It's been a slow week...

I've got to admit, I have nothing of interest to report on since my last post. Things here have been relatively quiet. Z is back from Morocco, she had quite the experience! They went on this dessert tour through the Sahara for three days and essentially were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by sand dunes. They rode camels through the dessert, climbed one of the tallest sand dunes to watch the sun set, and even got some pictures of 'mirages'! I think it was a great departure from Europe - even though there are cultural differences from one European country to the next, you can still see the thread that binds Europe together as a whole. And especially of late, it seems that the thread is turning into a sturdy piece of rope.

Even in Morocco, Z mentioned that the youth speak only in French, not Arabic or Berber - almost as if to say they were rejecting traditional culture and preferred what the imperialists introduced to their country. And yet the country is still so heavily influenced by Islam. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens when this generation takes over. But I'm sure even with their European influenced youth that going to Africa must've been completely different from anything we've experienced here, and yet it's only 3 hours away! You really feel like you're in the middle of the world here. I would love to visit Egypt or Tunisia one day...it'd be nice to see the Great Pyramid of Giza before they put a Starbucks inside...

I do have a favor to ask of you all though, which has to do with my research. I've created the surveys for my dissertation online, and I have 7 conditions, each one containing a different set of visual stimuli. I need 25 women between the ages of 18-40 to complete each survey. I was hoping that if anyone reading this falls under that category (who did not complete the pre-test I was circulating a while ago) that maybe you could pick one of the links below and complete a survey for me. They take about 15 minutes to do, and please select just one. What would also help a lot is if you know of anyone else who could complete a survey, to e-mail them one of the links as well. I would really appreciate your help and just think, you would be contributing to research that can help us understand more about how women's esteem is affected, and the measures we can take to combat body dissatisfaction.

Here are the Links:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

Link 5

Link 6

Link 7

Once again, thank you so much for your assistance!