Ryan Westafer

“closer to nature”

So close, but so far away.

Dragon Toy

The main question: do good dogs get good toys, or do good toys help make good dogs?

Or another way to put it: can certain toys desensitize dogs to the consequences of biting?

Arwen (our aussie) loves to chew on toys and to nip at other dogs while playing, but she has always been very cautious about accidentally biting fingers while playing tug-of-war or or the yelp of another dog when play gets too rough.

This dragon toy not only has a very tough fabric, but it also made a lot of noise and squawked loudly whenever she bit on it.  She refused to play roughly with it.  I’ve always discouraged her biting things which complain about being bitten.

I’m curious to know what others have found.  Does your dog mercilessly shred toys and gnaw on the squeakers?  Has your dog ever continued to bite or attack something/someone without listening? If it’s simply a matter of bad habits, one can probably fix the problem.  Just disable the squeaker.  A simple puncture with scissors can prevent the internal air bladder from pressuring the noisemaker.

It might also be possible to use a squeaking toy to train a dog to play with a more gentle bite.  Negative reinforcement (in some way which works for the particular dog) can be given whenever the dog bites hard enough to make the noise.

Though Ford would have us associate these cars with horses, I think they’re designed more like dogs – their radiators are in the front.  The faster you drive, the more convective cooling the radiator receives.

While horses do sweat; cars and dogs don’t.  Dogs primarily cool through the mouth, by panting.  That’s the same thing a car does while idling at rest: a fan is used to keep air flowing through the radiator.  Another fact (which I learned from Kristin) is that dogs bear about 60% of their weight in the front.  I don’t know whether this is true for horses, but the weight distribution sure sounds like a muscle car to me.

Well, after all the analogy, there’s still the problem of image.  Dogs are seen as “loyal and friendly,” but horses are “elegant and powerful.”  Also, I can’t think of anyone who has ridden on a dog.  (Well, except for my brother when he was about 4…)  The branding makes sense, but I could see a nerdy engineer suggesting a different image.

OK, this was a somewhat pointless post, but I know many people see the different faces cars have: formed by the headlights and grill.  This random thought was just an analogy for function rather than form.

Fellow researchers – get ready to annotate and markup papers electronically.  The PDFXChange Viewer is free, and it allows advanced annotations on PDFs.

I noticed highlighting in a paper I received from a colleague, Pete.  It was nice to see what he considered important in the paper.  PDFXchange allows commenting and all the usual things, but you can also type directly on PDFs, leave underlining & highlighting, and you can draw colored boxes around important figures, etc.  You can also export all comments to a text file.

As desktop searching advances, I believe software like Google Desktop will (or already does) search the comments within PDF files.  This means one can keep all the thoughts together, much like you would do in a paper-style notebook.

Download here: PDFXChange Viewer download

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I recently closed my account with SunTrust after getting married.  Now, I need some statements for tax purposes.  I will have to pay $5 per statement.  Imagine if I were audited by the IRS and needed several years of information, that’s $60/year.  OK, so that’s not a big deal.  I’ll pay the money. But, what’s worse- I must go to a local branch and pay only with cash or check.  The demands probably go on and on.  I can’t request my information over the phone, etc.  Don’t let your private financial information become locked away like this.

Lesson learned: download all of your electronic information before you conclude business with a bank.  It will save you much trouble.