During a trip to Dr. Victoria Talwar's lab at McGill University, Po and I took part in one of her experiments. Talwar investigates why and when kids lie, so she asked us to watch videos of children describing a bullying incident. Our job was to decide if each child was talking about a real event or just making up a story. Po was only able to correctly identify four of the eight, but I'd done even worse: just three right answers, making Po's 50% look stellar by comparison.
Now, I'm enough of a perfectionist that I'd study for a dental exam, if I could. So friends have been teasing me about my poor score at the lab, knowing that it must drive me crazy. In truth, while I was embarrassed, I wasn't surprised by my low score. In fact, I have a really good (lame) explanation (excuse).
Before Po and I had met Talwar, we had plowed through the scientific research done on lie detection. In the studies, scholars listed a few "tells" – behaviors through which liars give themselves away, and I'd memorized the list. But I didn't feel as though I'd walked away from the scholarship with a magic decoder ring. Instead, I had realized just how challenging lie detection is, even for the experts.
It's hard enough when you're trying to catch an adult in a lie. For kids, once they know enough to tell a reasonable version of what happened, it's darn near impossible to tell when they're lying. (For those parents and teachers out there saying, "I can tell with my kids," Talwar's tested parents on their own kids, and they still can't reliably catch a lie.)
Thus, when the videos began, all I could think was: "I'm never going to be able to do this." I found myself desperately searching for all tells I'd read about ("Big smiles!! Look for the SMILES!!!!!") until I'd forgotten to pay attention to what the kids were saying (Oh! There was a smile! – wait! – was it "big" enough?). By the end of the tape, I triple-guessed myself so much, I wasn't even sure of my score.
So, you see, if I hadn't read the lying research, or if I hadn't been so sure of my impending failure, I probably would have ... gotten the same exact score. All right, maybe I'd have four right, but I doubt it.
Outside the ideal setting of a laboratory, lie detection is even more difficult. Part of the problem is the myths out there on lie-telling.
Liars do not look down or look to the left. They do not shift from side to side. They don't fidget. Actually, liars often hold themselves still, restraining their movements so that they appear truthful. And liars don't get nervous, because they're sure you believe them. (In comparison, shy, truth-telling introverts often get anxious during a confrontation and thus mistakenly get accused of lying.)
The University of Portsmouth's Dr. Alvert Vrij has studied videotapes of police interrogations of murder and rape suspects. His team found scant differences between truth tellers and liars. The liars blinked a little less; they moved their arms a little less; and they paused a little more before answering. That was about it.
UC San Francisco's Paul Ekman has become famous (thanks to the Fox drama Lie to Me) with his method of identifying "microexpressions." Microexpressions are involuntarily facial expressions and gestures, subconscious revelations of emotion occurring in fractions of a second. However, Ekman freely admits: "There is no perfect, foolproof way to catch liars, and I bet [there] never will be...." And microexpressions aren't something everyone can use to catch a liar: Ekman's system requires extensive training and experience.
Experience, however, can have its own drawbacks.
In one study, Talwar had police officers come into the lab. During their years on the job, the officers developed a list of “sure-fire” behaviors to watch for. But it turned out that the officers had it exactly backward. The behaviors they were looking for meant that they identified truth tellers as liars, and they said liars were telling the truth.
Other studies have come up with similar results. In lab tests, FBI agents are better than average at identifying liars, but the longer they are in the field, the worse at it they become.
German scholars have pioneered Criteria Based Content Analysis (CBCA). Armed with a 19-point list of identifiers, analysts ask if the story was incoherent or disorganized. They count the number of details, how frequently the storyteller self-corrected wrong facts, or admitted not knowing something about his own story.
According to CBCA proponents, liars tell stories in chronological order to keep the facts straight. They rarely correct a misstatement, and they're less willing to say, “I don’t know.” Some scholars using CBCA can accurately predict lying as high as 78% of the time. But that's nowhere near perfect, and it’s not a method easily used in real-time conversation.
