Dogs are humans friends and can help us in a great many areas if trained properly: companying depressed or sick people, guarding the yard, smelling cancer, guiding the blind people, etc. Among these, I am most curious about dogs’ smelling cancer. I learn from this article that though the 23,040 breaths we take daily drag in a universe of information, our olfactory powers are not even mediocre compared to a dog’s.

This cute and informative video from TED-Ed tells us that dogs have 300 million olfactory receptor cells compared to humans’ 5 million of them. Also, sensation of smell take up more brain space in dogs than humans. Dogs really “see” with their noses!

But can this powerful nose really smell cancer, a disease hard to treat? Researchers conducted a study of 93 patients consecutively admitted to hospital with suspected lung cancer– they sampled exhaled breath and urine, and performed the canine olfactory test (let dogs smell the samples and trained them to sit beside the sample of cancer) in a double-blinded manner. In the end, sensitivity and specificity were outcome measures. It turned out that “with 99% sensitivity, the olfactory test demonstrated that dogs have the ability to distinguish cancer patients from healthy individuals.” I believe the study is rather convincing because it is a well designed double blind control trial and the number of objects can be accepted to draw conclusions. Plus, with a 99% sensitivity, the test rather reliable and should be qualified as a promising tool to diagnose cancer. However, the olfactory test still has progress to make: “the main challenge is to determine whether the test can sufficiently discriminate between patients at risk, patients with benign disease, and patients with malignant disease.” In other words, though dogs can smell and tell who have cancer, they cannot figure out what phase of the disease the patient is going through.

Another study intended to determine whether dogs can be trained to identify people with bladder cancer on the basis of urine odour more successfully than would be expected by chance alone. Participants include 36 male and female patients (age range 48-90 years) presenting with new or recurrent transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder (27 samples used for training; 9 used for formal testing); 108 male and female controls (diseased and healthy, age range 18-85 years—54 samples used in training; 54 used for testing). As a result, “the dogs correctly selected urine from patients with bladder cancer on 22 out of 54 occasions. This gave a mean success rate of 41%, compared with 14% expected by chance alone.” So scientists concluded that dogs can be trained to distinguish patients with bladder cancer on the basis of urine odor more successfully than would be expected by chance alone. Besides proving dogs are able to smell cancer, this study also demonstrates to us that dogs can be trained to complete the formidable task with a higher successful rate than solely by chance. In this way, we don’t have to worry about the lack of such “smart dogs” which can provide us great help, since we can always train new ones when necessary.

Another question I’m thinking about is that if doctors know what chemical components or molecules dogs recognize as symbols of cancer when smelling, they can trace the substance that’s typical to cancer and maybe figure out means to clean these “evil things” from the patients’ bodies, then cancer is cured. An article states that “Volatile SNOs (vSNOs) are proposed to be the source of the significant smell of cancer.” A sniffer dog was trained with the synthetic vSNOs, and the results of the tests indicate that synthetic and cancer smells are very similar or even the same. Scientists are thrilled that these findings can serve as clues for future measurement methods and establish methods for cancer diagnosis and so am I.

Andrew mentioned that cancer is one of the topics we are going to talk about in class and I believe if cancer is really curable, science will prove it one day and yes, to the extent that science is powerful enough to prove anything.

When I met another Chinese girl the other day, she told me that she doesn’t like to FaceTime with her parents because she would cry. As international students, studying abroad means not only trying to fit into another or several other different culture, but also being away from our homes and relatives.

Students studying abroad at Loyola University’s Rome Center during the 2004 fall semester and the 2007 spring semester completed surveys, which examined aspects of psychological distress, loneliness, and functioning while abroad. “These studies found that students experiencing more psychological distress and more loneliness demonstrated lower levels of functioning while studying abroad and this relationship was found at different time points in the semester.” It’s normal that when people are down or depressed, they don’t feel like working and are hard to concentrate. My advice is that students should not be hesitated to seek help– at Penn State, there are friendly people in the health center willing to address our psychological distress and other mental problems, also, some organizations are meant to gather lonely international students together and talk about the issues.

