Month: April 2008

Phew! Done with That!

Well, about 15 minutes ago, I turned in my first statistical research paper, which also happened to be my first APA-style paper. I had turned in a very rough draft on the 18th (with minutes to spare before midnight) but, alas, never received any feedback from it. Still, I worked on the paper since then, especially yesterday, and it was taking good shape. However, when I was walking home today, I was feeling rather low about research papers in general, wondering even if I’d be able to tackle my eventual thesis paper.

My work on the thing after work today managed to swing that feeling around. At 8:30pm I was done with the paper, so I printed it off (cuz it looked so nice!) and took it around to the folks’ who agreed that it looked nice. And surely looking nice is half the battle! Dad didn’t see anything truly glaring in my conclusions, so that’s something too. After they oggled the paper, I returned home, saved the file in Word format (I use StarOffice at home) and turned it in. Yay! I feel elated and have begun to work on the other class’s final project – a curriculum for a science and the public course. That’s due on Friday.

Wow – hard to believe that after this week, I’ll be 12 semester hours into my Masters program! I have a summer class starting May 19th (and ending July 12th) on scientific writing. That should be good practice for my science blog (tls_scienceblog) among other things. And this weekend, I start up my 30-day retail version of World of Warcraft. Yay!

“It’s curtains for you!”

Since I have a final project due on Monday and a final curriculum due on Thursday, I’m doing everything I can to avoid working on them. But at least I’m doing productive things to avoid them!

The first thing we (parents and me) did today was check out garage sales in town – well, visited Aunt Becky at her son’s garage sale. After we went to the post office and library, we picked up pork tenderloin sandwiches and French fries from a vendor on Main street (in place for the town garage sales).

Before we headed off for our grand adventure, I stopped back home for something, only to find that the kitties had pulled the living room curtain down again. They get their claws stuck in the lace and pull it down. And then trying to get the lace back on the curtain rods is a pain in the arse. So I measured the windows and resolved to buy new curtains while we oot & aboot.

We started out at JoAnn fabrics with the thought of mom making curtains (she’s making some gingham ones for her side-door), but then we decided to check if Walmart had something like I could use. And there, we found just what I needed – sheer but not lace (no place for kitties to get claws caught on) and not floor length like the big window had. I also got some grass seed and wrapping paper & cards for Amy & Rachel’s birthday presents.

Back home I got to work taking down the old curtains and putting up the new ones. And before I did that, I cleaned the front window – it had a long row of kitty nose prints from kitty cats walking along the sill and looking outside. Turns out in addition to nose prints there was a nice layer of dirt. Comes with never cleaning my windows. Ugh. Should do my other windows tomorrow.

I also put some of my grass seed in the dead spots in my lawn. And watered it. That took a bit of time. Then it was time to have supper and watch the new DW. And then judiang, elsaf, and hergrace got online so we watched the episode together. Let’s hear it for Instant Messaging! 🙂

Anniversary Celebration

Today was mom & dad’s 40th Anniversary! I wasn’t around 40 years ago when they got married, but I was around today, so I took them out for a nice dinner at the restaurant of their choosing. (Yesterday I gave ’em a dozen roses courtesy of the Lion’s Club selling ’em at school through their Leo Club.)

Mom wanted to try out The Caroline, a new restaurant that’s where Taggart’s used to be (a fairly well-known restaurant in Troy, OH). I like a grand adventure, so I agreed to take ’em there. Although they lost my reservation, it wasn’t really needed and we were seated right away. We got a friendly waitress who did a nice job serving us. For an appetizer we had shrimp cocktail. We all had side salads (I had the Caesar salad), then our main courses came out. Mom got the prime rib, which was the day’s special. It was very juicy and tasty. Dad ordered their house steak (and he got it medium, which was a shock). I ordered their chipotle pork chop with spiced apples – tasty but I should have gotten medium rather than medium well – was just a bit dry. I also had the lyonaisse potatoes as my side – basically fried taters cooked with onions. Then, though we were pretty stuffed, we split their three layer chocolate cake. Very very moist and tasty!

It was a very pleasant evening out and we enjoyed ourselves and our food. Happy 40th Anniversary Mom & Dad! Here’s to 40 more! 🙂

Data mining

So I’m playing around with Ohio’s data on school performance and lots of variables to see if there are any correlations for my statistics class’s final project. And to my (pleasant?) surprise I found out that there is correlation between teacher salary and the school’s performance indicator (a number the state comes up with for each school based on several qualifying factors). And it’s a positive correlation. OK, so it’s not as strong of a correlation as economic advantage or on percentage of white students (since standardized tests are usually written with the middle/upper class white student) but it’s statistically significant. So yeah, pay me more and my school will do better! 🙂

Here’s the graph:


Graphs are cool! I like graphs!

OK, back to number crunching!

A favor to ask of you…

For our Statistics class, we’ll be doing a statistical research project. One of my classmates is doing research on home schooling and has a survey that she needs respondents for. I did the survey myself and it didn’t take very long at all (she specifies 3-5 minutes, but it seemed shorter to me). If you’re willing and able, would you please fill out her survey to help with her project? The survey is completely anonymous (and she probably doesn’t know any of you anyway, heh).

http://homeschoolsurvey.questionpro.com/

Thanks in advance to those of you who’ve taken the survey!

(In my own project, I decided I’d wade through all of the Ohio Graduation Test/Ohio Achievement Test data and see what I could find. Should be, um, fun?)

Glad I got *that* out of my system!

For my Masters program this semester, I had to make a presentation either on Science & Religion or on Science & Policy. I’d been meaning, for some time, to tackle the so-called controversy over evolution but didn’t think I was ready for it. However, last week during our class’s discussions on science & religion, I decided I would do it. So I made a presentation on Impress (StarOffice/OpenOffice.org‘s presentation software) and uploaded it to Slideshare (sort of a YouTube for PowerPoints). And then posted it on my science blog for my classmates and anyone else to read it. Check out the entry with slide show here.

I’ve actually been updating my science blog each Wednesday since early February, which I’m very pleased about. I hope it’s something I can keep up. (I have two more misconceptions I want to cover in the next two weeks, so that’s April covered for the most part.) If you’d like to see the posts as they show up, I have created an LJ feed for the syndication: tls_scienceblog.