Interlude:

I just reread part of my post about job hunting in Tokyo and the problems I had.  God, it's boring.  I can barely follow what I wrote, and I lived through the whole thing.  I don't know why people are reading the post, but the counter keeps on going up.  I think there are probably two or three obsessive people logging into my blog every day. I've invented backstories for them.

I'm so happy and grateful I have this blog. As I was saying, this blog is the only means I have for expressing my own opinion.  For years - decades - I had nothing.  Every time I opened my mouth there would be someone screaming at me (Elin Thordardottir), insulting me (Marc Pell, Ekaterini Klepousniotou), or just plain wrong-footing me (Susan Rvachew).  It was non-stop bullying effort to erase my personality completely, and it worked in the sense that it drove me into a nervous breakdown.  Those stupid bitches hurt my brain as surely as if they had ganged up and together swung a baseball bat - hard as they could - against my frontal lobes.  Talking about it feels like reporting a crime or a rape ten years after the event, when the guilty party has gotten away scot-free, but the victim is left dealing with the fallout. How did this happen?  Why didn't I just flip them the bird, and walk away?  Because I was lied to, that's why.  Elin Thordardottir lied to get me into the programme, with promises that a) I would be allowed to do my beautiful research project b) she was capable of overseeing it. (That woman's a pinhead, an incompetent ----.  She's just a ----ing lazy piece of garbage.  You can't finish a research project if your supervisor won't read it and sign off on it, and that woman can't read, I swear to God).  I said I would finish that project if it killed me, and it nearly did.  Susan Rvachew is a stupid cow who insults her employees and students behind their backs, and was so dumb that she wrote me email telling me to falsify my thesis. After the legit version had already been published on the Internet. THREE YEARS PRIOR. Cause that's how they conduct academic malfeasance at McGill - with a paper trail and a bunch of witnesses. Jesus Christ.  Marc Pell is a statistically-challenged, whiney little bitch with no imagination who does not see the virtue in using naturalistic stimuli to test an automatic response.  I can say this here, and it's the truth. I would honestly rather be doing research - working to develop therapies - but when I was trying to do research there was always some slimebag trying to bully me into lying or spewing out some garbage.  Susan Rvachew, Elin Thordardottir, and Marc Pell all have their little tricks to get the answer they want for their research.  But in my blog, I have freedom. No-one can force me to lie. And because I've been able to express my opinions here, in my blog, I've started to talk more in real life.  I feel I can express an opinion, or disagree with someone without being frightened. I expect to be treated better, and it's working, a bit. So that's why I'm very, very, very grateful for this blog. THANK YOU, BLOG, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

As for Schulich medical school at Western University: it was a 20 000$ a year rich kid's party.  No-one was remotely at risk for failing out for academic reasons, and everyone knew it.  Half-assing your way through written assignments by cutting and pasting off Wikipedia wasn't a problem.  Plagiarizing material wasn't an issue because we were specifically told we didn't have to reference work handed in.  Stories of illegal drug use among students and residents were endemic - these stories were told to us by the faculty, and were winked at.  I never heard of any medical student or resident having the police called on them for illegal drug use.  The focus was on "rehabilitation". You would think that killing patients by accident would be the cardinal sin, but it was presented to us as being inevitable routine. The idea that we would kill people off out of carelessness, ignorance, or arrogance was discussed with us early and often, so we would have plenty of time to get used to the idea. Killing off the patients was considered a necessary part of the learning process.  We needed someone to practice on, after all. Medical students are much more valuable than patients - there will always be another sick person begging for the doctor's help.  It was just a really fucked up atmosphere.  It took Schulich faculty about 2 months to instill a tin God complex in those kids, and most of them were pretty much spoiled, greasy little shits to begin with.  The fact that we were flattered and given candy by the faculty at every opportunity - we were chowing down on candy and cookies during exams, literally - just added to the demented frat-house party atmosphere.