Another intriguing lie-detection test is Reality Monitoring. The idea behind Reality Monitoring is that a truth teller will, without prompting, relay spatial and sensory details. They won't just say when the man stood in the room: they'll include if the man was near or far from the window, how the room smelled, the sudden bang of door slam. Liars are creating a story intended to make sense, so they rely on logic to supply the details. For example, a truth teller might say, “I remember he had an umbrella, because it was dripping on the floor,” while the liar would say, “Well, he must have had an umbrella with him because it rained earlier.” The liar’s story is based in a rational inference, compared to the truth teller’s sensation. Reality Monitoring, like CBCA, has shown some surprising success.
However, no matter how effective these methods are for adult lie-detection, they are just different degrees of miserable when it comes to kids. The younger the child, the more ineffective they are.
In study after study, trained coders can’t find any physical behaviors that reliably give kids’ untruthfulness away. In one round of experiments, Talwar’s team studied 47 physical behaviors: looking down, sitting on their hands, turning away, changing tone of voice, just to name a few. The kids were notably different on only two of the 47. More of the liars had a big smile at some point, while most truth tellers had a relaxed mouth when they weren’t talking.
Most of the liars did look away, but almost 70% of the truthful kids looked away, too. Kids just seem to look away when they are thinking.
(And these were behaviors the researchers observed while meticulously studying videotapes – it isn't as if the scholars identified them during live interactions.)
CBCA falls apart because young children don’t use details. They don’t correct forgotten facts, and they rarely admit when they don’t know something.
Kids flummox the Reality Monitoring standard, apparently because lying feels like pretend play. Kids are better at selling the sensory imagery of a falsehood than adults are at telling the truth.
And, given how rapidly kids cognitively develop, the tells kids might actually have at one point, may be completely different a few months later.
For me, there is an actual upside to admitting that I can't tell when kids are lying to me. It's changed the way I handle kids tattling and arguing. Occasionally when I'm tutoring kids, a pencil will go flying through the air, or the boys will suddenly be tussling over a book or game. In the past, I'd have listened to the "He started it ... No way! It was him!", and I'd have tried to sleuth out which kid was telling the truth. And then the kid "in the wrong" would get pulled to the side for a talking-to about throwing things and/or lying about it.
Now, I realize that, unless I saw something happen, or a kid admits his own wrongdoing, that I can't be sure which kid's lying. And the better thing to do is put my inner-Nancy Drew aside and go straight to how to best fix the aftermath, and prevent the problem from re-occurring.
Every once in a while, you gotta take a break from arguing about the horn arrangements on the new Lucero record to crack a book. Here are ten I dug in 2009.
01. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans (Dan Baum)
Baum traces the history of the most corrupt, and most culturally rich, city in the United States from Hurricane Betsy (1965) to Hurricane Katrina. The result is an engrossing journey to the heart of a city so enigmatic, it practically transcends lore. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
02. Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon)
An homage to The Big Lebowski (and, by proxy, an homage to The Big Sleep), Pynchon’s stoney pulp novel is a quick read, but one you’ll want to go back to a second time to catch everything you missed the first time through.
03. Cheever: A Life (Blake Bailey)
Bailey’s mammoth biography may be more intriguing than anything Cheever himself ever wrote, and Cheever was pretty damn good.
04. Sag Harbor (Colson Whitehead)
Whitehead’s coming-of-age tale examines racism, classism, and a whole shitload of other -ism’s without getting bogged down in platitudes, rhetoric, or soapbox pontification.
05. A Bright and Guilty Place (Richard Rayner)
Another “biography of a city,” Rayner’s rumination on the seedy under and upper bellies of Los Angeles is as enthralling as it is informative. Sort of like reading a very long tabloid, if tabloids employed people who actually knew how to write.
06. The Book of Basketball (Bill Simmons)
I’ve not yet finished Simmons’ epic tome on the past, present, and future of the National Basketball Association, because it is approximately 13,000 pages long, but so far, it is the most enjoyable book I’ve ever read on the subject of the NBA, and I’m relatively sure I’ve read ‘em all.
07. Changing My Mind (Zadie Smith)
Why is it that I feel like every book Zadie Smith writes is the best book Zadie Smith has ever written? She just keeps getting better, as proven by this collection of essays.
