Today I went to UBC for a two-hour "crisis study" in the department of psychology, where I played the leader of a group of workers at an emergency operations centre during a severe weather event. Four of us had to decide and communicate what to do in response to various crises for an hour, from flooding and evacuations to a roof collapse. Not sure how we would have fared in real life, but I'm glad I am not an emergency response person. Got paid $20 for my time.

Ran into a fellow editor (talk about biased sample!) at a psychology study where we watched videos of people meeting for the first time and rated them based on our first impressions. Oh, the fremdscham was strong. They're trying to see if we rate people's personalities more accurately when they're attractive to us or if we feel as though we relate well with them. I got $10 for that.

The next day I did a linguistics study, listening to three minutes of a woman uttering various syllables from a fictional language. Then they played pairs of "words," and I had to decide which of the two was a member of said language. I was highly sleep deprived at a time and am probably an outlier. I wasn't at all confident in my choices, and the longer it went on, the more unsure I got. Sorry, grad students. That one also paid $10.

I've also completed the second half of the moving study I did about a year ago. For four consecutive days I wore an activity monitor and recorded every trip I took in a trip diary. They didn't seem to mind that Monday was a holiday (during which I left the house once). My parents are away now, too, which means I've had to commute lil' dude back from school as well. So my travel was not typical. Whatever. I hope I've given them enough to analyze. I just sent back the package today and will receive a $25 gift card to Shopper's Drug Mart when they get everything.

I participated in two linguistics studies in as many days, both at UBC's Speech in Context lab.

In the first one, I had to listen to sets of two voices and rate on a scale of 1 to 6 how similar they sounded.

In the second one, I had to listen to people saying sentences, with white noise/static overlaid, and type out what I thought I heard. Next, I had to listen to the sentences, without the static, and rate how much of an accent I perceived. Each spoken sentence was sometimes accompanied by a photo, sometimes not. After that they tested my response times as they flashed a name on the screen and I had to push a button depending on whether it was Western ("white") or Asian; I did the same with words that had a positive versus negative connotation. Then the two sets (white vs. Asian; positive vs. negative) were mixed in various configurations. Finally, I had to state how much I agreed with certain statements about Asians Canadians versus European Canadians.

I got paid $10 for each study.