When having friends to talk and hang out with, we seem to be more cheerful and less depressed, so I’m curious whether increase of friendship networks or social connections can help international students feel better. A correlational study includes Eighty four international students completing a survey examining the relationship between friendship networks, social connectedness, homesickness, contentment, and satisfaction. Researchers found that “international students with a higher ratio of individuals from the host country in their network claimed to be more satisfied, content, and less homesick. Furthermore, participants who reported more friendship variability with host country individuals described themselves as more satisfied, content, and more socially connected.” In other words, especially students who make friends with people from different countries gain more satisfaction and content. Why is it this way? I think the reason is that due to language barriers, cultural differences, etc, it’s more difficult for students to connect with or make friends with people from other countries. However, once we really fit in and get along well with individuals from different countries, we will feel more involved into the environment we are in and don’t recognize it as merely a remote place to study, but a warm second home with people we can reach to and groups we belong with. Plus, if people completed some difficult tasks or went beyond what we thought ourselves could do, we would feel more satisfied and content.

(Trend of studying abroad)

Since the trend of studying abroad gradually increases and a lot of American students are considering studying abroad to broaden views or gain more experiences, I believe this blog can give you some heads up and advice of having a nice mental status in order to function well in studies. As my blog is closely related to psychology, you may ask if it has something to do with science. To address such concerns, I found an abstract of a book illustrating psychology as “the science of mind and behavior.”  🙂

Marijuana legalization won on the ballot in Colorado and Washington in the 2012 election, and in Alaska, Oregon and Washington, D.C., in the 2014 election– big news. Some people are against the action because they think that as a drug, marijuana may do harm to people, such as causing them to more violence- oriented. Is this really the case? Does marijuana make consumers behave violently? I’m concerned about these questions because if people do behave violently due to consuming Marijuana, the legalization would increase the probability of danger to the citizens and no more states should continue to do so.

A review of the literature on marijuana and interpersonal violence states that the present review demonstrates a positive association between marijuana use and interpersonal violence. “While data from laboratory studies on THC administration and aggressive behavior are mixed and some studies failed to show this relationship in particular subgroups, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on marijuana use and interpersonal violence and withdrawal-specific studies conducted within the past 25 years support an association between these variables.” Below is a picture that clearly demonstrates the relationship between the various types of influences.

This articles seems a great sum up of the available empirical and theoretical literature on the relationship between marijuana and violence, including past theoretical models, yet it also points out that data from laboratory studies on THC administration and aggressive behavior are mixed and some studies failed to show this relationship in particular subgroups. I can understand that some studies may fail to reach the right conclusion due to chance (as we talked about in class– always take chance into consideration), but this article doesn’t say how many these studies are and why they do not find the association. So I continue to search real studies to figure out the truth.

A study aiming to test the relationship of the degree of use of each of ten types of illicit drugs with each of eight types of violent criminal offenses and found that “Greater frequency of use of marijuana was found unexpectedly to be associated with greater likelihood to commit weapons offenses; and this association was not found for any of the other drugs, except for alcohol. Marijuana use was also found associated with commission of Attempted Homicide/Reckless Endangerment offenses.” The study involved a group of young adult study sample of N= 612, which I think is a large sample. However, I believe the study’s conclusion may not be universally correct since the objects are all from an African-American, inner-city, low SES. This is merely a typical crowd that may has some particular attributes like being aggressive, so this study is actually not randomized.

Since randomized study can help us decrease the influence of third variables and are more convincing, I ended up finding a randomized one, but it’s observational. Researchers interview 268 individuals who committed homicide to examine the relationship between marijuana use and homicide. They reveal that “about one-third of respondents who had ever used marijuana used the drug in the 24-hour period before the homicide; and that almost three-quarters of those respondents were experiencing some type of effect from the drug when the homicide occurred. A total of 18 respondents (7% of the total sample) said that the homicide was related to their marijuana use.” Since the study is conducted only on observational level, the farthest we can go is to conclude that there may be a correlation between marijuana and violence.