08. Pops: The Life of Louis Armstrong (Terry Teachout)
I’m a Louis Armstrong junkie, so this one comes with a caveat: If you’re looking for a biography full of reverence and admiration for Satchmo, Teachout’s biography is for you. If your interest in Louis Armstrong – and/or jazz in general – is cursory at best, you’ll likely be better off avoiding this one.
09. Zeitoun (Dave Eggers)
Eggers wrote two brilliant books in 2009. Wild Things, his companion piece to the Spike Jonze film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s seminal children’s book, is as touching a portrait of a broken-home-in-repair as I’ve ever read. However, Zeitoun, the story of one man’s insistence on protecting his home from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina while an entire city fled, is a jarring, moving, and unforgettable story. History will judge the Bush Administration as a collection dishonest, blood-and-oil-thirsty warmongers, but their greatest failure may well have been the immense catastrophe that occurred in the days following Hurricane Katrina.
10. Lowboy (John Wray)
Will Heller, a paranoid schizophrenic, goes off his meds and retreats to New York City’s subway system, winding through is own (perhaps justified) paranoia and the structure that keeps his city moving and vibrant. If Wray keeps this up, he’ll a lot have more in common with Jonathan Lethem than place of residence.
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon: “Spade stopped her with a palm-up motion of one hand. The upper part of his face frowned. The lower part smiled.”
Hi everyone!
I'm new here, and although I've considered myself vegitarian (or pescetarian, more precisely) since I was, like, ten, I just learned that I'm not a very good one.
Anyways, I just found out that both marshmallows and candy corn have gelatin in them! I thought gummy candies were the only candies that used it.
Would anyone like to compile a short list of other things I should avoid? I've looked all over google and can't find one.
It would be a huge help!
Thanks, Aly
(If this type of post isn't allowed, I'd be happy to take it down.)
I'm new here, and although I've considered myself vegitarian (or pescetarian, more precisely) since I was, like, ten, I just learned that I'm not a very good one.
Anyways, I just found out that both marshmallows and candy corn have gelatin in them! I thought gummy candies were the only candies that used it.
Would anyone like to compile a short list of other things I should avoid? I've looked all over google and can't find one.
It would be a huge help!
Thanks, Aly
(If this type of post isn't allowed, I'd be happy to take it down.)
- Music:Viva la Vida- Coldplay
I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! I must have been good because I got everything I wanted this year! Here's one gift from my sister that I'd like to share with you - a vintage beaded handbag to add to my collection! The beaded snowflake pattern on this bag is coming apart from the metal frame a bit, but almost all beads are intact! It's difficult for me to tell the age of this bag, but the tag inside says it was made in Hong Kong. I don't think it's very old, but it is very pretty! Perfect for the holiday season! What did you get for Christmas?? :)
Just a couple other news tidbits. First, I have selected a winner for my final Lark Books giveaway. Michelle Mach will receive a brand new copy of Marcia Decoster's 'Beaded Opulence'! (yay!!) Michelle is an accomplished freelance writer and jewelry designer. She helped launch the Beading Daily newsletter (published by Interweave) in 2007! Please stop by Michelle's website to learn more about her and for links to some of her free beading projects! :)
Also today, Talisman Studios selected my beaded owl painting, The Messenger, to be in an Etsy Treasury! It's entitled 'Owl Be There'! I am so thrilled because I love owls! I think this is my favourite Treasury, yet! Please stop by to check it out, then let me know.. which owl is your favourite, and what kind of beaded bird painting should I make next?? :D
This Christmas Eve, I stood guard, anxiously surveying the narrow border between childhood innocence and the complex wisdom of messy adulthood. Little had I realized before now, how perilously close to one another are these two geographic spaces, and with what relatively modest effort a person might cross from the first of these to the next, all in a matter of seconds. While my wife brought in ...
I finally had the chance to watch American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein, and I was a bit disappointed with it. It reminded me of my disappointment with Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. A lot is lost when you put the ideas of Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, or almost any other scholar onto film, unless you're willing to sacrifice good pacing and include long segments of speeches, debates, or interviews. Having read both a lot of Finkelstein and a lot of Chomsky before seeing each documentary, I was frustrated by how simplistic their ideas and research seemed when film took the place of print. Finkelstein sounds like a self-hating Jew who is more like an angry loudmouth than a competent scholar. Chomsky sounds like a conspiracy theorist and someone whose contributions to the study of mass media are more complaint than serious analysis.
