Agent Plus Environment

It’s a matter of balance

Vassar’s varsity athletes may soon receive academic credit for participating in their sports during the school year. This proposal has been in the works for nearly two years, and at long last, folks are voting to approve it. Or to not approve it, but the former seems more likely.

As a member of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee and as a long-time varsity athlete, you might say I have particular stake in the proposal. After all, I could get half a unit a semester for up to four semesters–a typical class is worth one unit, and a typical physical education course of any level is worth half a unit, with a maximum of two physical education units counting toward graduation requirements. It seems justified: Students can receive credit for participating in other extracurricular, faculty-supervised activities, such as the orchestra, the choir, and the repertory dance theatre, so why not varsity athletics?

My friend over at Carolyn Blogs agrees: from the above standpoint, sure, it seems fair to give credit to students. If you get credit for introductory P.E. classes, you should get credit for varsity athletics. But our school newspaper presents other arguments in favor, which Carolyn thinks are highly unjustified:

On top of everything, we must remember that varsity athletics present a considerable time commitment. It is rare to find another activity on campus—academic or extracurricular—that includes a comparable daily rigor and frequent overnight obligation. Varsity athletes regularly travel throughout the northeastern to participate in meets, games and tournaments, often gone from campus for an entire weekend at a time.

And you know what? Although it’s certainly frustrating to travel to Boston for an all-day competition on the same weekend as a good friend’s birthday party, a fascinating-sounding lecture, a dance party, and seventeen other campus events no one in their right mind would ever want to miss, I agree with Carolyn. The reason I participate in my sport is because I enjoy it. If I cared more about other activities, I’d do those instead. Simply being a huge time commitment is not a valid reason for awarding credit. Carolyn’s supporting example, that higher level courses with more difficult and plentiful homework are worth the same amount of credit as introductory 100-level courses, drives this point home. And she’s backed up by our school’s system of awarding units instead of credit hours:

This system—which in its most basic form allots one unit of credit per semester course, regardless of difficulty, hours in class and subject matter­­­­—makes Vassar relatively unique in its credit system.

According to Registrar Dan Giannini, “The rationale behind such a system is to try to send the message that all courses are equal in worth and that one shouldn’t try to distinguish between courses based on time spent in or out of class.”

The reason time commitment is highlighted is because, according to the authors of the article, the faculty “must consider what it can do to mitigate possible academic pressures on these students.” Um. No, I don’t think the faculty has any obligation whatsoever. Students choose to be varsity athletes of their own accord. If they can’t manage to balance their athletics and their coursework, then perhaps they should reconsider participating in a varsity sport in the first place. Athletes shouldn’t get special privileges simply because they’re athletes.

Personally, I like the fact that even though I dedicate huge chunks of time to my sport (more time than I dedicate to any single course, at least while in-season), I can still keep up with my classmates who are taking comparable course loads, minus the sport. Sacrifices must be made, sure: Dance party on Friday night, or overnight travel to a competition?

The question is, what’s more important to me?

You learn stuff, too

The article continues:

While athletes will continue to be held to the College’s rigorous academic standards, the athletics credit could discourage a varsity athlete from unnecessarily taking on five academic credits while in their athletic season.

With the proposed varsity credit, the athlete seeking to assume five courses in his or her athletic season will be checked with an overload form, thus encouraging the student to think twice about assuming such a large academic and extracurricular load.

I’d like to be known that students who have trouble balancing tough course loads and time-consuming extracurriculars have always had the option of taking a lighter load or dropping an extracurricular. Adding the option of a varsity unit to the list doesn’t make much of a difference. Students who aren’t varsity athletes could add an easy P.E. course instead. Students who can balance their work and their sport will continue to do so. And let it be known, varsity athletes don’t have to take a half unit for their sport… thus negating the need for an overload form if taking five courses.

Carolyn says, in response to the above quote, that “participating in sports is optional, and should always take second place to academics.” True, mostly. Academics are officially what college is about. Academics are what get graded. Students’ GPAs will, in part, determine what they are able to do with their lives. But academics are only one particular kind of knowledge. Carolyn’s statement assumes that a student can learn more important things from academics than from participation on a sports team. Personally, though, some of the most important things I’ve learned about persistence, goal-setting, success and excellence, effort, teamwork, leadership…. these I’ve learned from my sport and my coaches. It’s a different kind of knowledge than what one typically gains in an academic course, yes. But it’s no less important. And that, I think, is the best reason for awarding credit for varsity athletics.

Edit: Another article from the Miscellaney News noting some faculty concerns about the proposal.

You deserve a big hug

One of my fencing coaches told me today, “You’re one of the people on the fencing team who deserves a big hug at the end of the season for your hard work.”