 (source)

I suggest that there is a lack of good randomized experiments because we cannot assign a group of people to take marijuana and see whether they become more violent– it’s unethical. I think it’s very similar with the smoking case we learnt in class– researchers can just go to hospitals to collect data based on observational studies to see the correlation between lung cancer and smoking, and they can merely conduct experiments on dogs: let them smoke and make observations on their lungs. Here, we can just gather data by interviewing, like the last one I mentioned. I predict that our next step may be performing experiments on animals: let them consume marijuana and observe whether they act more violently. I feel sympathized when talking about experiments on animals– a lot of rats and dogs and other animals have made significant contributions to science.

As skinny statue becomes a fashion trend today, weight losing becomes prevalent. Girls go on diets, or work out in the gyms, even take pills etc. I even thought about going on a diet to put on the skinny skirt. So how effective dieting really is in regard to weight losing?

The definition of diet is “to restrict oneself to small amounts or special kinds of food in order to lose weight.” Dieters are picky about the food they consume. This article puts “cut back on sugars and starches” as the first step of losing weight and a study is conducted to compare the effect of low- fat (calorie restricted and hungry) and low- carbohydrate (eating until fullness) diets on body weight.

As the diagram shows, the low- carbohydrate group lose more weight. This means stay hungry and restrict intaking calorie actually don’t work as well as controlling the amount of carbohydrate in foods while eating until fullness. Dieting can be the right path of losing weight when low- carbohydrate meals are consumed, and eating as few foods as possible does not mean get rid of more body weight.

However, I found another study which has a totally inverse conclusion. People (29.0–44.6 kg/m2) recruited from Boston Medical Center were randomized to a hypocaloric LFHC (n=26) (LFHC: high fat, low carbohydrate) or HFLC (n=29) (HFLC: low fat, high carbohydrate) diet for 12 weeks. “The change in percent body weight, lean and fat mass, blood pressure, flow mediated dilation, hip:waist ratio, hemoglobin A1C, fasting insulin and glucose, and glucose and insulin response to a 2 h oral glucose tolerance test did not differ between diets after 12 weeks.”

I start reexamining the study process and compare the two studies. Though the second study provides more statistic information, it is not perfect — the sample is not large, so the small scale experiment may not be convincing enough. However, I think the second study is more credible because it takes precise measurements and it’s more scientific- rigorously conducted. It also utilizes statistics– “P- value >0.05” to reach the conclusion. As we studied in class, when P- value>0.05, we cannot reject the null hypothesis, so it is due to chance and nothing is happening. Even the case is so, another thing we studied in class reminds me that more studies should be conducted to determine the result, so I continued searching and found that there seemed to be no agreed answer on this topic.

Another well- conducted experiment I found on Google Scholar concludes that “The LCHF diet resulted in significantly greater weight loss than did the HCLF diet (7.8 ± 0.4 and 6.4 ± 0.4 kg, respectively; P = 0.04).” Also, it is randomly controlled trial, and applies statistics and measurements. Plus, the sample size of 93 objects is larger than that in the previous study. This time I feel difficult to determine which one is more credible, but it is still possible to figure out the truth because I agree with the study that “further studies are required to determine the replicability of this finding.”

At this point, I feel what we learnt in class can explain the case reasonably– conclusions from very large, well executed experiments of the best design possible can be wrong and the only way to work that out is to do more studies. Science is more of a process of exploring and discovering things, so we should never stop the steps of progressing.

Almost everybody knows ice cream are bad to us, but I love them as much as you do. Should we just say goodbye to them? The common reasons why ice cream is evil includes they are rich in sweet and fat. Yet I was frightened by another reason that I’ve never heard before– ice cream have tons of bacteria!

The first bacteriological ice cream examinations in Cincinnati were made in 1911, and the result is surprising– a minimum of 200,000 bacteria per cc. and a maximum of 400,000,000 bacteria per cc. The analyzed causes include high bacteria counts in the original cream and milk, unsanitary factories, and careless handling. After improvement of sanitary environment, thirty- nine samples of ice cream are tested in the first week of March, 1914. The bacteria counts are here. So it is proved that when sanitary condition gets better, the number of bacteria falls down to some extent.