American Radical also disppointed in a more general way--a way many documentaries on political or social issues have disappointed me. For some reason a lot of documentary filmmakers like to keep narration to a minimum (if it's included at all) and make no obvious statement of their own views. I don't know if this is a modus operandi that's drilled into people who pursue graduate degrees in media arts, or if it's the free market's effect on documentary filmmaking: let the audience make up their minds about the issue, so that your audience can be as broad as possible and your film can hopefully turn a profit. Whatever the reason, so many documentaries I've seen seem to do nothing more than string together a bunch of footage, with no apparent thesis or message. You get clips of people from various opposing camps making their arguments, with little or nothing to help you evaluate anyone's argument.
Besides making the documentary more coherent, I think taking a position and making it known throughout the film is simply more honest. While watching American Radical, I was reminded of a theme that comes up from time to time in the writings of Howard Zinn and Michael Parenti: the defense of scholarship that is completely up front about its ideological groundings. The more common school of thought is that bias should be left out of your research, but it's a fruitless pursuit. Everyone has biases. Bias has made each scholar pursue his or her discipline to the exclusion of others and his or her thesis to the exclusion of others. Zinn's disbelief in the absence of bias is captured in the title of his memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train; so-called neutrality leaves the status quo or consensus alone and has essentially the same effect as support or agreement with it. Not being up front about your biases leaves your biases unexamined and therefore empowered, since they are presented as objective conclusions instead of a work of ax-grinding. But when you disclose your biases, the reader, viewer, or listener can evaluate your work skeptically and decide whether or not your argument is founded on presumption and prejudice or fact and logic (or something in between).
Speaking of Chomsky, Zinn, and Parenti, I'm excited that they all have new books coming out next year. (I thought Finkelstein was supposed to have a forthcoming book as well, but at this point I've found no evidence of that.)
American Radical also disppointed in a more general way--a way many documentaries on political or social issues have disappointed me. For some reason a lot of documentary filmmakers like to keep narration to a minimum (if it's included at all) and make no obvious statement of their own views. I don't know if this is a modus operandi that's drilled into people who pursue graduate degrees in media arts, or if it's the free market's effect on documentary filmmaking: let the audience make up their minds about the issue, so that your audience can be as broad as possible and your film can hopefully turn a profit. Whatever the reason, so many documentaries I've seen seem to do nothing more than string together a bunch of footage, with no apparent thesis or message. You get clips of people from various opposing camps making their arguments, with little or nothing to help you evaluate anyone's argument.
Besides making the documentary more coherent, I think taking a position and making it known throughout the film is simply more honest. While watching American Radical, I was reminded of a theme that comes up from time to time in the writings of Howard Zinn and Michael Parenti: the defense of scholarship that is completely up front about its ideological groundings. The more common school of thought is that bias should be left out of your research, but it's a fruitless pursuit. Everyone has biases. Bias has made each scholar pursue his or her discipline to the exclusion of others and his or her thesis to the exclusion of others. Zinn's disbelief in the absence of bias is captured in the title of his memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train; so-called neutrality leaves the status quo or consensus alone and has essentially the same effect as support or agreement with it. Not being up front about your biases leaves your biases unexamined and therefore empowered, since they are presented as objective conclusions instead of a work of ax-grinding. But when you disclose your biases, the reader, viewer, or listener can evaluate your work skeptically and decide whether or not your argument is founded on presumption and prejudice or fact and logic (or something in between).
Speaking of Chomsky, Zinn, and Parenti, I'm excited that they all have new books coming out next year. (I thought Finkelstein was supposed to have a forthcoming book as well, but at this point I've found no evidence of that.)
- Location:home
- Mood:
awake - Music:KRS-One, Lamb, and The Dandy Warhols
Time once more for Fearless NFL Predictions, in which I attempt to pick the winner, straight up, of each NFL contest in the upcoming weekend. Or weekday, as the case may be.