    The fact that I got reemed out for outsmarting that misogynistic lump of pig faeces, Nadeem Hussain of Schulich Medical school, still ticks me off.  I called him "The Lizard" in my other blog.  (I should have used real names there. It makes them searchable). This is the slimebag who rained shit on me for refusing to dumb down a medical explanation for the pretend patient in our interviewing skills class.  In this class, actors play the "patient" roles for the benefit of medical students.  They're someone to practice on.  It wouldn't be a bad idea if it weren't for the naked contempt for the pretend patients shown by Nadeem Hussain and some of the actors.  The pretend patient I ran into trouble with was supposed to be a hospital cleaner.  She was "played" I think by some kind of nurse or hospital staffer.  By Nadeem Hussain's lights, this sort of person with this sort of job was obviously too dumb to deserve a full explanation for the questions I was asking her.  There are PhDs in this country who work as cleaners and dishwashers. What a shitheel that man is.

   Have you ever wondered why your doctor treats you like a mentally deficient 2-year-old?  There's an easy explanation for it: your doctor is a spoiled, sheltered brat who was given acting lessons in medical school in which he was taught to treat you like a moron.  It's not you; it's your doctor.  Furthermore, they're not just treating you like that, they treat everyone like that.  Medical students take classes in which they are taught by doctors like Nadeem Hussain to treat their patients like garbage.  Part of the reason I went to medical school was because I wanted to gain readmission to the human race.  I wanted to know why I had and have been treated like a sack of shit since my nervous breakdown in 2005, particularly by medical professionals.  I wanted to answer the question, once and for all, "What the hell is going on with the shitheels in the Canadian medical profession?"  The answer turned out to be... there's absolutely nothing going on with the shitheels in the Canadian medical profession.  They're just a bunch of shitheels, that's all. There's no there there. 

    Do people actually read this blog?  It seems very strange.  I write my blog to vent.  A lot of it isn't particularly coherent.  The count numbers go up though, which is nice, I guess.  Possibly the social worker at Regional Hospital was right and the people at Schulich Medical school do have to wade through this stuff.  I write it as a reaction against bullies and incompetents like Nadeem Hussain and Elin Thordardottir.  The bad feeling is getting out of my system, however, so the blog should start to be more organized soon.  I miss doing fractals, but I don't have access to the Apophysis software right now.  Unlike medical school, no-one slams you on DeviantArt for getting the fractal right. You don't have to dumb down to flatter someone's ego.  I'm only a mediocre fractal artist, but I enjoy the way DA is set up as a meritocracy.  I have no idea, for example, what someone like Claire Jones does in real life, but there's nothing that I know of that can prevent her from doing epic fractals, or me from enjoying them.

Update: Why the hell are people reading this blog?  There's no way it can make much sense to anyone but me.  The page-view counter goes up, but I suspect there is something wrong with it.