Then I am curious about which composed part of ice cream mainly contributes bacteria, and I’m happy to find the article demonstrating 5 studies, basically  separating the ingredients apart from the ice cream to see how much bacteria each ingredient has. The result is that “Sugar and eggs have practically no effect upon the bacterial content of ice cream. Vanilla powder and gelatin as ordinarily used introduce comparatively few bacteria, the great majority being derived from the cream.”

Though the resource is from PubMed, a rather primary academic literature, I think the study is not that perfect. One of the reason is that it is not controlled well, since the two tests were conducted in different seasons, which lead to different temperatures. Thus, the satisfactory result in the second test may partly due to the cold weather on the test day. Since we know as temperature goes up, bacteria has better environment to grow in. I think this is also why refrigerator can help us keep foods from going bad for a longer period of time.

So based on what we know now, it seems ice cream have so many downsides to our health and we’d better kiss good bye to this wonderful sweet dessert. Is this really the case? I continue searching and this article gives us some positive sides. “Ice cream is a dairy product with good potential to act as a food carrier for probiotic bacteria. Since in addition to making a functional healthy food, ice cream in itself contains beneficial substances such as dairy raw materials, vitamins and minerals, and is consumed by the general population. Also, compared with fermented milks as a vehicle, ice cream supports considerably greater viability of probiotic strains during production and especially storage.” Since this should be the first and only article I’ve ever seen that gives compliment to ice cream, I checked its credibility.

  (My screen cast)

It is actually from Google Scholar, so it can be taken into consideration. This article with new perspectives is further backed up by other articles I found. One article explains that “Probiotic ice cream was made by fermenting a standard ice cream mix with Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium bifidum cultures and then freezing the mix in a batch freezer,” and that probiotic ice cream is a suitable vehicle for delivering beneficial microorganisms such as L. acidophilus and B. bifidum to consumers.

Now I’m excited to find that ice cream are not always evil, they can actually bring benefits to us if produced properly. However, I noticed that the probiotic ice cream is a new type of invented ice cream intended to help people become healthier, so further studies should be done to test whether this kind of ice cream really do more good than bad to human. We can test the fat they bring to people and the beneficial microorganisms delivered to weigh the pro and cons, so we can decide the net benefit they carry to consumers before actually launching them into the market.

As we talked about in class, “your intuition is lousy”. Though most of us view ice cream as unhealthy food and cannot find another benefit from them except making us happy, science can make them beneficial microorganisms delivers to us with brilliant methodology. Science is amazing!

As an international student, I am concerned about language learning. Whenever I find my English is not good enough and I should pay more efforts in learning it, I cannot stop wondering how we mastered language so easily as babies? As infants, we did not know anything and could not use one language to learn another, so how did we achieved the unbelievable accomplishment? Before conducting researches, I hypothesize that babies do the task mainly by staying around people who speak the language and gradually learning bit by bit every day.

As the speech code is so hard to crack, especially conducting experiments on infants, experimental studies are not so many. However, I found an author writing about several studies in one article and I want to share some of them which are easier to understand and focus one aspect of babies’ language learning– social learning. I think we cannot entirely fall back on what the author says, because one person’s words and experiments are not convincing enough to prove a point, and more researches from different people can provide higher credibility.

The first study I’m going to analyze shows that social learning plays a dominant part in language learning by conducting a speech experiment: Nine-month-old American infants are separated into four groups, two of them are control groups that are only exposed to English. The third group is exposed to Mandarin Chinese in twelve 25-min live or televised sessions while the last group “leads a Chinese life”– listening to four native speakers of Mandarin during twelve 25-min sessions in which the speakers read books to the infants and talking about toys that they show to the infants. After exposure, all of them were tested on a Mandarin phonetic contrast using the head-turn technique– infants were treated to turn heads when perceiving difference between Mandarin phonetic sounds. The results show “phonetic learning in the live-exposure group, but no learning in the TV- or audio-only group.”