Last week, counting the Thursday night (12/17) and Saturday night (12/19) games, I was an atrocious 7-9, my first sub-.500 week of the season- making me 151-71 on the season after 15 weeks. Hopefully I can turn it around this weekend, but I'm not off to a good start after my inexplicable pick against the Chargers last Saturday night. Anyway:
The Standard Disclaimer: Remember, these picks are for my own, and hopefully your, amusement. I don't have any inside info that you can't access on your own so I beseech, beg and implore you NOT to bet your hard-earned money on these picks if you gamble legally or otherwise. If you do so, and lose your ass, IT'S NOT MY FAULT. You've been warned, sucka.
ATLANTA over Buffalo.
CINCINNATI over Kansas City.
OAKLAND over Cleveland.
GREEN BAY over Seattle.
MIAMI over Houston.
NEW ENGLAND over Jacksonville.
NEW ORLEANS over Tampa Bay.
NY GIANTS over Carolina.
PITTSBURGH over Baltimore.
ARIZONA over St. Louis.
SAN FRANCISCO over Detroit.
INDIANAPOLIS over the NY Jets.
PHILADELPHIA over Denver.
DALLAS over Washington.
MINNESOTA over Chicago.
Enjoy the games, everyone!
Picture from Kissing Suzy Kolber.
- Music:Todd Rundgren- Todd
And then I'll go to bed. Really. I mean it this time.
A friend asked me about my thing for bears (after I mentioned ursa74 being a straightforward bear reference):
It's multifold; a real fondness for the actual animals, a sense that if I were religious in a way that an animal totem would be appropriate, it would most definitely be mine. I identify with bears' energy level, and their playfulness, their strength, their love of water, their usual mellowness, and their fierceness under relatively limited and generally appropriate circumstances... I admire octopodes, and am fascinated by them (another association I'm known for). I identify with bears.
...and also a really strong fondness/wistful identification with the queer bear community.
I'm hugely attracted to bears, in the queer community sense, and if there's a heaven, there's a bi bear leatherdaddy waiting for me. Even aside from my lecherous side, I find the bear community to be one of the subsets of GLBT culture that feels most socially comfortable to me, and most like "family". It's a great overlap of queer community and body-positive community (although the dyke community is often great for that, too, and butch women make me weak in the knees -- I'm still not entirely over the fear of bi-induced rejection in that community, though). It's a community that manages to tease apart masculinity and homophobia from the tangled knot our culture's created out of them. And I basically identify as a female bear in that sense of the word. I know I'm not the only queergirl who does, although it's not all that common in my experience.
And the other thing floating through my mind, in the context of creating the exhibitionism filter. My tattoo is an oddly exhibitionist piece in its own right. With Baubo mythology being a central element of my research, that's practically unavoidable. I hadn't really thought too much about it in the context of my own exhibitionism, though. Something to ponder and get thinky about. In day to day life, I often flat-out forget that I'm kind of covered with naked ladies with graphic genitalia. But when I do remember, it certainly amuses me, and it hits something else for me, too. A chance to push the world's boundaries, maybe. The tattoo's somewhat different from impinging my own sexuality into other people's realities, but it's also a constant instigation of conversations about those sorts of things in a more general sense, and I very much like that about it.
A friend asked me about my thing for bears (after I mentioned ursa74 being a straightforward bear reference):
It's multifold; a real fondness for the actual animals, a sense that if I were religious in a way that an animal totem would be appropriate, it would most definitely be mine. I identify with bears' energy level, and their playfulness, their strength, their love of water, their usual mellowness, and their fierceness under relatively limited and generally appropriate circumstances... I admire octopodes, and am fascinated by them (another association I'm known for). I identify with bears.
...and also a really strong fondness/wistful identification with the queer bear community.
I'm hugely attracted to bears, in the queer community sense, and if there's a heaven, there's a bi bear leatherdaddy waiting for me. Even aside from my lecherous side, I find the bear community to be one of the subsets of GLBT culture that feels most socially comfortable to me, and most like "family". It's a great overlap of queer community and body-positive community (although the dyke community is often great for that, too, and butch women make me weak in the knees -- I'm still not entirely over the fear of bi-induced rejection in that community, though). It's a community that manages to tease apart masculinity and homophobia from the tangled knot our culture's created out of them. And I basically identify as a female bear in that sense of the word. I know I'm not the only queergirl who does, although it's not all that common in my experience.