I appreciated this comment. I appreciated it far more than I expected. What I appreciated was not the implicit compliment (nice as that is), but that someone had noticed the time, effort, and thought I put into the team and into improving my own fencing.

Back to ambition

If you take a look at my recent rambling on ambition, you’ll find I think it’s up to you to achieve what you want to achieve. You’re the only person you’ll have to blame if you’re not satisfied with how you’ve lived your life, be it a sport that you’d like to excel at, a dream job you want to have, a novel you plan to write. The only person who can get you the places you want to go is you.

I call this drive and determination to do the work needed to do the things I want to do ambition. A friend of mine, though, noted that “ambition” often has negative connotations. It’s associated with evil overlords and corporate weasels. And “work,” that’s associated with external imposition. It’s something to be avoided. This comment made me think: Why do I approach work (and ambition) differently?

Fencing coaches give good advice

The most prominent influencing factor that came to mind was my first fencing coach, George Platt. He was a cheerful, positive man, and he explained the difference between achieving success and achieving excellence to all his fencers.

Success, he said, is how good you are in relation to the rest of the world. Success is job promotions and high salaries and winning medals in competitions. Excellence is how good you are in relation to how good you individually can be. Achieving excellence is being the best you can be, regardless of how good anyone else is. And that should be your goal: being the best you can be. Doing what you enjoy and putting effort into the things that are important to you.

Most of us, we’ll never be The Best at anything. The hard part is not letting failure to achieve success dissuade us from continuing to pursue excellence. It’s easy to be discouraged. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “I work, but no one else does and no one appreciates it, so I’m going to stop.” It’s easy to lose motivation. So in a world increasingly full of lazy slackers, we need to acknowledge the people who do work hard, no matter what results they garner. That acknowledgment may be exactly what they need to keep going.

I don’t understand people who don’t have ambition.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about my summer plans. I’m currently applying for a variety of internships and summer research programs. Another student happened to be listening in, and he said, I don’t want to do anything with my summer.

I can understand the desire for a lazy summer. I find free time (which I inevitably fill with my own projects and activities) just as appealing as the next person. But this guy, he’s a senior in college. What’s he going to do, bum off his parents when he graduates? That’ll look great on his resume:

Coach Potato – Hometown, A State. June 2010 – August 2010.
Sat on couch, wasted time on the internet, smoked pot, watched TV, ate chips, played video games.

But it doesn’t make sense to me for a person who wants to succeed and excel to not work towards that goal. Sure, maybe not everyone has high-flung aspirations. But everyone wants to do something. If you could be paid to be a professional coach potato, then absolutely, spend the summer doing that. But if you want to do research, if you want to be a lawyer, if you want to be a film director or work a high-salary job in the pharmaceutical industry… If you know what kind of experience you’ll need to get that dream job… why aren’t you looking for the opportunities that will let you achieve what you want to achieve?

It’s your life, do what you want

In the end, all that matters is whether you’re satisfied with how you’ve lived your life. Me, I know that the only person I’ll have to blame if I’m not satisfied is me. It doesn’t make sense to not put in time, effort, and thought.

Conclusion: The world is full of stupid, lazy, and boring people. If you don’t fall in one of those categories, I applaud you.

Afraid of losing ourselves

You and me, as conscious beings, we’re special. We don’t just move in the world, acting and reacting–we know we’re here. We have selves (illusory as they may be). We are conscious of our existence. We also know we’re not here forever.

“Every creature has fear,” said Jared. “Even the non-conscious ones.”

“No,” said Boutin. “Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it’s not the same thing. Fear isn’t the desire to avoid pain or death. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential.”

— from The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

You and me, as conscious beings, we’re special. We can be afraid.

Unresolved

I’m not one to make New Year’s resolutions.

I mean, sure, I could take my pick of popular New Year’s resolutions; I could decide, on the first day of the new year, that this year, I’ll start exercising more and eating better, or that I’ll spend more time with my family and friends, or that I’ll learn a new skill. And if I chose to make resolutions, I’d be far from alone–a 2008 survey on Dorthy.com found that 66% of the 2000+ adults polled had made resolutions at some point (though only 17% managed to keep them).

Making resolutions: It’s about self-control

The question Anirban Mukhopadhyay of the Hong Kong University and Gita Venkatarmani Johar of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University asked is this: What determines how many goals a person will set, and how successful a person will be at achieving those goals? They performed a few studies in 2005 to look at the relationship between self-control, goal setting, and goal achievement. They suggested that what you believe about self-control affects the goals you set and achieve [PDF].

In the paper, “self-control” is used to mean a sense of willpower. Mukhopadhyay & Venkatarmani discuss various lay theories of self-control, noting that the amount of self-control a person has can be seen as either an inherently limited or unlimited resource, and that this resource can be seen either as malleable or as fixed (the amount of self-control a person has can change over time, or not). An important premise to note here is the idea that the probability of choosing a goal or making a resolution increases if a person thinks that goal can be attained. So if you think you’ll be able to achieve a goal, you’re more likely to set it. Combine this with theories of self-control, and in general, if you believe you have unlimited stores of self-control, you’ll set a larger number of goals. If you believe self-control is malleable but limited, you’ll set fewer goals.