(left part of the image is the first study I include)

I want to share some of my thoughts regarding this study:

1. It did a good job allocating the infants into four groups that contain two experimental groups to contrast the phonetic learning progress between live- exposure and TV- or audio- only, and also two control groups to make comparison.
2. It also tries to control other variables, for instance, the times of the exposure are the same: twelve 25-min sessions.
3. The study has some flaws, for example, it does not demonstrate how many infants are being tested and whether they are selected randomly. So we do not know if the number is large enough and if third variables can be ruled out.
4. The measure of testing babies’ phonetic learning is not persuasive enough. Though the article expresses that researchers train the infants to turn heads when they notice a difference phonetic sounds, babies are too little and may still turn their heads whenever they want to. Thus I do not think the test is convincing enough.

(left part of the image is the second study I include)

Another study I want to talk about is that infants hear a repeating prototype vowel (English or Swedish) while being entertained with toys; they are trained to turn their heads away from the assistant when they hear the prototype vowel change. It turns out that “Infants perceive more variants as identical to the prototype for native-language vowel categories, indicating that linguistic experience increases the perception of similarity among members of a phonetic category.” So from here we can get that linguistic experience helps babies with perception of the language. In other words, as I expected, the more babies are exposed to a language, the more they are going to learn about the language. However I still have to say that the experiment is not perfect. For instance, head turn is such an easy and random motion that babies can do even if they do not recognize a change in the vowel.

Yet it is a breakthrough for this unknown field as I admit it is difficult to design and conduct such experiments on babies. I think we can conclude that social interactions do play a significant role in infants’ language learning, but more flawless experiment are needed to back this point more compellingly.

Check out a cool video from TED talking about more discoveries regarding the topic! And I was excited to find that she mentioned the study I posted here 🙂

We may find learning a second language so difficult: last week a junior told me he was struggling in the Spanish course, and he showed off a little bit to me that English is his first language. I don’t think English is tough, but it’s definitely harder to learn than my first language. Yet, we should realize that we learnt our mother tongue as little babies! When we just arrived in this world and cannot speak, don’t know anything, and lack the basic knowledge of everything that seem stupid to us today. However, we did it. With immense curiosity, which always spark flames of exploration in science, I determine to look up how babies complete such an impossible task and why we do better job learning a language as infants rather than as adults.

A study shows several essential elements in infants’ language learning, and first of all is “the discrimination of the acoustic events that distinguish phonetic units.” Eimas and colleagues showed that “young infants are especially sensitive to acoustic changes, including those of languages they have never heard, whereas adults cannot.” For instance, domain changes /b/ to /p/, and equivalently small differences in the frequency domain change /p/ to /k/. Infants can discriminate these subtle differences from birth, and this ability is essential for the acquisition of language.

Nevertheless, “Infants’ initial universal ability to distinguish between phonetic units must eventually give way to a language-specific pattern of listening. Werker and colleagues investigated when the infant ‘citizens of the world’ become ‘culture-bound’ listeners.” They showed that English-learning infants could easily discriminate Hindi and Salish sounds at 6 months of age, but that “this discrimination declined substantially by 12 months of age. English-learning infants at 12 months have difficulty in distinguishing between sounds that are not used in English. Yet at the same time, the ability of infants to discriminate native-language phonetic units improves.” The difference of capacity for learning mother tongue and a second language initiates here. 

Apart from the ability to distinguish phonetic units, categorization– “perceptually group different sounds that they clearly hear as distinct” is another skill babies must have. Basically, in a natural environment, infants hear sounds that vary on many dimensions (for example, talker, rate and phonetic context). At an early age, infants can categorize speech sounds despite such changes. If they are to imitate speech, this skill is necessary.