Update: On second thought, it probably doesn't matter who's reading the blog.  The important thing is that I have a place to express myself.  I want to talk about Elin Thordardottir today. Anyone who has ever met Elin Thordardottir will have heard about her laziness and her screaming temper tantrums.  She is capable of "functionary" grunt work, such as data collection, but really isn't up to PhD level analysis.  She has a bad habit, in her papers, of claiming that other authors said things that support her own argument, then citing these authors.  However, when you actually read the papers she cites, you find that she is misrepresenting other researchers.  The trick she uses is called "Wall of Words." In her papers she creates enormously long paragraphs in which she cites about twenty different authors - a "Wall of Words."  There is no way the average reviewer is going to wade through all that, and the reviewer won't go to the material Elin cites, and double-check that Elin is representing other people's material correctly.  It's the "tl;dr" phenomenon (Too Long Didn't Read).  Elin can't actually read English all that well.  (She presents herself as being hyperconfident in her English, and in most things in general, so she fools you the first few times you meet.  She's actually quite nervous. When she begins to feel more comfortable around her subordinates, then she starts with the screaming insults). With regards to the "Wall of Words" technique - I was able to notice she was misrepresenting other authors because, after a year or so working under Elin, I had read just about everything she ever had.  The Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in early when it comes to learning under Elin.  I am not certain whether she is misrepresenting other authors deliberately.  Her misrepresentations are probably due to wishful thinking on her part, plus poor English skills. She talks herself into her lies.  Also, she is simply not a very bright woman.  Fifty percent of the population is capable of getting a PhD.  You don't have to be very intelligent to do that.
     Elin Thordardottir.  She's a waste of oxygen, but since I was talking about her sleazy research practices I might as well finish up.  Susan Rvachew is willing to falsify research to get a publication consistent with her philosophy on speech/language impairment.  When I worked under Elin Thordardottir she had her system set up so that she didn't have to falsify results.  Her hypotheses were largely non-defeasible - by which I mean that they were so broad, that evidence could never show them to be wrong.  We were working with a population of children with language impairment.  I had to write up a research project proposal (which she finally managed to read after 18 months of screaming, yelling, temper tantrum throwing, and general f*cking around while I watched 30 grand of my fellowship money dribble down the drain).  Her argument against my project, when she did manage to read it, was that it might not produce positive results.  My project was defeasible. In her view, this was a problem because (again in her view), only positive results could get published.  She wanted me therefore to create a project with a non-defeasible hypothesis, that was guaranteed to produce positive results. There is a very easy way to do this when you are working with children with language impairment.  Elin did it herself for her PhD thesis.  Get a database of speech samples from children with language impairment, then (tired, going to bed) (a week or so later) then analyze the speech samples for language errors.  
      There are a million ways of analyzing speech samples for language errors.  This sort of research has been done and done and done. Elin Thordardottir did her PhD thesis on argument structure difficulties in children with language impairment.  There had been many papers on argument structure difficulties in children with language impairment prior to Elin's PhD thesis. Elin tweaked the definitions and reran the analyses.  Then she ran way too many F-tests in order to have some results to talk about.  (Statistics isn't really Elin's strong suit.  I once showed her an ANOVA table of results, and she had absolutely no idea what she was looking at).  The point is you can always mess around and find new ways of analyzing speech samples.  You can always tweak the language analysis. You can always run another 40 F-tests.  You can do this until the end of time. You will get positive results eventually, if you look hard enough.  If you look hard enough for failure, and are determined to dig until you find it, you will find it, especially in a population that is singled out for being cognitively fragile.  It's ground that has been mined again and again, and Elin is continuing to scrape the bottom.  It long ago became sleazy and underhand - Elin has a vested interest in setting children up to fail - that's how she makes her money in publications and government grants. Some research along these lines is necessary, and must be done, but there is always a cost to the children who are being "mined". Elin is an expert at milking the system, and is a cynically manipulative animal whose research benefits only herself.

[Interlude within the interlude]: To any doctors out there who think that "I'm busy" is sufficient reason for doing a bad job: drop dead.  No-one else on the face of the planet gets to use that excuse.  If you do a lousy job the first time around, it isn't on you, it's on the patient, who then has to clean up your mess.[/Interlude within the interlude]

I wish I were in the right frame of mind to post some more in this blog, but I'm not. I'm in the middle of a problem that's not going to resolve itself for a while.

Update: Oh, I lie, I love my blog to bits, and I'll post forever and ever.  My ravings here contain more factual and socially relevant information about research in my field than does Elin Thordardottir's entire oeuvre.  I am depressed because I am looking for work and I am running out of cash again.  Employers tell me there are fifty to sixty applications for every position advertised.  I need to stand out somehow, and the only thing I've come up with so far is making the rounds in person, schmoozing the manager, asking what they are looking for, trying some way to supply it, then following up in person with evidence.  Fortunately, the people are as nice as hell in this town - very different from Ontario. Something will come up eventually, but in the meantime, it's a drag.

Update: A woman downtown today asked me for spare change to buy something to eat.  She was in tears, and told me how humiliated she felt to have to ask.  She said she had just asked someone else for money and had been told to go eat out of the garbage.  Uhg.  This is an ugly little town, too, in some ways.  I'm glad I have this blog.

Update: I'd rather be dead than go back inside a Canadian hospital.  I'd much rather be living in Ueno Park.  It was nice and quiet and I felt mostly safe there. Volker Stephan Hocke was the name of the doctor in the closed ward in the Psychiatric Department at Victoria Hospital in London, Ontario. Every night I dream that the Devil kidnaps him, rapes him in public, strips him naked for all to see, then puts him in a cage in the middle of town where passersby can laugh at him and throw shit at him.  I pray that when he goes to hell he is raped every night and is never allowed to sleep because of nurses nearby whispering filth in his ear.  I pray that his brain is peeled off, layer by layer, until he is driven insane, because that is what he does to his patients.  I pray that he forgets he is a human being and comes to believe he is an animal.  I pray that the Devil treats him the way he treats his patients.  I pray his family will someday read this, his children especially, so that they will not be able to lie to themselves about what kind of person he is.

