Summer (and a bit of fall)

Contrary to what activity in this blog may suggest, I did survive the summer, relatively intact. I did lose a bit of blood to the several hundred mosquitoes I came into contact with, but other than that I made it. (And no, that number is not an exaggeration. At one point I had 107 bites on my arms and legs. Neck was not included in the total but I'm sure would have added a good 20 more to the count.)

Lab work at the beginning of the summer went well. I completed data collection for the Lombard experiment, began data collection on a second in-lab experiment (which turned out to be more time consuming than previously estimated), and then headed off into the field. Kind of. I was foiled by weather for a good two weeks, and spent the beginning of June sitting in lab hoping the temperature might breach 70 during the day and/or that it might rain. The rest of June and beginning of July was much more "frog friendly." I drove north, south, west, and kind of east, battled mosquitoes and ticks, was freaked out by the glowing eyes of (mostly) harmless deer, listened to raccoons amble by my tent at night, walked across and down part of the Mississippi river, and learned that I never want to live in a tiny rural town, ever. Oh, and I did research.

My goal was to find ponds where my frogs lived, and then collect data related to the frogs and vegetation in the pond, but due to the cool dry start to summer, I mostly only accomplished the pond finding mission, along with some trial runs for data collection. But, now I know where to go, and I have a pretty good idea of how to do things next year.

The rest of the summer (July and August) was spent in lab, staring at sound analysis programs, MS Excel, and various statistical programs. A combination of extreme monotony (sound analysis), confusion and frustration (statistical programs), punctuated by tiny moments of success (nice graphs and coding things correctly in stats programs).

Now school has started back up again and I am forced to drag myself out of bed at 7am three days a week so I can learn more statistics. Two statistics courses (eep), journal club, a couple seminars, proposal writing, plus the usual data analysis and writing of manuscripts occupy my time lately. And tomorrow I start up another experiment. Thus begins Year Two.

No comment...

...on how true this is. ;)

Hey

First of all, this has been a pretty good week with much cause to celebrate. First Iowa okays gay marriage on Friday, April 3rd, and today Vermont did too. We're up to four now! (Connecticut and Massachusetts are the other two, for those of you not keeping track.) Now if Minnesota can just get up to speed, I'll really be happy.

In work related news...
1. I have permits! My State Park permit came the other week, adding five more parks to the total I can conduct research in, so I should be good for this summer. Now I have to plan my route and try to figure out when I'm leaving. It's been pretty cold out lately, especially at night, so it's hard to tell when the frogs will start coming out.
2. Despite the gray treefrogs not being out quite yet, the chorus frogs soon will be. I'm taking a grad seminar on bioacoustics this semester, and we're doing a project with them. Said project is yet undecided, but will involve recording and being in a pond. Time to dust off the chest waders and break out the head lamp!
3. Assuming I get accepted, I'm going to Denmark in August for an international PhD course on animal communication. Sweet. Must get passport.
4. This fall/winter's experiment never got finished due to the increased non-responsiveness of the frogs. I only needed one more... We'll start up again with that part in August after the breeding season ends, but I'll be able to get some data during the breeding season as well.
5. Due to #4, I have a lull in research right now. It's nice.

Today I get to learn plant quantification methods. Yay?

Happy Obama day!

I'm not sure I'll get a chance to watch the inauguration tomorrow, despite coverage from 8:30am to 4pm. But between rebroadcasts, the internet, and blog posts, I'm sure I'll see and hear plenty about the festivities.

In other news, spring semester starts tomorrow. I would normally have evolution lab, but thanks to the first week of school, it is canceled. Hurray!

1/10th of the way there!

I have completed the first semester of my graduate school career. Woohoo! Only nine (or more? who knows) semesters to go. It's amazing how quickly the time went by. Sure, some parts draaaaagged and I thought I would never make it to winter break (the NSF fellowship experience comes to mind). But all in all, it was a decent enough semester.

Now I'm spending my time doing productive things like catching up on television shows, watching all the DVD's I got for my birthday and Christmas, hanging out with friends, and eating Christmas cookies. Oh, and playing Spore. I know there have been a lot of negative reviews about the game, but so far, I'm pretty impressed. Yeah, there are things that could be better and things that could change. It took me forever to get out of the "creature" stage (you're basically an animal running around, eating, and mating), and that got a little frustrating. And there's definitely a learning curve. But, no game is perfect, and especially for this nerdy biologist, the fun of running around collecting new body parts to evolve with and trying to ally with other critters far outweighs the negative bits.