And the other thing floating through my mind, in the context of creating the exhibitionism filter. My tattoo is an oddly exhibitionist piece in its own right. With Baubo mythology being a central element of my research, that's practically unavoidable. I hadn't really thought too much about it in the context of my own exhibitionism, though. Something to ponder and get thinky about. In day to day life, I often flat-out forget that I'm kind of covered with naked ladies with graphic genitalia. But when I do remember, it certainly amuses me, and it hits something else for me, too. A chance to push the world's boundaries, maybe. The tattoo's somewhat different from impinging my own sexuality into other people's realities, but it's also a constant instigation of conversations about those sorts of things in a more general sense, and I very much like that about it.
- Mood:
contemplative
For Christmas, Devin got me a Zeo, dubbed "your personal sleep coach." It comes with a device kind of like an alarm clock and a headband that you wear while you're sleeping. It tracks your brain activity while you sleep and reports in the morning how much you slept, and how much time you spent in light, REM, and deep sleep. From there, it can begin to make suggestions regarding how you could get better sleep.
I tried it last night, although it only tracked about half a night's worth of data (sadly, it missed the three or four solid hours I got early in the night). It's really fascinating, and of course my sleep is kind of crappy because Laurel wakes us up every few hours and I spend some time each night awake and nursing her. The device also tracks wake time.
I've always been fascinated by sleep and wanted to do sleep studies, etc. This doesn't track brief wakings -- of less than two minutes -- so it's not great for tracking apnea episodes, but for a better understanding of one's sleep patterns, it seems to work well. I can't wait to go to bed and track another night's sleep. :)
I tried it last night, although it only tracked about half a night's worth of data (sadly, it missed the three or four solid hours I got early in the night). It's really fascinating, and of course my sleep is kind of crappy because Laurel wakes us up every few hours and I spend some time each night awake and nursing her. The device also tracks wake time.
I've always been fascinated by sleep and wanted to do sleep studies, etc. This doesn't track brief wakings -- of less than two minutes -- so it's not great for tracking apnea episodes, but for a better understanding of one's sleep patterns, it seems to work well. I can't wait to go to bed and track another night's sleep. :)
Me: "So that's what a dragula is."
Devin: "Hm?"
Me: "It's the Munsters' car."
Devin: "I always figured it was some kind of vampire transvestite."
Me: "Yeah, but if you listen to the lyrics, that doesn't make sense in context."
Devin: "You can understand the lyrics?"
Me: "Um, yeah."
Devin: "Rob Zombie is capable of singing in English?"
Devin: "Hm?"
Me: "It's the Munsters' car."
Devin: "I always figured it was some kind of vampire transvestite."
Me: "Yeah, but if you listen to the lyrics, that doesn't make sense in context."
Devin: "You can understand the lyrics?"
Me: "Um, yeah."
Devin: "Rob Zombie is capable of singing in English?"
- Music:Rob Zombie, "Spookshow Baby"
The Inspiration:
Before my local bead store closed down, I used to enjoy browsing their clearance section for discontinued seed beads. There was always a big basket of 10 gram baggies, filled with different colors and finishes that would never grace the store’s shelves again. These last chance beads were always my first stop when looking for something new and interesting.
One of the most precious finds from the clearance basket was a pair of baggies containing 11/0 crystal seed beads with a bright fuchsia-purple lining. Because they were so pretty, and because there were so few of them, I’ve been holding onto them for years. I finally felt that it was time to use them when I pictured the sweet purple against some sour yellow-lined crystal beads.
I needed a really great focal bead for this project, so I was thrilled to have the chance to try a yellow CZ twisted oval drop. I love the honey-like color of the yellow Cubic Zirconia, which would add an extra dimension to the necklace that I had in mind for my precious purple beads. Together, the set reminds me of a bee’s favorite flower, fully in bloom on a bright summer day. Once I had sketched out the design that I wanted to use, I discovered that there was plenty of room for one more color, so I also added some gorgeous wisteria-lined crystal 11/0 Tohos.