In addition, social learning plays a dominant part in language learning. Researchers conducted a speech experiment: “Nine-month-old American infants being exposed to Mandarin Chinese in twelve 25-min live or televised sessions.” After exposure, they were tested on a Mandarin phonetic contrast using the head-turn technique. (infants were treated to turn heads when perceiving difference between Mandarin phonetic sounds.)The results show “phonetic learning in the live-exposure group, but no learning in the TV- or audio-only group.” Below is a picture explaining the experiment.

As the last part, the effects of language learning on the brain are also significant. “Dehaene-Lambertz and colleagues used functional MRI to measure the brain activity evoked by normal speech and speech played backwards in 3-month-old infants.” They found that similar brain regions are active in adults and infants when listening to normal speech but that there are differences between adults’ and infants’ responses to backwards speech. Thus, distinct active brain region is also a reason why adults fall behind babies. 

Actually, there is still no definite conclusion of how exactly infants learn mother tongue and why adults are not as competent as babies regarding language learning. Nonetheless, through more and more hypothesis, data, observations, and experiments, we are more and more close to the core of truth. Science is a path of exploring.

Works cited: http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v5/n11/full/nrn1533.html

I hereby admit honestly: I am a crazy shopper. I love shopping and every time I’m surrounded by dresses, shoes, jewelries, foods…, only one thing pop out of my mind: What are you waiting for? Let’s start shopping! I believe that I’m not alone– girls are with me.

 (source)

However, by announcing “I am a crazy shopper” doesn’t mean my brain doesn’t belong to me any more or is controlled by the sellers totally and buy everything I love without even care or consider about anything . No, definitely it is not this way of crazy. Actually I’m a passionate (crazy) while rational customer. I know what I want before going into the shopping center; I have clear picture of the particular product I’m looking for; I listen to salesperson’s words but I have my own standard to follow; I bargain with the retailer for a reasonable price; I walk in several shops to get a general information of the stuff I want to buy and make comparison among them before deciding which one I’ll buy… All in all, I’m a rather rational customer. (To avoid potential criticism and obey the scientific discipline that nothing is absolutely one way, I supplement that the circumstances above are the majority cases.) One of my friends once gave me high compliment after I took a blouse at 50% of its original price by bargaining, yet herself is in fact not a “clever” shopper. She just wanders with me aimlessly; it’s pretty easy for sellers to talk her into buying something though originally she didn’t want to; she almost doesn’t bargain when shopping… (I start help her after noticing these traits of her.) These distinct contrast between our shopping behaviors make me think: based on my good understanding of her, she is a very peaceful girl– never get angry, seldom disagree with others and always tend to obey other people. So I hypothesize that the compliant shopping behavior may has a correlation with her personality.

Fortunately, some scientists help me substantiate my hypothesis and reach to some further conclusions. The study method is through depth interviews which sought to answer two questions: “What do consumers experience when they go shopping?” and “What do shopping experiences mean to consumers?” The interviews totaled over 30 hours of conversation, resulting in more than 300 pages of single-spaced text. (view study) In summary, researchers reach the conclusion that “Shopping is both an emotive experience and an expressive communicative act. Shopping defines, reflects, and expresses the self, the relationship with others, and the world. The ability or inability to master the power of shopping can contribute positively or negatively to self-worth.” In other words, shopping can reflect and test what type of people ourselves are and how we relate with other people and the surroundings.

(source)

Almost my every blog goes through the similar process as we discussed in class (expect “imaginary data and indirectly- relevant data”): from “anecdotal observations” to “good experiments + good field observations”, thus from “weak inference” to “strong inference”. It’s cool to think that we are actually implementing science frequently by ourselves.

Hope you are a rational shopper and let’s enjoy shopping!

citation come from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296315003537

You may wonder what does my title stand for, or maybe I’m the only one wondering what does ESL stand for when I saw it the first time on the class schedule… Yes, it’s English As a Second Language. As an out- and- out international student who did not graduate from an American high school and come to U.S. the first time, I’m adapting to the environment without Chinese and I hope sooner the lunch guy won’t call me “easy pointer” when ordering food.

