kent lee's blog & ramble

Burnout is a common problem for us graduate students. I was really burned out after quals, but fortunately I rebounded better after prelims, only taking a few weeks to get back to work. After quals I couldn't understand why I couldn't do anything, why my brain was just jello. Then I found out what was wrong from reading Ph.D. comics: post-quals syndrome. While the strip said this was incurable, I found that my prelim / post-prelim syndrome cured my post-quals syndrome - kind of like curing bronchitis by contracting pneumonia. Well, while there's no sure-fire way of recuperating from burn-out, the following is what I advise my friends to do, in addition to a long vacation: 1. mindless, relaxing activities 2. spiritual meditation & reading good Christian books 3. doing something intellectually engaging but unrelated to your research or studies. 4. thinking / dreaming about life after grad school, even sort of looking at jobs and such For #1, it can be pretty mindless like...

I was thinking of setting up a little website to promote Dalek Sec for president (from Dr Who), or maybe a MySpace page. But unfortunately, he was killed off in a recent Dr Who episode ("Evolution of the Daleks"), as the other Daleks didn't appreciate his progressive ideas about genetically mixing Daleks and humans. Otherwise, he would have been an interesting presidential candidate... "What would you do about Al Qaeda and Bin Laden?" "I will exterminate them." "Just like that - just exterminate them, like it's that easy?" "I shall exterminate." "What would your policy be toward companies whose factories or products that still contribute to global warming?" "They must be exterminated." "How would you handle the president of Iran?" "I will exterminate him." "How would you deal with members of Congress who oppose you on foreign policy?" "They will be exterminated." ...

The essence of what I do and how I spend my life: I like linguistics & psychology, which I pursue empirically as a an experimental psycholinguist. I grew tired of armchair linguistics research, and found an area that meets my need for a real-world reference point to the otherwise very abstract study of language. I love theology, which I approach from multiple angles. The most helpful thing I've learned: Ponder God, don't try to reduce him to some sort of religious rationalism (as many evangelicals and skeptics sadly do). Rather, ponder him, and stand before him in total awe, wonder, and fear. We cannot begin to understand him or wrap our minds around him. But we can know him to the extent that he has revealed himself to us thru Christ, the Holy Spirit, and his word.

Here's a cute limerick about a form of hyper-Calvinism called supralapsarianism [from Latin: "above the fall" (i.e., Adam's fall)]; this is apparently by a Presbyterian minister, Harry Lars Norlander . Franciscus Gomarus Was a superlapsarius He actually gave Adam an excuse, Saying God had decreed, Fore-ordained Adam's deed. God had pre-cooked Adam's goose.

I just got awarded a grant that will cover my research expenses for my dissertation! Praise God! Lauda Deum! Gott sei hoch geehrt und gepreist! 讚美主!

Another example of pop psychology is in the area of self-esteem, and equally disheartening, religious over-reaction against the concept of self-esteem among fundamentalists. Many self-help books and pop psychology pundits talk about self-esteem without a proper understanding of it, and thus oversimplify and misapply it. First, self-esteem is a legitimate concept, and an important domain in social psychology research. There's been a good deal of interesting research in psychology over the years. However, self-esteem is not just one simple thing, that people need more of. There are different types of self-esteem, or different dimensions to self-esteeem. These dimensions can include one's self-knowledge and self-understanding, one's appraisal of one's abilities and general self-evaluation, one's feeling of control, in addition to evaluation of self, others, and social relationships. Often these things are fluid, and can actually vary depending on the context - specific...

In my websites I describe myself as a psycholinguist, so you may wonder what that means. Well, I study the processing of language in the brain, including how linguistic information is represented in the mind, cognitive processes behind language, and the psychology of reading. My dissertation project deals with Chinese character reading - how people make use of the linguistic information in characters in the process of reading. When you read a word in English (or other alphabetic languages), you translate the letters into sounds, and from the sounds you access the word in your mental lexicon, where words are stored in your brain. But at the same time you also are looking up words directly based on the spelling. Depending on how regular the spelling is and how frequent the word is, one of those routes - the phonological or orthographic - will end up retrieving the word from the mental lexicon. That's the standard dual route model of reading in psychology. But what about Chinese? That...