Update: 

For Lessons About Class, a Field Trip Takes Students Home - New York Times, Ron Lieber

www.nytimes.com/2014/05/31/you…

I was interested in this article.  It describes how kindergarten children at an upper class Manhattan prep school are taken on field trips to their classmates' homes as a way to break down social barriers.  Were rich people always this weird? When I was in kindergarten I saw my classmates' houses when I went to birthday parties.  The school did not need to organize it.  

I noted this paragraph in particular:
         'Still, for all of the school’s commitment to diversity, openly acknowledging who lived where and how well was complicated. It became easier for the parents when they realized that the children had no issues with it; at 4 or 5, they’re still a few years away from wielding the word “rich” as a weapon or experiencing deep and lasting class envy. “Four-year-olds have no value judgments about one house being better than another because it’s fancier,” said Sarah Leibowits, who teaches that age group and now leads the visits. “They don’t think that way. That’s what adults think.” '

Notice it is the poorer or middle class kids who are seen as the threat.  They are the ones who are likely to use the word "rich" as a "weapon" - violent! - or being corrupted by the deadly sin of "envy".  The wealthy children apparently do not have any flaws worth correcting. The point of these organized field trips is to protect the rich children - build up resistance against the poor.   It is to ensure the rich children do not suffer a hit to their confidence and self-esteem, I suppose, when someone points out to them that accomplishments they thought they had earned fairly through natural brilliance were actually bought with connections and hard cash.  The author of the article, Ron Lieber, must be independently wealthy with children.  I'd love to point this out in the paper, but they didn't allow comments for the article. Boo.

As for me, my financial position has stabilized to an extent.  I have enough money to support my vices (ballet classes and diet Coke), which is the most that anyone can reasonably ask for.  I'm working on earning more, but it will take a while.  I no longer have any excuse not to finish writing about Elin Thordardottir's terrible research practices.  On to the intellectual nullity known as the "Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis."

Elin Thordardottir once told me not to be too critical of other people's research.  She said that it was very, very hard to do good research.  Having observed Elin closely for several years, I can verify that she indeed found it very, very hard to do good research, to the point where I never actually saw her pull it off.  She was very successful at stopping me from doing good research, though.  Jesus Wept, I was throwing pearls at that pig.  I could never really figure out why Sheri Baum wanted her in the department.  Sheri Baum herself had been hired into the department with the intent of revamping it, redirecting its focus and giving it a better research foundation.  Elin's first language is Icelandic, and she has some knowledge of French and English.  There isn't enough research being done on language development in languages that have a small population base, like Icelandic.  God knows she wasn't hired on because of her research ability.  Her PhD thesis is a crock, like I already said.  She really has difficulty with abstract concepts, and her English and French aren't up to speed.  I think she was hired on with the hope that she might someday produce good research in her native language.  I can verify that she can't do it in English or French.  I doubt that she's any more successful at it in Icelandic.  I suspect a talented Master's or undergraduate student could do a better job in Icelandic at half the price.  Elin is aggressive - very aggressive when she has the upper hand  - meek with her superiors - but oddly literal.  No head for abstraction, or juggling complex ideas.  I've already said that, though.

Anyway, the "Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis." Doesn't that sound important?  Doesn't it sound deep and clever?  You look at the phrase Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis and think, my God, that sounds smart.  You'd have to be a fucking genius to understand the Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis. You'd have to have a Master's degree in organic chemistry and at least a Master's in Neurophysiology to begin to have a clue about the Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis.  Plus an undergraduate degree in Physics.  AT THE VERY MINIMUM.  (The graduate level work in Math and Stats goes without saying.)  Because when you test small children according to the Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis you need three MDs (neurosurgeons) in the room. Oh, and don't forget the anasthesiologist.  Because you'll be drilling electrodes into the child's skull.  And monitoring brain waves. (That's why you need the Physics degree!) It's almost as complex as ERP. (Actually, scratch that.  ERPs studies can be both fun and useful. The Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis is just a crock.  Like Elin's PhD dissertation. But I already said that.)

The Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis is a short way of saying that the child is dumb.  Possibly almost as dumb as Elin Thordardottir. (I'm kidding, of course. No-one's as dumb as Elin Thordardottir.)  It's cynical and contrived bullshit.  Almost as cynical and contrived as Elin Thordardottir's research.  (I'm joking again, of course.  Susan Rvachew's research is cynical and contrived. She has a brain. Elin doesn't have enough brains to come up with original ways of milking the system.  She doesn't have enough intelligence to lie, or falsify research.  She can barely keep up as it is. Her stupidity is honest and pure.)

Let me rephrase: the Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis is a way of saying the child that you selected on the basis of a language learning deficit is dumb all over.  This is how Elin's research goes: 1) Pick a group of children suffering from language learning problems. 2) Give them a language test.  Make sure they fail. 3) If the children pass the test, repeat 2. 4) Blame the children's failure on their limited processing capacity (i.e., the children are dumb.)  5) Apply for $100 000 grant to run the same study in Icelandic (I'm just guessing at that one, frankly. I'm a good guesser, though.) 6) When student raises ethical qualms, scream at student until she shuts up. (Punish student by refusing to mark student's papers.)

Update:  The Atlantic Monthly also thinks that Canadians have a shitty healthcare system: www.theatlantic.com/health/arc…
So, it's not just me!  Or rather, they report on a new international ranking of the health systems of certain developed countries (the usual suspects). The US comes dead last, but Canada is second-to-last, scoring very low on equity, among other factors.  However, I think the take-home message in Canadian medical circles will be "Study confirms Canadian system is better than the US."
              I'm moving to England. I won't talk to the locals there, unless I am partaking of their highly ranked healthcare system.  I will hang out with other immigrants, and eat at Anglo-Greek diners, where the cooks marinate their mushrooms before folding them into delicious omelettes.

Update: Hurray!  Dutch is out on Duolingo!

Update: What is it with middle-aged white men and this library? These men don't talk, they yell.  They talk to themselves, they shout on the phone. They all seem to be trying to draw as much attention to themselves as possible.  Shut up, silly white men, no-one cares about you.  I want to get some work done.  QUIET.

Update: Worked at a computer today next to a white guy who had his music blaring and who shook the desk, he was pounding on the keyboard so hard.  He interrupted his work only to have a loud conversation when his friend stopped by.  I ate lunch on a bench next to a white guy who found it necessary to describe to the world the size of his penis.  (Too small, apparently.)  I'm switching races.
   Or at the very least, I'm moving to a different continent.  I'm so tired of the abuse handed out by local doctors.  Deborah Sheinbaum at the Royal Jubilee, in addition to being one of the ugliest people I have ever met, has got to be one of the nastiest and stupidest.  (Honestly, though, is there any other kind of doctor?). This woman - face like a cunt - probably makes over a hundred grand a year - probably whined all the way through residency about having to survive on forty grand a year - reamed me out for accepting rides to work.  At the time, I had an income of 220$ a month.  Apparently, grown women do not accept rides from their mother to work.  They drive their own car or they take the bus.  I cannot afford to buy a car on 220$ a month.  There is no bus to my work.  It is a 15 mile walk.  Deborah Sheinbaum - the inhuman cunt - was literally screaming at me.   I was taking advantage of my mother, of course. The problem is, FaceLikeACunt got to scream, and I had no right to scream back. It would have meant forced hospitalization.  I wish to God I had been allowed to record that conversation.  I would have stuck it on YouTube.  They do not allow recording devices in the hospital, though.  It is to protect the doctors.  However, they can't stop me from writing about it.

Update:  You know what happens when I tell doctors in BC that I was beaten up in Regional Hospital in London, ON, and that I am still in pain because of it? They go "awwww" at me like I'm cute.  How adorable of me to have been beaten up.  How cute of me to think I have the right to complain about it.  How sweet of me to actually consider it a serious problem. Dr. George Wray of Saanichton, BC, you have been my doctor off-and-on since I was eleven years old, and I expected better from you.  Consider yourself fired, you dumb fuck.

