Viva the La Resistance!

Welcome to Oppression City, a happy, fun-filled, sunshiny place =)

At least, that's how it was before THE REVOLUTION.

Now the only sounds are the hope-crushing thuds of propellable objects hitting the ground.
Occasionally, some brave soul will try to have fun, but they are quickly caught and arrested by the Ministry of Not-Juggling police, who paradoxically use juggling to strike fear into the hearts of the populace.
Every day, the people of Oppression City come to the telescreen to yell epithets and curses at the Jugglemaster.

The police notice a certain Mr. Daniel Wright is not adequately expressing his hate. He is instructed to report to the Ministry at 4 AM.

Terrified she'll never see him again, Daniel's girlfriend Emma gives him a locket as a token of her affection.

The next morning at the Ministry, Daniel takes the "Why Juggling Ruins Everything" tour.



He is accepted into the citizen "Snoop Squad," a job he thoroughly enjoys until he comes across someone familiar:

Right after Emma's arrest, Daniel encounters a mysterious figure who quickly whips him back into shape.

"Zat French guy" brings Daniel to join the La Resistance, a small but visionary group dedicated to overthrowing the Ministry's dictatorship.



Filled with anger at Emma's arrest and his own brainwashing, Daniel leads a night protest:





The Ministry catches on, however, and raids a La Resistance rally. Fortunately, all the leaders except Daniel escape, but look who's leading the raid...
The locket? It was really a homing device.

Trying to make him reveal the whereabouts of the rest of the La Resistance, Emma introduces Daniel to the Ministry's most elite force: the J-team!



Despite training in a 100G chamber, however, they are ill-equipped to handle the ingenuity of the people, who have begun to hope again...



The rest of the La Resistance decides to boldly rescue Daniel, leading to a pitched battle that will determine the fate of Oppression City:



Hey you. Yeah, I mean you. Don't just let the Ministry take over our lives! Join the La Resistance!

Puberty and...Dean Salovey?

Bulldog Days 2007 was an crazy three days, jam-packed with activities from visiting 9:00 classes (if prefrosh chose to do so) to late-night festivities organized by various campus groups, or perhaps just staying up talking with friends and current students. With everything going on at once, it was impossible to see/listen to everything, but I hope everyone had a good time!

My Bulldog Days began with a Phoenix performance at Mosaic - unfortunately I don't have any photos of myself balancing three bowls on my head - but two of my favorite events came Tuesday night. For those of you who were elsewhere at 7 PM and 9 PM, a sampling of photos and videos from the Davenport Pops "Puberty Concert" and the Purple Crayon's "Dean Salovey" show. For those of you who were fortunate enough to be present at either or both of these, enjoy the good memories =D

Puberty Concert - Woolsey Hall 7 PM

DPops is undoubtedly one of my favorite orchestras...it was founded in 2005 (one of the founders is featured in a video below) and is completely run by students with a wide range of talents and interests. Even the conductors, who also do most of the musical arrangements, are students, so it's an awesome opportunity for anyone looking to expand their musical repertoire and skills.

"Toddler Medley"

The Spizzwinks(?) performing various childhood themes


Duel of Fates - Justin vs. the Common App

Many more videos...

Dean Salovey show - Davenport dining hall 9 PM

Where else would the dean be willing to come make fun of himself in an improv comedy show? Only at a school where the president shows up at the Freshman Holiday Dinner as Santa Claus...

He's right! Maybe he is the dean...

I know a dean when I see one!

Doc, things just haven't been the same since the incident

The blue phone put me on hold...

Honey, we just moved to Australia and you killed a kangaroo!

You're going to have to throw me, elf!


Aaaaaand...scene!

All in a weekend's work =)

After spending 4 hours a day in the Off-Broadway Theater (plus hanging lights, setting cues, and checking the sound system), all our hard work paid off in a spectacular fashion Friday at the opening night of the Phoenix spring show. Despite the date of ill omen, there were only a few mishaps: no dropped fans, crashing umbrellas, or tangled ribbons. So many things came together last minute - the seniors learning a metal fan dance in 72 hours, frantically safety-pinning Daizu skirts that somehow ripped at the seams - but it all worked out in the end. A couple clips from "Moonlit River" (my watersleeves solo) and "Summer Day" (the umbrella dance I choreographed) are below:

Curtain call was bittersweet, as it marked our seniors' last show...

Shani, Margaret, Alyce, and Zimo

...but at the same time it was a huge relief that we had successfully completed a show. The other really nice thing was to see that we had so much support from our friends: I was surprised by a bouquet from the seniors (how did they sneak it in and hide it backstage?!) then surprised again by a huge bunch of baby roses from Atisha and Regina . That's currently sitting in a container in the sink because I don't have a big enough vase =P

Group photo!