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Since language plays such an important part in my life now, I wonder if surrounded by people who speak a different language can promote my language learning. In fact for this concern, I’m able to predict the result through my own experience and it’s not hard to hypothesize that when we cannot communicate with people in other languages expect one specific language, we are forced to utilize it every day. (even if it’s the Vatican language) Plus, with this single language beside ears every moment, even trained parrots can speak a sentence or two after some time. If we utilize scientific method to explain it, it should contain practice makes perfect. It’s time to stop my theory and let’s take a look at how real scientists address the problem.

Researchers conduct a study in which two groups of English- monolingual adults are resided in two different cities: one of them has French exposure while the other hasn’t. The result hits my prediction that the group with French exposure “showed faster learning and better retention for the French voices compared to the other group”. Yet the further conclusion of the study strikes me a little bit– it reveals that “systematic language exposure promotes talker learning, even in the absence of functional phonological knowledge or language comprehension.” This means that even I don’t know how to pronounce English words and have no idea of comprehending English before, exposing myself to an English- speaking environment can still promote my learning. No wonder one of my teachers back in China once told students who sustained performing poorly in English from grade ten to grade twelve, “If I throw you all to America, you’re sure to become fluent in English within no longer three months.” At that time, I only viewed this remark as tease, but now I realize it’s possible because of science.

I can feel myself become smarter due to interaction with science, and in effect, science benefits us a lot through assisting us to get rid of ignorance, to become brighter, to make us achieve better ourselves. This is what science is.

I like smiling and a lot of people who meet me for the first time say that I like your smile, but actually, the only person who knows the truth is I, myself. I smile even constantly when being around with other people, especially if it’s the first occasion, because I’M REALLY SHY. I feel kind of uncomfortable when talking to people I’m not familiar with. My inside world is like a little baby trying her best to not act awkwardly but in fact almost shake with fear, so I can just put on smiles to cover up. But don’t worry, I don’t have autistic disorder. I’m just shy, and these are my true feelings from psychological aspect.

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In fact I don’t want to act like this. I want to talk naturally with others instead of being shy, so I start keeping an eye on myself—paying attention to my own behaviors when contacting with people and every time I perform actions. I ask myself why I’m acting this way. (Conduct an experiment on myself) As time goes on, I realize that I’m zealous in texting; some times I prefer sending emails back home instead of talking straightly with the unfamiliar person; I tend to feel more uncomfortable when talking to boys than girls. (I feel more difficult talking with opposite- sex than with same- sex)

Then I came up with some ideas regarding each action and also did research on these three facets hoping to take a step forward by consulting professional studies. As for my first “symptom”, I’m curious of its reason. I found a research reveals that actually there are multiple motives for shy people to love texting, and the top among them is to increase personal contact. Additionally, decreasing loneliness plays an important role. After dwelling on the result, I think it is believable because it fits my inner feeling.

For my second behavior, I wonder if my shy personality impact the favor of types of communication media. I discovered a study shows that “Extraversion and Neuroticism are significant predictors of media preferences”, so YES– shy people’s traits do influence their communication media preferences: prefer e-mail to face- to- face conversation. However, I do think the research is not perfect because the sample is somewhat small, and I remember that Andrew told us in class: the larger the crowd being tested, the preciser the result going to be. Maybe it will be more compelling to bring in more people to conduct the study.

Regards to my third motion, I noticed an examination of “help-seeking behaviors of shy and not-shy men and women”. As a result, shy group appears to seek help less easily from opposite- sex compared to same- sex. Though this examination narrows down my scale of discussion from “general talk” to “help- seeking”, it can still tell us that there may be a correlation between shy trait and preference of same- sex when speaking to other people. Andrew’s formula jumps out of my head again: correlation ≠ causation, so at this point we can’t say shy personality causes this sex preference during talk.

To tell the truth, the most amazing fact apart from the experiments’ result I realize is that conducting studies to oneself is really a fabulous idea. By doing this, we can not only find out something interesting, also it helps us to know better of ourselves and raise our self- awareness at the same time which is an extremely significant breakthrough.

