My life's Adventure

Reading for the past 8 hours.

I got a little lost playing Sims 2 at about 4 am. I got through a few goals and had simulated sex. I used the simulated washroom and ate simulated food powering my simulated character. My simulated car is repaired too. At this point I saved the game and was tired and a little weary.

I started to study, partly out of guilt, but also because I have so much to read. I took breaks by reading the newspaper. I read tigers will soon be extinct in India and that was probably the most important piece of news. Also our supreme court has narrowed the definition of a violent crime when the offender is a youth. I also read a little politics and other crime news and a bit of a piece about happiness and consuming to sustain happiness v. consumption for material ends.

Speaking of crime I read about the drug abuse crime connection in a study by British criminologists. I also read more about the US service economy in a book that pits the service economy i.e McWorld v. the ethnic and powerful identity economy, i.e. Jihad. This over simplifies to be a comfortable book for Americans to read and a book that demonises ethnicity by tieing being ethnic to terrorism. Like a little pigeon hole game I wonder about how to write with catagories and simple structure and suppose I could not do much better.

I also read a few chapters of a book that looks at classical sociological theories of suicide and how these feature in relation to the economy and then constructs a mathematical model for the relationships between suicide trends and various economic variables. Modern theories of suicide are also used for models. I only sent one email the whole time I was reading. I emailed some thoughts on the criminology statistics, the suicide v. economy models and a chapter on statistical literacy in a book on damn lies and statistics that I read. The person I emailed is a busy professor of statistics who I am hoping will supervise my M.Sc. studies. She and another professor taught the data mining course I took last winter and I will try to take another course this winter from her.

I did read an article from our grant proposal literature reference list. I got worried that because I have no formal psychological background education I needed to look up some terms in the article so looked up dispositional approaches to measure for making scales. In this case the scale is a hope scale. I search google and visited aboiut nine academic links and documented my search. So I learned another skill that of documenting my internet search activity. In the end I learned that dispositional means of the self. That is I hope I rate my level of hope for my "self". The scale measures hope that an individual's self has for goals. I found references to dispositional measures of satisfaction with work, avoidance/ approach ( this was out of context and a failure of the search engine to contextualise my search terms or my failure in use of search terms), and also the self and being able to think about symbols. So dispositional could be like a trait or it could be like thinking. All in all an interesting little study of psychology was done by me for tomorrow's meeting.