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...

Woohoo!!

All the raw data has been gathered! Ten frogs, five noise conditions each, three variables per condition. Lots of data. The Excel spreadsheet I have been working in the past however many weeks is over 4 MBs and takes a bit to send via email. I no longer have to deal with quirky software...but as soon as my advisor and I get our baseline amplitude value, I get to do lots of math. (Where is my calculator??) As much as I hate statistics class, I'm kind of hoping that I can do some data analysis in R, at least so I can get some practical application out of it.

Also, I have a computer in my office, finally! I haven't actually used it yet becuase I've been basically living in the lab, but it is there and I plan to utilize it tomorrow.

I'm trying to decide if it would be a good or bad idea to do the same thing for my grant proposal as I want to do for my thesis. The idea is vague right now, but I need something for this grant proposal. It is due in 43 days. I suppose I might as well...I'll at least figure out if I hate the topic or not.

Also - I flipped the title and subtitle for this blog. It was a boring title. It got demoted.

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.

Sick day...or twelve

All frog related work has currently been put on hold, at least in my little sector of the world. I'm sick. It started with the flu (the achey kind, not the stomach kind) twelve days ago. That cough became bronchitis, and that bronchitis has now become pneumonia. So besides impressing the urgent care and emergency room staff with stunning x-rays of my lungs, complete with a pronounced white blob of pneumonia, and watching the Olympics and episode upon episode of Star Trek, I haven't been doing much lately. I plan to continue that plan for another couple days (hopefully with the exception of events involving urgent care and ER staff) and hope I get better soon. The umpteen drugs I've been prescribed should help with that too.

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....

Endless paperwork

I knew the grad school application process would be grueling and involve lots of forms and paperwork (online paperwork, but paperwork nonetheless). But I thought it would end once I was accepted to and accepted a school! Not so. There is currently a rather large stack of forms - like, physical paper forms - that has been residing on the piano bench for the past week, waiting for me to finish filling them out. This has been a lengthy process, involving much research into which insurance policy I should have (but my father did this, whew), the address of the local newspaper (yet unfound), the dates of various vaccinations (need a new tetanus, ick), and my student ID number (also yet unfound), as well as numerous signatures.

I'm curious why I even need this large stack of paper forms. I applied online to go to college, and that was four years ago. I applied to go to grad school online - a much lengthier form - and that was just seven months ago. So why is there not an email form for me to fill out about my vaccinations and which insurance policy I choose and which newspaper to notify about my acceptance to grad school? Online forms would make my life a lot easier. I've had several forms filled out for a week, but they only sent one envelope for all the forms, and I'm not going to waste an extra envelope and stamp just to send in two pieces of paper. If the forms were online, though, I could have sent them in and crossed them off my list days ago. And there wouldn't be so much paper being used.

Anyway, assuming I can track down my local newspaper's address, my forms are all set and ready to send off tomorrow. Just in time for the holiday weekend.

End of the season

There haven't been any pairs for the past four nights. I was hoping to get about ten more pairs so I could test ten more males in my experiment, bringing my sample size up to twenty males. That would have been a good size, and enough to write a paper on and get published. (That was Mark's idea actually, to get more males, test them, and then write and publish a paper in my first year of grad school.) It was a good plan, but alas the frogs did not cooperate, and so it appears that I will have to wait until my second year of grad school to publish a paper.* I did not expect the frog season to die down so suddenly. We were still getting ten or so pairs a night last week, then there was one relatively cool day and they just stopped.

I have this week off from the lab. It's nice to be able to sleep in late, although I'm starting to feel guilty about sleeping until (or, ahem, past) noon. Next week the summer program I am doing through my fellowship begins. It's only one or two days a week until the end of August, but I have to do some research, write a paper about my research, and present my findings, so I'll definitely still be busy.

Also, I changed the banner picture again. Now it's a pond - much more appropriate to frog-related research. I'm not sure if the green corners match the green in the picture though. I'm not a perfectionist at all, no...

*However, I still have not written the paper about my brain lateralization research, like I have been meaning to do for, oh, the past six months. So I could still work on that (in my free time??) and get that published. I actually really want to, because it's pretty cool stuff.