sinéad's lifestream

Loving the B3TA Star Trek image challenge. These are the ones that have made me laugh my ass off – USB Data, Cyberspace the final frontier, Star Trek the Blome Generation and 2 Girls 1 Cup. Hating that the site’s questionable content (the “occasional” badly drawn cock) means that I can’t access it from work.

Loving the work of Maria Schneider (staff writer at the Onion), her web-comic strips over at Pathetic Geek Stories are inspired by user submitted geeky childhood/teen confessionals that she illustrates, quite brilliantly. Setting up a dialogue with the individuals who submit their stories enables her to bring extra realism to each comic, thus making them hard not to identify with. Hating that I’m terrified to submit my own, as I do have some terribly embarrassing (thus humorous!) stories locked deep inside.

Loving Play.com, especially their fast delivery. Admittedly this site could use some work, especially in regards to the structure of it’s categorisation system, I actually use Amazon to browse but Play to purchase. The reason for this is because Play offer such good value for money and complete transparency, meaning that you known exactly how much you’re going to pay for an item before you’ve even added it to your shopping basket (as postage is included in each item price, rather than added on at the end). Being able to view the site in Euro is also a huge benefit, I hate trying to shop online and converting currency as I go along, it’s too messy. Hating Playtrade, half of the items I have tried to purchase from these “Playtraders” have turned out as being out of stock because they don’t update their inventories often enough.

Loving that the IFI is finally showing Grindhouse – the Planet Terror and Death Proof double-feature, including all the fake and fantastic movie trailers in the middle. Hating that it’s a Saturday and Sunday matinée showing only. Walking out into the light of day after these will not be pleasant.

In two weeks time I’m off to Limerick to attend the Congress of Psychology Students – this is an annual event where undergraduate and postgraduate psychology students (and sometimes their supervisors) present the research that they have conducted, usually in the last year or two. At this event two years ago I presented my own research, and plan on doing so once again at next year’s congress.

The congress is a wonderful opportunity to gather information about the current direction of Irish psychological research and based on the information from the timetable for presentations it appears that the majority of the research to be presented is coming from the traditional mainstream topics of scientific psychology. From almost 200 presentations taking place only about 10 of these are related to I.T in some way, which personally is a big disappointment, especially considering the ubiquity of communications technologies in Ireland and the number of I.T companies based here.

Applying psychological studies to technology has always been a niche in this country, which is surprising because it has so many positive and negative impacts upon Irish working life, home life, education etc. It is something that I feel passionately about, especially the importance of applying scientific methods to research in I.T – rather than the current climate of unreliable surveys and the media shaping public knowledge and ideas about how we use and interact with one another through technology.

I did however note an increase in the areas of research related to gay men and lesbians (though it is still a tiny percentage of the 200 presentations). There are of course many other areas of research that I have an interest in and below is a list of the selected presentations which I will aiming to attend.

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