make the person a sustainable leader. This is the reason why a student studying politics doesn't necessarily become a politician after that; governors, CEOs, directors, pastors and generals are a self-selecting lot and, for better or worse, their immense, self-aggrandising belief in the value of their own ideas, goals and needs over others' persistently drives their rise to the top.

Animals

On Evolutionary Explanations of Restrictive Eating Disorders, and the Value of Radical Ideas

My supervisory professors have been missing in action the past 2-3 days, so I've had more time to turn my attention to themes and research that I'm quite interested in.

One of the fascinating topics I did some reading on is restrictive eating disorders (i.e. anorexia and bulimia) from an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary theory posits that every psychological, behavioural and physical trait expressed by an organism was selected for by aiding the organism in its survival and/or reproduction, and therefore had a functional purpose for existing at some point in evolutionary time. A trait could never exist if the environment was not conducive for its expression (i.e. hinders the organism in survival or reproduction).

By this logic, it might therefore be reasonably assumed (however inconceivably) that there could have been some adaptive function for the existence of anorexia and bulimia at some point in our evolutionary history. They are annoyances in our modern world because there could be a mismatch between its usefulness in the ancestral past and the environment today.

There are at least five major evolutionary explanations for restrictive eating disorders, each with its own flaws, as outlined by Dr Igor Kardum and colleagues from the University of Rijeka in a 2008 paper reviewing evolutionary accounts of anorexia and bulimia, namely (1) the reproduction suppression hypothesis (Wasser & Barash, 1983), (2) the model of parental manipulation (Voland & Voland, 1989), (3) the sexual competition hypothesis (Abed, 1998), (4) the adapted to flee from famine hypothesis (Guisinger, 2003), and (5) the combined concepts of 'social attention holding power' and the 'need to belong' (Gatward, 2007).

The most palatable (and, thus, conventional and popular) idea tends to revolve around competition among females catalysed by the media (sexual competition hypothesis). It is the notion that in wealthier societies, to be able to resist food is seen as a mark of having high status, while in poorer societies, to be able to get food is conversely the indicator of high status; thus anorexia is more prevalent in modernised societies while relatively larger-sized females are exemplified as beautiful. This is propagated via media imagery.

I will not go into detail with all the ideas as it can get rather technical, but in particular I wanted to point out two radical ideas put forth that, while still works-in-progress, were really interesting and reflective of creative, convention-defying attempts to think of new ways to consider this issue.

In particular, I thought Voland and Voland's (1989) model of parental manipulation interestingly attempts to account for why eating disorders tended to happen more with wealthier, higher class individuals. This model draws on kin selection theory and asserts that anorexia may be adaptive (useful) insofar as it increases an anorexic's helping behaviour to her own kin's survival and reproduction while suppressing her own reproductive success (because anorexia leads to a decline in fertility). Non-evolutionary research in the 70s showed that members of anorexic families possessed mutually overprotective attitudes, and anorexic individuals tended to worry constantly about the well-being of their families. In the ancestral past when families were larger, anorexic female helpers could suppress their own reproduction and therefore divert their own resources towards helping collateral kin, leading to greater inclusive fitness (genes belonging to family members). This sets the precedent for some interesting speculations. The model of parental manipulation suggests that anorexia is actually somehow exacerbated by parental influence. Many studies report significant correlations between dominant and overprotective mothers and the probability of anorexic reactions of their daughters. Anorexia reduces a female's fertility and hinders her from bearing additional offspring. Additionally, when a daughter is overprotected and dominated by her mother, her ability to find a mate is also reduced. In wealthy families, males are the more valuable sex as they have the resources to attain more mates. By inducing anorexia (thereby restricting the reproduction of daughters and also reducing their food intake), especially for families in higher societal strata and class, parents can then concentrate investment potential towards sons, who in wealthier families have higher reproductive value.

The next radical idea is Gatward's (2007) combined concepts of 'social attention holding power' and 'the need to belong'. 'Social attention holding power' is defined as an individual's ability to hold attention and gain investment from other members of the group, and this concept is closely related to the degree to which a person feels in control. Naturally, higher status individuals hold more social attention in their group and feel more in control. The need for belonging to a group is a fundamental human need, as ancestors who did not belong to any group were unlikely to survive for long in the harsher environments of the past. Because survival depended on belonging to a group, people had to compete for resources and this competition could lead to exclusion, if one wasn't careful. Anorexia might therefore have been adaptive in the past to prevent competition for food and resources, as well as compete in a more nuanced manner for status (a reference to the more conventional sexual competition hypothesis outlined above), thereby promoting group harmony and reducing the likelihood that one might get expelled. I would personally go on to speculate that in our modern society (essentially functioning and subconsciously perceived as a really large group), nobody feels like the highest status female who doesn't need to conform to restrictive eating disorder, because there is an implicit assumption that the highest status female is the one they see artificially created by the media. So everyone else who feels subordinate will increase her tendency to engage in restrictive eating disorder, an adaptation brought on by the need to maintain the large group's social harmony.


These are certainly radical theories that need to withstand more empirical testing, but reading about them excites me because they represent interesting attempts to get away from more conventional and acceptable ideas that do not necessarily get us very far, as evidenced by the fact that many extant theories on the causes of eating disorders still have ambiguities and gaps. Of course, there has to be a deal of initial plausibility, lacking which we would just think the idea is quack. But science is ultimately pushed by great thinkers with ground-breaking insights.

On a concluding note, the authors of the review paper highlight one consistent element found among all proposed evolutionary theories of restrictive eating disorders - response to threat. All the major evolutionary explanations can be reasoned as a form of response to threat (to survival and/or reproduction) that leads people (especially females) to develop symptoms of eating disorders. This independently corroborates research linking eating disorders with feelings of insecurity and need for control.

Circumventing Being Challenged

I was reading a very humorously written article titled Bullshitting: Lessons From the Masters. 6 "bullshitting techniques" were identified by the author, and I thought points 3 and 4 were fascinating in and of themselves, regardless whether in this context of bullshitting or not:

3. Act arrogant - keep it up. Although arrogance might seem to work against you by offending people, it is the supreme intimidation technique - people are readily cowed when someone acts like he is better, smarter, more powerful than they are (ergo, the Donald Trump phenomenon). The only danger is if you act modestly or question yourself, because people WILL attack weakness. In fact, even when you are being arrested (as in Stanford's case), attack your accusers.

4. Claim esoteric knowledge or techniques. It doesn't matter if the formula you use to explain your success makes no sense - people aren't secure enough to challenge something they can't understand. In fact, it pays to make the secret to your success as incomprehensible as possible while linking it to something beyond questioning, like say relativity, quantum physics, evolution or, for the old fashioned, God.