Mukhopadhyay & Venkatarmani also discuss self-efficacy: belief in one’s capabilities, the perceived ability to carry out a desired action. They propose that people with high self-efficacy–people who believe that failure is the result of insufficient effort, and thus exhibit increased commitment and persistence–will achieve more of their goals than people with low self-efficacy, who tend to view failure as the result of deficient ability, and thus may simply give up.

The studies

In the first study, 85 participants (all college students) each read one of four passages presenting lay theories of self-control. Each passage contained two paragraphs; the first discussed self-control either as limited or as unlimited, and the second discussed self-control as either malleable or fixed. The participants then answered questions about their belief in each of two theories presented, followed by a second questionnaire to assess motivation, in which they listed all their current goals.

The study was testing whether a belief in unlimited, malleable self-control would result in most resolutions, and indeed, this is what was found. The experimenters had some concerns about participants’ natural beliefs in relation to the passages they read, however, so in study two, the order of the two measures (lay theories and motivation/goal listing) was varied. Data from 130 new participants revealed that, as hypothesized, if the motivation & goals questionnaire were assessed first, then among the people who believed self-control is malleable, those who also believed self-control to be unlimited (vs. limited) set more goals. When lay theories were assessed first, this result reversed. The people who believed that self-control is fixed were unaffected by order.

The third study moved on to examine goal achievement, adding a measure to look at self-efficacy. The study had two sessions, in November then February. In the first session , the 159 participants read passages about lay theories (much like in study one, but with longer passages to strengthen the manipulation), listed the resolutions they were planning on making at New Years, rated how disappointed they would be if they failed to keep their resolutions, and filled out individual difference measures (which included a self-efficacy scale). Only 86 participants successfully returned for the second session, during which they indicated how much success they had had at keeping their resolutions.

What does this mean for your resolutions?

The resolutions made by participants across all conditions were qualitatively similar (take a look at any list of popular New Year’s resolutions, and you’ll see the majority of the goals). As shown in the first two studies, more goals were set by people who believe self-control is unlimited and malleable than by any other people–that is, if you expect more success, you may increase the difficulty and number of tasks that you set for yourself. Self-efficacy did not have a significant effect on goal-setting.

As far as success goes, only the interaction between lay theory and self-efficacy was significant. If participants believed in limited self-control and were low in self-efficacy, they tended to give up more often, failing to achieve their goals. But if participants believed in unlimited self-control, self-efficacy had no effect; participants achieved just as many goals regardless, and people who set more resolutions were marginally more likely to succeed.

Mukhopadhyay & Venkatarmani realize that their research does not directly look at the relationship between lay theories of self-control and beliefs about one’s own amount of self-control and self-efficacy, and propose this as an area for future study. But in general, lay theories about self-control can determine how much success you’ll expect (and thus, how many goals you’ll set), and self-efficacy beliefs can determine how much success you’ll actually have.

References
Mukhopadhyay, A. & Johar, G.V. (2005). Where There Is a Will, Is There a Way? Effects of Lay Theories of Self-Control on Setting and Keeping Resolutions. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 779-786 [PDF]

Scene: One of the last episodes of Series 2 of the new Doctor Who (the 10th Doctor)

Characters:

• Rose Tyler, companion of the Doctor as he travels through time and space
• Jackie Tyler, Rose’s mother

Conversation:

Jackie: Do you think you’ll ever settle down?
Rose: The Doctor never will so I can’t. I’ll just keep on traveling.
Jackie: And you’ll keep on changing. And in forty years time, fifty, there’ll be this woman, this strange woman, walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. She’s not Rose Tyler. Not any more. She’s not even human.

Except that’s not how it works. If Rose changes, she won’t be the same Rose her mother remembers (and perhaps this is what her mother is referring to). If Rose changes, she’s still Rose. She’s just progressing, changing, adapting, learning, growing, pick your favorite synonym, it’s what everyone does as they progress through life. Are you the same person you were ten years ago?

I thought not.

The longest Monday of my life

I recently returned to the US from Australia. The 14-hour flight took me from Monday morning in Sydney to Monday morning, again, in L.A. Crossing the date line messed up my sense of time enough without the added bonus of thinking I should be heading to bed just as the sun began to climb into the California sky.

You may be familiar with the concept: Jet lag. The catch-all name for circadian misalignment, the disruption of sleep cycles and circadian rhythms. If you’ve had the pleasure of crossing time zones in a jet plane, whether it was a mere three-hour hop from one coast of the US to the other or a trip to another continent, chances are, you’ve experienced some amount of jet lag.