For Christmas I also got The Future is Wild (Discovery Channel and Animal Planet). It discusses animals that might exist far into the future (5 million, 100 million, and 200 millions years future) after humans die out from planetary changes and whatnot. For example, marmots might evolve into large rodents capable of surviving an ice age, and wolverines might evolve into a larger sabertoothed version of themselves that preys upon the evolved marmots and other creatures. We don't know that these animals will evolve, but scientists looked climate changes, current species, past species, and evolution, and came up with all these species that could plausibly evolve. One thing bothers me though. All the scientists featured on the show as the experts are male, as is the narrator. I double checked the credits to be sure, and yep, all seven science consultants are white males. There isn't even a racial minority or one female to try to fill some quota. What's up with that, Discovery Channel?? Surely there were some prominent female evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, or natural historians you could have consulted.

What is that bright light up ahead??

The end of the semester is...in sight? Weird. I have surprisingly little to do. Today I turned in my last statistics assignment. Now I only have an essay and two finals left (stats and animal cognition). Oh, and one more journal club meeting. Then I get almost a whole month off to relax (eg, write grant proposals, read lots of papers, and analyze more data). YAY!?!

Slacking...

Actually, not slacking. Well, slacking with the blog posts, but that's only because I've been busy not slacking as much in other areas. Like, you know, minor things like grant proposal writing, statistics homework, weekly essays, data analysis, presentations... You get the idea.

To expand upon the above... I did get the grant proposal in. There were lots of revisions, some banging of head on wall in response to revisions, and many late nights involved. And I might have hit "submit" a mere forty minutes before the deadline. But it got in! Now I get to wait six months for results, by which time I will probably have forgotten about the thing entirely. Or repressed the memory. Something.

As for statistics homework and weekly essays, I have only one or two more statistics problem sets after I turn in tomorrow's, and no more weekly essays for animal cognition (the last one was due today). Granted, I have finals in both classes (ew), but on the plus side, I don't have animal cognition next week, and we're having a pizza party during the last week of class. You are never too old for in-class pizza parties.

Data analysis has progressed nicely. Mostly. I just might have lost an important scrap of paper, and had to remake some sound files and rerun the data (twice), but it all turned out okay in the end. The past week has involved a great deal of math and conversions between things I'm only semi-familiar with, but it's been a good learning experience. Unfortunately, the math resulted in me rejecting the main part of my hypothesis (*sigh*), but the data are interesting nonetheless. All this data analysis led up to today (well, yesterday I guess, since technically it's Wednesday now) when my advisor and I gave a tag-teamed presentation at my alma mater. That went quite well. We were very well recieved, and at least one student is interested in working in our lab for research experience. I'm hoping to recruit some undergrads from St. Kate's to work with me this summer. They get research experience that they can't get at St Kate's, and I get peons. I mean, assistants. Win win.

Tomorrow (er, later today) either 2/4 or 3/4 of my classes and seminars are canceled, so my Thanksgiving break starts at least two hours earlier than I thought it would. Not that I'm a fan of Thanksgiving (don't like turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes...I'm weird, I know), but I am very much a fan of not having to sit through classes at 4 and 5 pm, particularly when four days of sleeping in are so close.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I like lists

1. Data analysis is nearing completion! (Well, completion as compared to a few weeks ago.) I have eight tests left to analyze to get raw numbers. Then all we have to do is subtract some things (once we figure out the thing to subtract), and run some statistical tests, and ta da done! Er, there might be a few more steps in there too. But the point is, there is a light at the end of the tunnel and I will soon get a break from sitting in a windowless room clicking buttons in the quirky software and copy/pasting things in Excel.
2. I have a computer for my office now. At least, I'm assuming it's there and set up. I haven't actually been to my office yet this week (see above), but all signs point to it being in my office at this very moment. I am delighted, because now my desk won't look so bare, I can check my email and such without taking up lab computers, and I can do that in a location with windows.
3. I still hate statistics class. Friday, he had us flipping coins to determine probability. I'm in grad school and I'm still flipping flipping coins in class. *sigh* Today there were new symbols and weird vocabulary and even my interpreter didn't quite know what he meant.
4. I have way too much reading to do.
5. I have an inkling of an idea for my thesis, but absolutely no idea what to do for a grant proposal due in less than two months.

