daannii

Well the thing about careers in research is that pretty much all require at least a masters and most require a PhD.

For example. I could teach at colleges with a master's. But I'm not qualified to run experiments unless I have a PhD.

Usually only community colleges and small religious colleges hire professors with only a master's.

Most other colleges or universities prefer or require a PhD.

When I first started college, at age 24, I just wanted to get some education to get a better job.

Psych was not even on my radar.

I took a class because why not. Did well. Took a few more psych classes. Before I knew it, I had enough for it to qualify as my major.

I talked to the chair professor and told him. I didn't want to major in psych because 1. Everyone I knew who was a psych major never even finished their degree. 2. I didn't want to go to school for another 10 years to be able to work in the field.
I said I didn't want to be 40 before I finished.

He said. Dani. You are going to be 40 regardless. You want to have a degree and a career that suits you or not by the time you are 40?.

So here I am. Turned 40 in May. 😅

I may need to explain why it took me so long.

I did my associates and bachelor's half time because I worked full time during those degrees. So they took me 8 years. Then half a year gap. Then 1 year masters. Then 1 gap year. Then started PhD. 6 year program. I have 2 masters now. In the same exact field.

I was not competitive enough to get into a PhD program without research experience. That's why I had to get a master's first.

Younger people with more free time often work as research assistants. I didn't have that option as I had a full time job plus school.

Mostly writing for me right now. I finished up my doctorate research experiments in June and now I'm writing my dissertation.

After I'm done I plan to teach and continue doing research.

I exclusively do in-person research.

Nothing online. This is a bit more challenging as I have to set up a room and schedule people. And they often don't show. So it's exhausting sometimes.

My doctorate research is on depth perception based on motor feedback from the lens in your eye that focuses light.

I might continue to do a little more research in this area but my next interest is in motion sickness from visual and vestibular cues in moving vehicles.

As a general rule, I research multisensory systems. I have little interest in studying an isolated system. Boring.

So motion sickness. It's like getting car sick. Especially if reading.

I have some theories on how to combat this and want to test my hypothesis.

I get motion sick easy so this is also personal for me to find solutions.

Graduate work is not too different from what I will be doing after I graduate.

Teaching. doing experiments. And lots and lots of writing.

I already did teaching and teaching assistant as a grad student. I quite liked it and received a graduate teaching assistant award. So I think I'm well suited to it. Teaching isn't for everyone tho.

But I don't want to fully give up research to devote all my time to teaching, so I'm going to try to do both.

Most professors do both.

So I am a perception researcher. There is research on a lot of tactics for advertising.

There are laws now, shaped by that research, that prevent advertisers from using specific symbols used to mark materials and locations for safety. For instance.

The symbol for radiation is not allowed on advertising.

Do you know why?

Maybe you have a pretty good idea.

The symbol will lose not only its meaning when applied to non radiation areas. But it loses salience.

Salience is how attention-grabbing something is. There are specific features of things in the world that our perpetual system was designed to notice more. Because these are important to us in some functional way. They help us navigate our environment.

Bright colors. High contrast. Unusual Geometrics. And movement.

Another important thing about the perception system is it's adaptiveness. Highly adaptive. Even at older ages.

But very very adaptive at young ages.

An example. Kittens raised in spaces with only vertical black and white lines and never allowed to see any other orientation or color. (Blindfolded when fed and most of the time). When these cats were put in a room with horizontal lines. They could not "see" them. And ran into the walls. They never regained their ability to see horizontal lines nor any other orientation since this loss happened since birth.

This is because specific neurons in your primary cortex respond to specific orientations. If they never fire from lack of stimuli. They die.

Now that's an extreme version. But what I trying to get at is this:

The sensory system is highly adaptive to the environment. It provides what the person needs.

When we are bombarded with adds that all use salient stimuli (bold colors, moving, high contrast), we start tunning these out. They become "low salient".

Why is this a problem. ?

Because the brain processing at early sensory attention cannot "tell the difference" between a billboard advertising video playing in your periphery trying to grab your attention. And a small child running in the periphery that will end up in front of your car.

We are "learning" to not see movement. Or at least not direct our attention to it to identify what it is.

We are learning to not see bold colors and high contrast.

Things that we actually do need to see most of time. People are still missing safety and warning signs all the time because advertisements try to grab our attention and we learned to ignore anything bold.

This is not speculation. Lots of research on this. Being constantly surrounded by advertisement changes salience of important visual and audio cues.

It also has cognitive effects like exhaustion.

But I'm not as versed on those as the perception parts. That's my area of expertise.

I say, we as scientist must prove ads are harming us. Get legislation passed to protect people and kids.

But there already is evidence. And nothing is done.

No one cares. No one can fight lobbyists.

And it's hard to quantify the damage. Like specifically risk increases and the like.

Very difficult to do.

No control subjects.

So the research is often dismissed as speculation on real world applied harm.

There are some laws in some places. But not enough.

I have a neighbor who's neurodivergent. He's an older gentleman, retired.

He does the lawn care and looked after the house I'm currently in, when it was empty. He knows the owner. Anywho. The owner told me of the guy before I moved in.

The way she talked about him kinda clued me in, that he might be a little odd. Owner assured me tho that he was a good guy and very dependable.

If you only met him once. Or... Maybe a handful of times, you might conclude he's an asshole.

He's very to the point. And critical. Of everything and everyone.

But. He's actually incredibly kind and thoughtful.

After living here for 6 months, he comes and mows the lawn. Also mulched the leaves and now has shoveled my walkway. Just does it. No pay. I don't have to ask.

And I told him multiple times, if you need any help, just knock on the door. Cause I don't usually hear you out there and I definitely can do half the work. But he's like nah I got it.

Ive had a few minor issues with the house im staying at, and he's always been available to help immediately.

He will bitch about how so and so is responsible for the problems. Usually reasonable culprit (old house, owner hasn't done maintenance, or wrong building supply used, etc).

Nothing he complains about is a blame game. It's all legit. But he sure does complain pretty much non stop. I mean non stop.

As I said if you just met him or only interacted with him in some scenarios, you would 100% think the guy was an asshole.

But he's not. Not really.
Just different.

Thanks that's good info to have.

I'm hearing they are starting to censor but that must be kinda new.

Too bad.

It was, as you say, a decent reddit alternative for images/memes.

A lot of reddit users, especially those who have recently been permabanned due to the great censorship purge, are just hanging out there now. Not much censorship.

It's super antifa. I scroll there a lot when I'm in a meme mood.

I'd say it started going hard political around the same time as everything else. February 2025.

Glitter bombs.

Euthanizing pets has always been the rule rather than the exception in my family.

We are all big animal lovers and often end up with older pets that have no home.

When the animal gets to a point where it's crying in pain often or can no longer eat or walk or some combination of those 3, we usually take the animal to the vet and have them euthanized.

We (my family) don't believe in making an animal suffer for our own wishes that they would stay alive. It seems selfish.

Some people will keep an animal in pain, alive for a long time.

That's their choice. But I think ethically, it's wrong.

Let them go peacefully surrounded by those who love them.

Also I'm pro self euthanizing for the same reasons. But that's a different topic.

The artist knew exactly what they were drawing.

Door at my old apartment always "slammed shut". It was heavy and probably the pressure change factored in.

I was bothered by it so I bought some rubber bumper things (sold for cabinets) to help. It did help.

But I never intentionally slammed that door.

It was just heavy and some pressure difference would pull it fast.

Illustrates two ways to combat flicker in LEDs. It's still there. Just less visible to humans.