The pathophysiology of jet lag

Normally, two systems–the homeostatic system and the circadian system–work together to produce a 24-hour sleep cycle. During the day, the homeostatic system slowly accumulates a ’sleep drive,’ a desire to sleep that increases as a function of time spent awake. The circadian system generates an alerting signal in opposition to this sleep drive, which, during the day, keeps a person from feeling increasingly sleepy. An hour or two before bedtime, this signal subsides, and s/he realizes it’s time to hit the pillow. The sleep drive dissipates as a person sleeps and by morning (assuming a full night’s rest and possibly some coffee), s/he will be feeling alert and ready to go again.

Robert Sack wrote a delightful paper [PDF] on jet lag, by the way, which is where I’m getting much of my information.

So we’ve got a nice cycle of sleep. Jet lag is what happens when the homeostatic and circadian processes are misaligned. For example, the circadian system may signal a person to be alert when it’s not actually morning, or may be reduced during daytime hours, causing daytime sleepiness because the homeostatic sleep drive is no longer canceled out.

But I don’t want to be sleepy!

How do you beat jet lag? Robert Sack lists three primary approaches:

1. Reset the body clock
2. Prescribed sleep scheduling
3. Medication to counteract daytime sleepiness or insomnia

Let’s start with the first one, as it turns out to be the most complicated.

Resetting the body clock

The two most effective ways to reset the body clock are 1) through bright light exposure, and 2) timed melatonin administration. (But see below; fasting can also reset the body clock.)

Light is one of the most important cues about time of day and has the greatest effect on circadian timing (much smaller effects are seen from regular activities and meals, for example). Studies have shown that without light cues, totally blind people tend to have free-running circadian rhythms with an average period of 24.5 hours, instead of the usual 24. If a person is exposed to bright light early in the day, the person’s internal clock is reset to an earlier time; if exposure is instead in the evening, the internal clock is reset to a later time. Brighter light has more of an effect (such as the sun, at 3000 to 10,000 lux), though lower intensities (e.g., 100-550 lux) can produce changes.

Artificial light sources can be used to supplement daylight, to help reset a person’s internal clock to the correct new time zone when traveling. Alternatively, a person could wear very dark glasses, as light avoidance could help minimize the problems of light exposure at the wrong time of day or night.

Resetting the body clock, Part 2: Melatonin

Melatonin is a hormone that has been linked to the regulation of circadian rhythms and sleep cycles [PDF]. Melatonin is secreted by the pineal gland at night; secretion is suppressed by light exposure, and as such, the hormone can be thought of as a “darkness signal.” If doses of melatonin are administered in the morning, circadian rhythms will be shifted later; evening doses shift rhythms earlier. Timing of the doses is more important than amount per dose, though it remains to be seen what the optimal dose and optimal time of administration is–trials have been done with doses from 0.5 to 10mg, at times ranging from three days before departure to five days after arrival in the new time zone.

If doses of melatonin are combined with light exposure, the results are what you might expect: synergistic if both are administered to produce a time shift in the same direction (both earlier or both later); antagonistic otherwise.

Sleep, wake, sleep, wake

The second way to beat jet lag: Sleep at weird times. Slowly adjust your sleep schedule to match that of your destination, or keep your home sleep schedule for a while after you arrive. The problem with this is that your sleep-wake schedule won’t match up with that of the people around you, and if you need to be awake for breakfast at 7am or for a meeting in the afternoon, your sleep schedule may interfere. Use this method at your own risk.

Drugs for everything

Lastly, we have sleep medicines. As you might guess, hypnotic medications combat insomnia and stimulants fight off daytime sleepiness pretty well, because by definition, that’s what they do. Both benzodiazepine and non-benzodiazepine drugs have been shown to be effective in the first case; for the latter, the most common solution is to consume more coffee [PDF]. This works! In the study linked, subjects were treated with slow-release caffeine or with melatonin prior to a long eastward flight; the caffeine subjects were less sleepy than either melatonin or placebo. Granted, caffeine subjects also took longer to fall asleep later and awoke more frequently, but that may be a risk you have to take.

Lagging behind

Light, melatonin, drugs, strange sleep schedules. Of course, the only solution that will always work is time. The homeostatic and circadian processes need to realign, and while the aforementioned ways of beating jet lag can fast track the process, it still takes time.

UPDATE: I was alerted by a friend of the existence of further research of which I was unaware: Another way to reset your sleep-wake cycle is to stop eating. If you fast for about 12 to 16 hours, your body clock will reset, with whatever time you break your fast as morning. The Fuller, Lu, & Saper paper [PDF], published in Science, discusses the mechanism, though a more recent paper argues that the Fuller et al. results are inconclusive.