I’m lying on the couch with an ice cream of my favorite flavor, listening to one of Calvin Harris’s songs which are no longer free because he is in a relationship with Taylor Swift… “Less ice cream!” a strong male voice arises. My father is a physician director and he would repeat this sentence every time I have ice cream. However, like never asking Sheldon why he only sits in his spot, never ask my dad why is it better to have less ice cream. Though doctors’  remarks sometimes make us impatient, they are in fact of great use and will benefit us to a large extent. The points of my dad’s theory are cold foods like ice cream are harmful to our stomach, especially on hot days, and can give rise to diseases. Also, they weaken our capacity to digest foods, especially after meals. You may say, “I know ice cream is bad, because it contains a lot of fat.”(Actually when doing research, I found that our school did a study about ice cream fat.) However, my points here focus on “cold foods” and I’m trying to persuade you to consume less cold foods. (Ice cream serves as an intriguing instance in this case.)

From traditional Chinese medical perspectives, cold foods tend to cause diarrhea, especially to people who have a vulnerable stomach. (Like ulcers, gastritis… ) Sometimes after having icy drinks, we may need to go to the bathroom; that’s because our stomach are provoked by “the cold ones”. Actually our inside body environment always maintains at a range of temperatures that are almost equate with the outside surroundings, so when it is summer, our body is in fact hot inside and when winter comes, we turn cold. In this way, as cold foods meet with our relatively hot bodies, they give our stomachs a huge discomfort, which leads to diarrhea. Want more information? See here~

Now let’s see why cold foods like yummy ice cream weaken our capacity of digestion. First it comes a physics principal: objects will swell under high temperature while constrict under low temperature. So when cold things come into our body, our vessels will contract, which means fewer blood flows for digestion process to complete. Thus, it’s healthy for us to consume less cold foods especially after meals when it’s the high time for our digestive system to function efficiently.

I actually searched hard hoping to find a study or research conducted regarding my points. However, there are no such experiments about cold foods, and they are almost all illustrating how much fat does ice cream has. Maybe I’ll just try to design a condense experiment myself here. Randomly allocating 1000 (as many samples as possible) mice of various ages, sexes, etc, (try to decrease the influence of third variables) to two groups. Serve one of the two groups one course of cold food at scheduled time every day while the other group with same course of warm food at the same time. Control all of their other foods and drinks exactly the same. Track them for a period of time, and keep observing their stomachs and digestive systems. Plus, record their catch of diseases. (Because the study may be bad for people’s health, it’s unethical to conduct experiments on humans. P.S. It’s merely a brief illustration of experiment)

So the takeaways are cold foods do harm to our stomach, particularly on hot days, and can cause diseases. Plus, they prevent us from digestion effectively, particularly after meals.

Are you clear about what’s wrong with cold foods? As it is summer now, the beautiful season for ice cream, and Penn State offers them in dining commons, Berkey Creamery… it becomes quite easy for us to have a lot of these sweet dessert even we are not aware ourselves. However, please take control! Watch out for the amount of your consume! (Actually it’s stated in philosophic thinking that too much of anything is not a good way to go.)

Hi there,

I am Yu Zhang, a Chinese international student.(Chinese name is complicated, so you can call me Alice) I enrolled into this course because of GN requirement, but also because of its fascination to me. I love Andrew telling stories about his or other people’s experience. I love looking into cases to learn concepts which are seemingly complicated. I love topics like “Do fish feel pain” or “Are animals gay”, so long and so forth. I love exploring science in a light mood. I always believe that the key to making great unprecedented progress in a specific area is not knowledge, it should be interests and passion. Though I am actually a science student back in Chinese high school and took the science category of college entrance examination, I don’t want to continue to be a science major, because it is not the cause I am willing to contribute to in the future. I will not be happy studying physics or chemistry every day in a laboratory. (But I do somewhat have crush on maths.) Thus, I choose to devote myself to something that really fascinates me, something that I feel comfortable to deal with, and at the same time, discuss scientific topics with Andrew and so many peers from different places all over the world! It’s fabulous!