After using right angle weave to create a bib necklace with circular 16 bead units, I was anxious to use the technique again. Using some graph paper, I carefully sketched out a pattern of loops that would create a background for the CZ oval drop. I didn’t want just a simple RAW triangle, so after some experimenting, I came up with a lacy V-shaped pattern that would allow me to stitch continuously without much back-tracking.
What I love about the looped right angle weave is that if the shared beads are a separate color, each unit is independent of the others. This allowed me to use a different color for each circle, creating a sort of flower bed with the two purples. The pale yellow beads peek out between each one like tiny motes of pollen, with a pretty drop of nectar at the bottom. The twisted oval bead was a great focal for this particular necklace, because the shape doesn’t have a definite front or back. No matter which direction you string it from, it still looks gorgeous. I was able to incorporate the drop directly into the beadwork without any extra stitches or findings.
I would like to thank Artbeads.com for providing the CZ beads used in this design. Inspirational Beading has not received paid compensation for including Artbeads.com products or reviews in this blog post. I have shared my honest opinions about the products used in this design.
Copyright 2009 Inspirational Beading
Joy to the World, all!
(oh, and folks who missed the most recent Moya filter post may want to read back a bit -- new subfilter in the works!)
(oh, and folks who missed the most recent Moya filter post may want to read back a bit -- new subfilter in the works!)
- Mood:
chipper
I'm getting worse and worse about remembering these annoying weekday games. Anyway, tonight:
TENNESSEE over San Diego.
As I type this, San Diego leads by a score of 14-3. My mojo has fled, it seems. Anyway, the rest by Sunday morning. Cheers.
TENNESSEE over San Diego.
As I type this, San Diego leads by a score of 14-3. My mojo has fled, it seems. Anyway, the rest by Sunday morning. Cheers.
- Music:Various Artists- Ultra-Lounge Christmas Cocktails V1
Today... is Christmas! There will be a magic show at zero-nine-thirty! Chaplain Charlie will tell you about how the free world will conquer Communism with the aid of God and a few Marines! God has a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see! He plays His games, we play ours! To show our appreciation for so much power, we keep heaven packed with fresh souls! God was here before the Marine Corps! So you can give your heart to Jesus, but your ass belongs to the Corps! Do you ladies understand?
I admit to doing something tacky last evening. It's my family's tradition to exchange gifts on Christmas Eve. Before we did so, I whispered to my uncle and his wife, "Just want you to know: I think what I got you is really cool, so just tell me you like it, no matter what, okay?"
I know that sounds (is) rude, but there's another Christmas custom in my family: we give each other weird gifts.
There is a sweet reason for this. My grandparents grew up during the Depression, and there were years when they had no gifts at all. So my grandmother and her siblings would gift-wrap their old socks and clothes, just so they had something to open on Christmas. Pretend presents were better than none at all.
My grandmother never really got over those early years, so, for the rest of her life, she went a little crazy at the holidays. She'd start buying gifts in October. It didn't matter what it was. Socks, toothbrushes, used paperbacks she'd read but didn't like, all went under the tree. Contents of catalog "mystery boxes" meant we spent another hour unwrapping presents. One of my more memorable gifts: a single piece of clear plastic labeled "face shield." I was apparently to hold it in front of my eyes when I used hair spray.
We got nice gifts, too, of course, but you never were completely sure whether it was junk or something important until afterwards. We all just thanked Grandma profusely no matter what – then she'd say, "Oh, that's just a thing." That was the signal that you could forget it, thanking her once more for the pretty sweater set you'd opened earlier. As a little kid, this pattern of gratitude for the terrible presents bewildered me; it took a long time for me to understand it was all right to laugh at some of her gifts.
My grandmother's since passed away, but her wacky, put it all under the tree, tradition still continues. So we sort of have to tip each other off on what we consider to be the real presents. Which is what I did with my aunt and uncle.
But now, Christmas morning, I sit here, wearing new fuzzy socks (Thanks, Mom and Dad) and realizing I am hoist by my own petard. I don't really know if my aunt and uncle actually liked the gift I gave them. They said they did, but since I coached them to tell me they love it, I'll never really know if that was the truth.
