Not fringe science, but almost as cool.

I'm currently involved with my Tuesday obsession (otherwise known as the tv show "Fringe"), so hopefully this post won't be too disjointed.

Research is going very well. Data is mostly analyzed. That was incredibly tedious, but went relatively quickly. I now have lots of graphs. All of them are quite interesting, some more than others. Some are stat sig too...but not necessarily the super interesting ones. I thought they were most stat sig originally - the error bars were ridiculously tiny! - but alas that was only because I didn't calculate the standard error correctly the first time. Oops. But all is well now.

(Sidenote: This is a really creepy show to watch when you're alone in the house.)

I've started a second project, in conjuction with another student in my cohort. Today we made our sound files. It went a lot better than I thought it would. Only a couple of hitches, the main one being my lack of DOS skills. Yes, we have a program that runs in DOS. On the plus side, I can now navigate in it decently.

The other big thing going on is a grant application. Lots of writing and editing and rewriting. And then doing it all over again. Hopefully it will all be worth it, in that I get the grant. But even if I don't, it's at least good experience. (But I'd really like the grant!)

Back to the show...

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.

Plugging along

I'm about halfway through the summer program I'm in at the U. Friday evening I finished and turned in the lit review paper I had to write. Whew! Now all I have to do is analyze my data, write up the paper about my research (including the results of my analysis), and do a presentation on everything. I'm not too worried about the presentation, and I think the full write-up should go fine. I've already written bits and pieces of it for other things, so I just have to combine things and make everything flow.

The analysis part, on the other hand, is being the frustrating bit. I'm supposed to use a particular program to analyze my sound files, and I've worked with it a little bit. However, the manual has proved to be very little help (it says what certain things do, but does not tell you specifically how to do things or where to find specific buttons and commands), and last time I was there, the program froze every time I tried to manipulate something. I was told it was "quirky", but I thought that was referring to it's lack of user-friendliness, not it's inability to function... I'm going in again tomorrow, so maybe I'll figure things out a little better then.

In between all this data analysis, I have a giant stack of print-outs to read about sound and sound analysis, and a bunch of stuff to pack so I can move into my new place. Busy busy busy....