Since I was in the show, I obviously didn't get to take too many photos/videos, but I promise links to those will go up as soon as we get them on the web =)

Even as we cleared out of OBT, some of us had to change back into costume, check our makeup, and run over to SSS for Kaleidoscope, the International Students Organization annual cultural show. We performed the Mongolian bowl dance (one of the few pieces that can fit on the tiny stage in SSS) and stuck around to watch a few other acts, like the Yale bhangra team Jashan:



Saturday we had a show at 2 PM, which might seem a little weird, but it gave us time to clean up and still make it to Marga-RELAY-ville, aka Relay For Life 2007. The steering committee did an amazing job, organizing hundreds of volunteers on dozens of teams into one crazy 18-hour event. Campsites covered the floor of the gym as those who were waiting to walk listened to a couple bands and watched The Incredibles - there were even giant balloon sculptures hanging from the ceiling:


I stopped by to visit the Silliman '09 team, but I couldn't stay for long because I had to catch an early train to NYC with the rest of my "Medicine, Molecules and the Millennium" class. Professor Modlin was giving a lecture to a patient-interest group at Mount Sinai Hospital on carcinoids, a rare and difficult-to-diagnose class of endocrine tumors often found in the abdomen. In classic style, he was rather amused by his photo on the poster:


Besides attending the lecture and doctors' panel, we got a short tour of the hospital, which really has a long and fascinating history. For example, it was one of the first places to offer dialysis for patients with kidney failure and the place where Crohn's disease and several other disorders were first characterized. The day ended with quite the adventure - trying to get home through a nor'easter! Our MetroNorth train was stopped after 125th Street because of flooded tracks, but we all got back to school safely in the end.

Craziness coming up this week: Bulldog Days Mon-Weds, the YAGS show Revolution Thurs-Sat, Communiversity Day and CASPY this Saturday, then another trip to NYC Sunday...I finally get to see Avenue Q! Yay for Silliman =D

SRCD = something really cool, duh =P

How often does an undergraduate get to attend an academic conference? How often is the student just a sophomore? How often does that sophomore get to present at the conference?!

I don't know about overall statistics, but at the end of March I headed up to Boston with several other Caplabbers for the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting, a huge 4-day psychology conference. The trip started around 5:30 AM Thursday morning, when Laurie picked up Maya, Brian, Drew, and myself for the drive up to Boston. We paused to pick up coffee and some snacks, then continued on to catch Derek's talk abou the overimitation project at a Harvard-organized mini-conference they called "NSRCD" for "Nearly SRCD." His presentation was definitely the most polished of the group, and who could resist Felix (on the screen)?

Derek talking about Project Felix

After NSRCD finished, a bunch of us went to grab lunch and I got to meet some of the Caplab alums. Adena's now a first year grad student at Harvard, Mariko's at Johns Hopkins, Neha's a lab manager at the University of Maryland but she's coming back to Yale next year as a grad student, and so on. They were happy to see us too and hear all the lab news, like the babies Jaws and (Admiral) Hargreaves =P Then it was on to SRCD!

I spent Thursday afternoon tending various paper symposia: 3-4 people give 20-minute presentations with time for questions, then a "discussant" usually comes up to summarize everything and bring up a few more interesting questions. Laurie gave two talks on false beliefs in rhesus macaques and how they reason about essences without language (e.g. what makes an apple an apple?), both of which I've partially seen before but were still cool. I also got to hear Deena (another grad student in Professor Keil's lab) give a presentation on how preschool children reason about fictional worlds, e.g. does Batman think Cinderella is real?

The rest of SRCD passed in a similar fashion, attending symposia and viewing others' posters with various social events in the evenings. Finally, it was Sunday morning...after going to see Venkat (former Caplab manager, now a first-year grad student) talk about the Endowment Effect project, it was time for my poster session!

At first, it felt a bit intimidating to stand there with graduate students and professors browsing through the rows, reading abstracts and asking questions, but I soon developed a 2-minute walkthrough presentation, going through the basic ideas of each experiment and explaining the results. One of the coolest parts was starting to put faces to the names I had read so much about, like Josep Call (a co-author of Primate Cognition) and Malinda Carpenter. It was also nice to meet so many people from around the world: Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia to name a few.

My poster on the board...it's six feet long!

If any of you are really, really interested in seeing the poster, here's the PDF file (requires Adobe Reader):
Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella) use an Experimenter's Unfulfilled Intention to Locate Hidden Food

After that, the conference ended and it was time to drive back down to New Haven...I left physically and mentally tired from doing and learning so much over the past few days, but it was a really great opportunity to present my work for peer critique, getting a firsthand glimpse of another aspect of academic life. Many, many thanks to Laurie, Derek, and the Perspectives on Science program for helping me get involved in research so early and giving me plenty of guidance along the way =D