So summer school started today. I bought the remainder of my textbooks... my Nutrition textbook is enormous. I think it's the biggest book I've ever held. It's bigger than my GRE book, which is saying something. Definitely not normal textbook size and I'm rather glad it's an online class so I don't have to drag that monster around campus with me.

Nutrition has stuff due on Fridays and History has stuff due on Mondays. It should be relatively good if I stick to schedule. Both classes require two textbook chapters a week and then some other stuff. So I figure one chapter a day should be good and then the remaining days for either Ren Fest partying or the other stuff I have to do. Like create study guides and do the projects I have to do. I have to read The Jungle and write a short paper on it by the 1st and I have document analysis for History and I have a nutrition project for my nutrition class... I know, never would have guessed. We get to analyze our diet. Mine should be interesting. Today I ate: a vitamin, a lunchable, a cup of juice, and lasagna I "cooked" (read: heated up) in the oven. Worst diet ever I'm sure. But hey... juice! Vitamin!

In addition, we have discussion board stuff for the class. In order to win at that, we have to cite two sources. I don't know if the teacher means outside sources or referencing the textbook. So, like a lot of people would do in accordance with what Social Psychology has said, I'm waiting to see what other people do first.

But I thought I'd check out the questions and see what's what. I think I'll probably answer this one:

"You hear that pomegranite juice is good for you and can prevent cancer.  Where would you look (be specific) to determine if this was valid information?"

Hahaha. I just took a whole class on research methods. I could totally cite that textbook and I could probably answer this question without referring to any notes. Is this a correlational study? Were the groups randomly assigned? Was it double-blind? Was there a control/placebo group? Were extranneous variables controlled for? Is it representative of the population as a whole? Were there enough participants? Was it a peer-reviewed study in a prestigious journal or some media thing that probably misinterpreted stuff? Who paid for the study? There could be biases there.

And, honestly, how can you tell if it prevents cancer if you don't know who might come down with cancer? HMM? I don't know that much about cancer but I'm fairly certain you can't predict with 100% accuracy that someone is going to get cancer... so... saying something can prevent cancer... I'm skeptical. Lower chances, perhaps, but not prevent. I'm hoping the next chapter has more information about pomegranite juice and/or cancer... the nutrition stuff... but in any case I think I have the science covered and maybe that'll be enough.

There was another one about why we eat the foods that we do and, being all armed with Psychological knowledge, I could talk about Bandura's Social Learning Theory so there's always that too.

I love how I can apply psychology to non-psychology stuff. You know, I never though I was going to be a scientist, but here I am thinking about t-tests and ANOVAs and research studies.