I have some links I want to post, but it's nearly midnight and I want to get some more work done before bed. I'll post them soon(ish).

Still alive

I did indeed survive my first day of grad school, no worries. The long silence is a result of statistics homework that takes eight hours to complete (!!), a paper due the second week of school, a ridiculous number of BBQ's (what do grad students do in winter when they cannot BBQ??), data analysis and battles with quirky software, and me squeezing in sleep where I can. Welcome to grad school Emily!

I'm enjoying it though - I think I'm happiest when I'm busy. (This does have a limit, however. If you plot busyness on the x-axis of a graph and happiness on the y-axis, it would probably look like a Normal bell curve. If I get too busy and insane, it's all downhill from there. (Look, applied statistics knowledge! The course is useful!))

Data analysis is plodding along. It's slow and rather tedious but it's getting there. Ten tests down, only forty more to analyze. I'm also in the planning stages of an experiment for this winter, in conjunction with another student in my cohort.

Looking at my schedule before school started, it seemed like I would have a lot of free time. Then school started and suddenly there were all these weekly meetings I need to attend. My weekly calender has a lot less white space now. And while the white space may technically be "free", I don't feel very free. My stack of articles and books to read is growing quite rapidly. Most of it is interesting material, but it's just a LOT of material to read and digest and remember. Quite a bit of it has to do with sound as well, and I've never really worked with hardcore sound stuff before, so I'm trying to figure that out in addition to reading the behavioral stuff. Since I haven't yet fulfilled my physics prerequisite, my advisor suggested an independent study on the physics of sound. I'm really hoping we can do that next semester so that I don't feel quite so befuddled about what's going on physically in the experiments I'm reading about.

*gulp*

First day of school tomorrow.

T-minus 3 days

School starts in three days, and I don't even have my notebooks set yet. I have purchased my textbooks though. I'm not pleased about the cost of my statistics textbook...or that I must once again enter a stats classroom. "Evolution and Animal Cognition," however, I am really looking forward to.

I have finally, mostly, recovered from my three week flu -> bronchitis -> pneumonia episode. Still have this annoying cough, the ribs/muscles on my left side still feel odd (they think I strained the joints or tore muscles), and walking for over a quarter of a mile at a time makes me wheezy. I hear that takes awhile to clear up though, so I'll take what I can get for now.

Now that I'm off the couch, I've been back in the lab. I finished a third of the data analysis for the Lombard experiment. Granted, it was the tedious but easy third, but a third nonetheless. I started the other two-thirds on Friday, but now I have to deal with the "quirky" software again. My files are finally small enough that I can manipulate things, but when I try to import data into Excel, it does it's own thing. Logically, data should arrive at the highlighted cell. Illogically, it arrives on the previous spreadsheet in the file, somewhere in the vicinity of cell A1729. My scrollwheel finger is getting sore. Progress on this two-thirds will be slow.

Deviating from work-related talk, I have to comment on the latest political happenings in the US. Palin? Seriously? I know he's 72, but I didn't think he was senile yet. And if he thinks that he's going to get the Hilary votes because he picked a woman as his VP, well, then he's definitely senile, or else has a really low opinion of females. We are not dumb, we know the difference - Palin is not Hilary. I would love to have a woman VP or president, but no way am I going to vote for someone who is strongly pro-life regardless of situation, pro-creationism in schools, wants to drill for oil in the Alaskan Arctic Refuge (in the middle of the caribou migration route and calving grounds), and denies that humans have anything to do with the current climate change and global warming...just because she's a woman. I'm way smarter than that, thanks.

Continuing the negative theme, my city has thrown democracy out the window this week. The RNC hasn't even started, and already people are being held and arrested, houses are being searched (without the inhabitants seeing the search warrant beforehand), and laptops, cameras, and phones are being confiscated. I hate to see what will happen once the event actually begins. Read about it here and here.

On a brighter note, Barack Obama responded to fourteen questions regarding science in America (scroll down to get to the questions and responses). I'm pleased with most of his answers, puzzled about a few, and not so pleased about a few.