Update: Mandarin has got to be the most amazing language on the planet.  A 92-character poem, "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den," consisting of the same homophone (w four different tones): en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-E…

Update:  My life seems to consist of me generating great idea after great idea, while others scream at me, tell me what a horrible person I am, rip off my great ideas, claim them as their own, then do everything in their power to ensure that I get poorer and poorer, and sicker and sicker.  Sound familiar, Marc Pell?  Anyone else out there?

Update: Having just bitched about plagiarism I should point out that I stole my "seek admission to the human race" line from "Yes, Minister".  But it was so apt!  Besides, everyone knew that. The Marc Pell thing might come as a surprise to a few people, though.  God knows he went to a lot of effort to shred me in public whenever I opened my mouth.  Absolutely vicious.  I was simply not allowed to speak. He just didn't believe in using naturally generated stimuli to test facial expression recognition.  He was determined to hire actors to generate the facial expressions for the test battery.  I had written and published on right hemisphere implicit facial recognition, before I had ever met him, so I knew he was making a mistake.  Marc Pell couldn't have been nastier on the subject.  Kind of like Nadeem Hussain.  I wonder if either of them ever changed their minds?

Update:  Danish and Irish are out on Duolingo!  Irish vs. Dutch was the race of the summer.  The World Cup had nothing on it.  The Dutch team won, and it seems at first glance they did a slightly better job.  The Irish program tests you on material before they introduce it in the lesson.  If that's deliberate, it's annoying.

Update:  Back to school!  Not for me, though.  Not for a lot of people in this town, either.  There's a teacher's strike.  The provincial gov't has been trying to screw over the teachers.  No school for the children. Onto the Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis.  I really resent having to think about this.  Elin Thordardottir spent years forcing me to think about this crap, and I knew all the while it was a waste of time.  I must have tried to explain the term "non-defeasible" to her on at least ten separate occasions.  She would just stare at me and look dumb.  Susan Rvachew was slightly better:  after a few tries I was indeed able to explain to her why the non-falsifiability of the LPCH was a problem.  She still made me write about it, though.  Actually, maybe that's worse.  I really don't want to write about this, it's so stupid, but I suppose if I write it down I can stop thinking about it.  Besides, as long as it's written down, if I need to refer to the subject again, I can just copy and paste.

Judith Johnson, who is a professor at UBC specializing in children with Specific Language Impairment, published an article in 1994 (I think that's the date -- not going to look it up) stating that the problems found in children with SLI -- language and others -- might be due to a general Limited Processing Capacity.  She also added the caveat in the same article that her hypothesis might be too broad, and the idea of Limited Processing Capacity might be too general.  No shit.  This paper was a liscence to print money.  Find a kid with SLI, find something wrong with him or her ... and attribute the problem to a Limited Processing Capacity.  Kid grew up in a French-English bilingual household, has a reduced vocabulary store in both languages as well as fine motor skill problems?  Limited Processing Capacity.  Kid with SLI picks her nose?  Limited Processing Capacity.  It's the ultimate non-answer.  

PhD-quality research shows meaningful interpretation of data, a drawing of inferences, theoretical extrapolation, model building, solution proposal, anticipation of further problems.  Elin Thordardottir can't do any of those things.  She knows how to identify speech problems in a language sample following a rubric, but that's undergraduate-level work.  Like I said, Elin Thordardottir has no head for abstract thought. The Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis lets a lot of people off the hook, though.  Elin Thordardottir's former supervisor, Susan Ellis Weismer, produces the same kind of crap.  One think I found funny about the Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis is that someone actually came up with the idea that there might be trade-offs in various processing capacity domains thoughout childhood development.  This hypothesis was floated in a longitudinal study on various cognitive skills in a group of children.  There was no pattern to the results, which is why the author had to propose the idea of developmentally-linked trade-offs.  Problem with that is, for that idea to work, you need some kind of framework that would account for the trade-offs.  A framework at the neuropsychological, neurochemical, neuroanatomical levels, perhaps.   The author was missing the point of the Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis, though.  The whole point of the Limited Processing Capacity Hypothesis is that it is an entirely vacuous idea that SOUNDS VERY IMPORTANT, requires no intellectual activity, and permits morons like Elin Thordardottir to publish research.  I can't believe that dumb sow had the whip-hand over me for so many years.  I picked her in part as a supervisor because Martha Crago said Elin Thordardottir was nice.  (Martha Crago is actually pretty nice.)  However, Martha Crago did not realize that Elin has mastered the art of kiss above, kick below.  What a twat that woman is.  I'm going to bed.

