MY Generation Is Not The NY Times Generation.

Three days ago I read this article in the NY Times that cites a university researcher's (aka PhD candidate?) study as definitive proof that Gen-Y, referred to by the Times writer as the "Me-Me-Me My-Space Generation," is indeed self-important and uncaring. Really?

It seems to me a study about the empathy of college students, particularly college students born of helicopter parents, forced into SAT tutoring from the age of 14 and often still calling mom a gajillion times a week on their cell phones is more a study of the values that were practiced in their upbringing than about the awfulness of my peers.

...the authors speculate a millennial mixture of video games, social media, reality TV and hyper-competition have left young people self-involved, shallow and unfettered in their individualism and ambition.

Universities are more competitive and more expensive than ever. It is neither a surprise nor a fault that current students look out for themselves more than the students of years passed- it's what they had to do to get in in the first place, and now it's what it takes to get employed upon graduating. Criticizing Gen-Y students for self-aggrandizing and self-involvement is punishing them for the skill set (self-promotion) they needed to make their application stand out among thousands. And why should you criticize college students for ambition, when old people always seem to criticize college students for being stoned, lazy slobs?

Really, I'm just sick of the trash talk. It's hard enough for people to take new graduates seriously enough to hire them, and this bullshit will only make it worse.

I Do It For Truth.

As always on the hunt for a quick buck, this weekend marks my first foray into being a scientific test subject aka paid guinea pig. Lured by its name dropping of the Magic Eye pictures, which I have loved since elementary school, I responded to this ad on Craigslist.

The participation contract I signed called the experiment a "Pavlovian visual perception experiment," so I was deeply relieved that no electrodes were taped to my head nor were there any bells in the room. Basically over the course of three hours spread over two days, I sat with paper red/green glasses and hit buttons on a small keypad. I had to respond to the computer-rendered 3-d spheres and cubes and not what direction they were spinning by tracking a moving dot across the screen. The kicker was that I was siting only 1 ft. away from a giant film screen in a pitch-black lab with no clock. There were 4 blocks of 120 images to be evaluated, and the testee was in control of the pacing. My first effort took 2 hours- twice as long as the average participant. I was taking a long time between images...my eyes were dry, achey and throbbing. I was actually so bored I was singing to myself to pass the time. (However, when asked if I ever lost focus I said "Not really.") When the woman running the test came in to check on me and told me I had been in there for 2 hours I was stunned. I was completely unaware of time passing. I was surprised to be invited back the next day seeing as I was such an eye sloth. Day 2 was basically day one repeated, but my eyes held up better and I finished the sequence in about an hour.

The PhD running the test eventually told me that it was not about my eyesight at all, but rather about the snap judgements the brain makes about optical illusions. Glad to do my part. May it get her published. Total earned : $60 including the re-imbursed commutes. Not to shabby- I don't normally bill out at $20/hour.

PS- the Magic Eye website is so poorly designed but there is some fun content.



For those of you who are having trouble with the image above- try to unfocus your eyes. And know that the above image is host to a 3-D slice of pizza. See it yet?