Blogging will be slow(er than normal) for the next couple of weeks. On Wednesday I’m off on a long-awaited Grand Tour of Canada, 2010 edition. The official purpose of the trip is the CNS meeting in Montreal, but seeing as I’m from Canada and most of my family is in Toronto and Ottawa, I’ll be tacking on a few days of R&R at either end of the trip, so I’ll be gone for 10 days. By R&R I mean that I’ll be spending most of my time in Toronto at cheap all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants, and most of my time in Ottawa sleeping in till noon in my mom’s basement. So really, I guess my plan for the next two weeks is to turn seventeen again.
While I’m in Ottawa, I’ll also be giving a talk at Carleton University. I’d like to lump this under the “invited talks” section of my vita–you know, just to make myself seem slightly more important (being invited somewhere means people actually want to hear you say stuff!)–but I’m not sure it counts as “invited” if you invite yourself to give a talk somewhere else. Which is basically what happened; I did my undergraduate degree at Carleton, so when I emailed my honors thesis advisor to ask if I could give a talk when I was in town, he probably felt compelled to humor me, much as I know he’d secretly like to say no (sorry John!). At any rate, the talk will be closely based on this paper on the relation between personality and word use among bloggers. Amazingly enough, it turns out you can learn something (but not that much) about people from what they write on their blogs. It’s not the most exciting conclusion in the world, but I think there are some interesting results hidden away in there somewhere. If you happen to come across any of them, let me know.