Finite verb morphology.  Some aspects of finite verb morphology have low information value, such as the third person singular verb inflection "--s" in English.  It just doesn't add much meaning to the utterance. This may be one reason why children with SLI drop some finite verb inflections in English.  Elin Thordardottir made me insert this point in a paper I wrote for her in the early 2000s.  She made me reference her own work.  Larry Leonard had actually made the same point in a paper published in 1994, years prior.  He referenced that important idea in his book entitled "Children with Specific Language Impairment.". Elin Thordardottir must have known about it, because she said shortly after our first meeting that she had read Larry Leonard's book, and she got me to read it too. She did not make me reference Larry Leonard, though, concerning the "information value" idea.  Elin, did you honestly think you were capable of coming up with an intelligent original idea?

I am going to try writing a little each day from now on.  This entry is dragging on far too long, and I have lots to say.  I have essentially the same question for Marc Pell.  I think I took Marc Pell's seminar in 2001.  By that time I had been with Elin Thordardottir for over a year,  and I had become aware that I had made a terrible mistake.  Out of the frying pan, into the fire.  There were a couple people in Linguistics whom I had remained friendly with who had left the McGill Linguistics department and told me they had ended up with saner, more intelligent people.  Elin Thordardottir was not those people.  She had been able to keep a lid on the screaming sociopathy for only about six months.  Still about five and a half months longer than Nadeem Hussain, though.

Marc Pell's seminar was on Pragmatics, with a focus on the Right Hemisphere.  I was really looking forward to the class.  I had started writing on the subject my first year at McGill, and I was still hoping to do some research along those lines despite Katerina Klepousniotou's decree that the Right Hemisphere was entirely hers, and that she would tolerate no interlopers.  I was absolutely looking forward to working with someone other than Elin Thordardottir.  Both Elin and I were unknown qualities at the time in the department.  Elin Thordardottir was a recent hire, and I was her first PhD student.  One year into my tenure at the department, and I had a feeling that Elin Thordardottir was already trashing me behind my back.  I was asking too many awkward questions she couldn't answer.  I was on tenterhooks, and I needed backup.  I was very, very eager to make nice with Marc Pell.  I was especially eager because he was Shari Baum's blue-eyed boy.  Shari Baum had been Marc Pell's PhD supervisor -- done in about three years -- and she had been responsible for hiring him into the department.  Elin Thordardottir was a Shari Baum hire as well.

I'm not sure how to describe Marc Pell's seminar.  It didn't start off as an evident catastrophe.  Instead, the tension built slowly, as in one of the better horror movies.  Henry Cheang was in that class, Katerina Klepousniotou, Diane Pesco, Areej (a snide nullity), and me.  There may have been a couple of other people, maybe Chris and Wendi, but I can't really remember.

We each got a thick book of photocopied researcher papers.  In most graduate seminars I've been in, the professor sets the material - usually a collection of research papers -- that links back the theme of the course.  Each week a sub-topic of the overall theme is explored.  Students have to read through all the papers, but each week one or two students are chosen to present the research papers for that week.  Seminars have to be pretty small for this to work.

This format didn't worry me.  I had taken several graduate seminars with Michel Paradis by that time, and he was acknowledged as being one of the pickiest professors on campus.  I had also taken a couple seminars with Lydia White in Linguistics. Her work was derived from the basic tenants of Chomskian dogma, (which I didn't agree with), but given those tenants (which I didn't agreed with), her research was very clearly argued.  She never seemed to hold my disagreements against me, though.  She had given me a lot of help with an independent research project, and I had found her very easy to work with.  Certainly, she was not the type of person to shout at her students or mistreat them in any way.  Papers were graded promptly.  Problems were addressed directly and were dealt with with minimal fuss.  Michel Paradis also marked papers quickly, didn't fuss, and didn't resent difficult questions, but my relationship with him was different in that I agreed with him for the most part about the principles on which his research rested.