All of which makes me think of the work of McGill professor Victoria Talwar. An expert in children's lying behavior, Talwar has been studying how kids respond to unwanted gifts. When they get a gift they hate, can they still thank someone and pretend to love it?
Talwar tests kids' ability to do this, by asking kids to pick a toy they want; if they win a game, they get the chosen toy. There are plastic dinosaurs, a small car, a few other items – including an unwrapped, grimy, worn, used bar of soap. At some point in the game, there's a switch in the adults who play with the kids. So, instead of giving the child her chosen toy, the late-arriving adult gives the child the soap.*
Then, the researchers watch what happens.
68% of kids, aged 3 to 11, will spontaneously say they love the gift of old ugly soap. The older they are, the more like they are to say a white lie about the gift. And if parents encourage the children to say how much they like the present, the percentage of kids lying about the gift increases to 87%. Parental coaching also amps up kids' elaboration of the white lie. Kids suddenly tell the researchers things like, "We collect soap," or "We need soap."
At this point, some of you may be saying that a white lie isn't a lie. That's because you are looking at lying from the adult perspective – that lies are acceptable, when told with the intent of helping someone, or protecting another's feelings.
But kids don't think of lying in the same way. For them, the intent behind a lie – for good or for ill – is irrelevant. It is so irrelevant that, for very young kids, you can even lie by accident. Someone who gives out wrong information, but believed it to be true, is still a liar in these kids' book.
Kids just don't believe that lying comes in shades of white or gray. Lying is much simpler than that: lying is telling somebody something that isn't so; lying is really bad; and lying gets you punished.
And if it gets you punished, you shouldn't do it.
In Talwar's lab, parents have literally cheered to hear their kids lie about how great it is to have received the old soap. The parents brim with pride over their children's knowing the socially appropriate response.
Talwar's regularly amazed by this. The parents never even seem to realize that the child told a lie. They never want to chide the child afterwards, or talk about the kid's behavior. (In every other experiment she runs, Talwar refuses to tell parents if the kids lied or not, because the parents are always so eager to reprimand the kids for those other kinds of lies.)
Regardless the parents' pride, the kids aren't happy about their successfully lying. Instead, it can be torture for them.
I was at Talwar's lab when she was doing a version of the unwanted gift experiment with kids in the first and second grades. Watching kid after kid react to that gross bar of soap, I could really see how emotionally difficult it is for kids to tell a white lie. The kids were disappointed when they were handed the soap, but that was nothing compared to the discomfort they showed while having to lie about liking it. They stammered. They fidgeted. Some looked like they were going to cry. It was simply painful to watch.
Indeed, Talwar has found that some kids just can't even bring themselves to say something nice about the present. About 20% of 11 year-olds just refuse to tell a white lie about that unwanted gift – even after their parents encouraged them to do so. And about 14% of kids still won't tell a white lie, even after their parents specifically explained the prosocial reasons to tell the lie. These kids just can't reconcile the disconnect between knowing how bad lying is, and being told they should now lie.
For her part, Talwar understands the social value in telling white lies. She knows that kids need to learn how to politely respond to unwanted gifts, a meal they didn't like, and so on: she, too, wants kids to be polite.
Still, Talwar cautions that we need to recognize that, at least from the kid's point of view, white lies really are still lies.
We should take care to explain the motivation behind the untruth – that we want to protect the other person's feelings. Kids may still fail to completely understand the distinction, but at least it will encourage them to think about others' feelings when they act. And we need to reassure children that they won't be punished for a specific white lie – because they did something nice for someone else. (That may be seem difficult in the moment, but something like this might work: "It would make me and Grandma really happy to hear how much you like the shirt.")
Talwar also warns that we adults should pay attention to our own use of white lies. Kids notice these untruths – and that we rarely get punished for them. If kids believe that we regularly lie to get out of uncomfortable social situations, they are more likely to adopt a similar strategy of lying.
If we don't watch it, we could inadvertently be giving kids yet another present: a license to lie.
Merry Christmas, Everyone. And, yes, I did get your fruitcake, and it was delicious!
________
*Not to worry: a couple minutes later, the kid gets the real toy.
Wishing you much joy on this very Special day!
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”- Isaiah 9:6
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”- Isaiah 9:6
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