When I Can’t Go To Sleep Because I’m Thinking Of Things I Need To Do And My Anxiety Is Too Loud,

Being able to read journal articles critically is also such an important skill. I’ve been reading journal articles since late high school, but it’s only been in grad school that I’ve learned how to approach them critically. Fortunately there are a few questions you can ask about any study that will help you decide how much you trust the results even if you know nothing of the field.

What journal was the article published in? Some journals are far more reputable than others. Usually a quick Google search can inform you of if a journal is considered reputable.

Do the authors list any conflicts of interest? Conflicts of interest aren’t an immediate red flag, but if the author has a strong incentive to only publish certain results then I’ll definitely be taking a second or third look at the study.

Who funded the study? If Coca Cola funded a study that says drinking one soda a day is beneficial to your energy levels, I’m not trusting that implicitly.

Is it peer reviewed? Peer review can fail, but this is the quickest test for if a study is good or not.

What are the limitations of the study? This plays into the assumptions the author made. Were the experiments only done on white men (often the first standard in medical research though it’s getting better)?

Similarly do the authors list their limitations? The best articles will have a short section on limitations or a paragraph in the discussion about limitations. I am always slightly wary when no limitations are listed.

What is the sample size in the study? This number will usually be found in methods. The bigger the number, the better. However, there are a lot of standards for what the minimum sample size should be. In small animal research, you’re usually looking at a few dozen mice or rats. In larger animal research, you may be looking at less than ten animals (pigs, horses, cows). In human trials (also known as clinical research), it tends to be dependent on what the study is on. Knee replacements probably 15 people or so. Spinal cord trauma would be more like 5 people. (Social science will also have different minimum sample sizes but I’m not familiar enough to give estimates. In general subjective surveys require a lot of people. More objective testing done by researchers will have less people involved)

How many citations does the study have? This one can be a little more hit or miss. An article published a year or two ago may be great and have no citations. While an article published fifty years ago may have a hundred citations but have incorrect information (in this case it’s usually that methods have improved and new information was discovered instead of poor research quality). Niche topics may also be hardly cited despite being good articles.

There are other questions you can ask like “Can I follow the methods?” “Does the interpretation of their results logically follow from their results?”Etc. but those tend to be harder the less familiar you are with a field. And if you’re reading about a study in a news article like CNN, Apple News, etc. there are different tricks to determining how much you trust them (I tend to look for hyperbole and rhetorical devices. One time I found a news article saying physicists had figured out faster than light travel. They were referencing a theoretical mathematics paper that stated using several assumptions hyperluminal travel is mathematically possible)

What I learn from Science & Technology Studies is that you shouldn't blindly trust science because there's a fair amount of fuckery (mostly unintentional but sometimes not) going on in the background, but you also shouldn't *not* trust science in the way that most people who don't trust science don't trust science.

Anyways, hope that helps!

Be unapologetically you. Sing in your car, dance in the grocery store, jump off the sidewalk. Do the things that make you happy.

Having to pay hundreds of dollars just for the honor of being denied is one of America’s biggest failures.

I was babysitting for my mom’s cousin and there were supposed to be a couple more kids than hers. I was not told I’d be looking after about 9 kids (fortunately 2 of them were old enough to mostly look after themselves) while the adults were outside having free time. I had only ever babysat my two cousins who were enough of a handful so adding five kids to the mix was a lot for me.

Anyway, one of my cousins and her three friends come in to the playroom. They are upset and two girls are crying. I get the story that they were playing with a microphone and there was a little bit of a fight over who got it next. One of them accidentally hit another with it. The other girls are saying it was on purpose. Eventually I am able to get the girl who was hit to calm down and get everyone but the girl who accidentally hit her friend to go downstairs for a bit. The last girl is crying and telling me it was an accident. I immediately tell her I believe her.

And guys, she looked at me like no one had ever said that to her. There are plenty of details from that night I don’t remember but I will never forget her face. I felt like I was the first adult (pseudo adult? I was like 19) to tell her that I believed her.

So don’t automatically assume kids are lying or anything. Or that they are upset for some stupid reason. Even if it is a stupid reason to you, it isn’t to the kid. They have a lot less life experience to pull from and their brains are still growing.

I sat with a crying second grader today. (The age range is outside my wheelhouse but I was the most convenient adult.) He was crying, the other adults said, because his brother took a phone he was playing on. “Phone addicted,” everybody said. “If he would get up and play games with the other kids he wouldn’t be crying.”

He told me everyone lets his brother take things from him because his brother is younger, and doesn’t know better. He told me he doesn’t want to play because he’s tired, he has too many extracurriculars this summer and can’t get good sleep because “everyone in my camper is so loud when I’m trying to sleep.” He’s exhausted and only eight. His mom’s an acquaintance and told me she and the kid’s father are going through a separation — mom and four kids left the house to stay in a camper.

But people will seriously not listen to kids crying over seemingly minor things because on the surface it looks like a tantrum. If kids are given the space to articulate themselves they often will.

Sometimes all you can do is breath

Ed Sheeran and live (bad) country is not a combination I thought I’d hear in my life. And now I wish I hadn’t.

I’m working through Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson and I am crying. The absolute injustice that has occurred in America in the last several decades. I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize the cheating in government had been going on for as long as it has. The lack of fairness in government is alarming. I was definitely the kid who cried when things weren’t fair (I understand equity vs equality, and sorta did when I was a kid). I am appalled and angry that some politicians have spend years changing the rules on everyone and cheating.

But anyway, it’s such an amazing book and I wish it could be school curriculum but it won’t ever be until Republicans aren’t able to mess with school curriculum. It airs way too many of their dirty (not so) secrets.

Ever get so anxious, tired, depressed, stressed and just bad feelings in general that it seems to make you completely numb?

This world has a lot of awful stuff and if someone holding a stuffed animal helps them cope, let them hold a stuffed animal. It doesn’t matter how old they are or what gender they are.

I picked out, ordered, and wrapped this gift. I don’t care how much money you put towards it, my name is first on the from list cause I am first author.