Independant Study

The independent study is going but I am not sure it is going well and I cannot see time to work on it in my near future. I see a few all nighters in my near future. I have the general concept down and the general code I think but I have to play around with it to try to get at exactly what I want. Luckily we have some time to work on it but I have guests coming in from out of town (my parents this week and my sister next week). My sister coming for jazz fest is very unsympathetic to the needs of a student and just wants to party. We will see who wins. Anyway hope everyone else is getting along in their Independent study.

Getting Busy

As is usual at the end of the semester, things are starting to get crazy. Lots of stuff is coming up due and to add to the madness, my old professor decided to dump two poster presentations on my. Also my parents are coming into town one weekend and then my sister another. Also have volleyball tournaments and soccer, but those are fun. Anyway as we all know, one of those assignments is the independent study. Since all of my data have already been processed in SAS i am going to compare my results from SAS to those from R and then make up a data set about mangroves and analyze that. Hoping this won't be too difficult, although I will need help generating a data set. Anyway, its a typical end of the semester so I'll stop whining since I am sure everybody has the same problems.

Spring Break

Spring break was good. I went home to Seattle to a new family member. My sister had a little girl before I arrived so I met her when she was 5 days old. Very Exciting!!!!!
Other than that I relaxed and did no school work and just hung out with my family. I also saw a friends baby for the first time as well (I am at that age where everybody I know is having a baby or getting married, 4 wedding/engagement announcements this year and it is only March). It was good to see the family (3 of my sisters and parents) and good to relax. However the connecting flight from Houston was pretty much a Tulane spring break shuttle. A lot of whining about being hung over, request to each other for weed when they got home, the stewardess asking them to sit down four times in order to find open seats to accommodate standby passengers and threats from one that Continental was going to hear from her daddy. Then after the flight more whining because bags were not immediately forthcoming. Anyway overall good trip.

Take-home test

I found the take home test to be quite time consuming but it was similar to many take home tests I have taken. When you have the book in front of you, you tend to question your response more. If it seems easy you think that you are doing it wrong because the professor wouldn't ask you an easy question if you have the book, right? However, I thought it was a fair test and didn't throw any huge curve balls.

Teaching

I had to teach a stats class this Tuesday as per the requirement for graduate students in the class. I chose to teach the class on field studies as this is what I am interested in and have some experience in. I think the class went pretty well as I had good feedback at the end. Thanks to the class for being good participators and humouring me even when if they thought the questions were not important. It is much easier to teach when the students appear somewhat enthusiastic.

JV getting hard

I worked on the homework for tomorrow tonight and read chapter 5 in JV and had a hard time understanding it. I understood their syntax for the most part and the general concepts but when they started to go into a lot of formulas, I was lost. However I think that I understood the gist of what it was trying to teach although I am not sure I would use these techniques to actually process my own data.

F statistic

I finally understand what the F statistic means. Although I have been seeing in the output of SAS for the last year under the Proc GLM and I have had previous stats classes I never really got a clear explanation as to what it meant. Our lecture book made it very clear and used a great figure to explain in. I always knew you wanted a large F but now I know why.

Getting More Interesting

The class is starting to get more interesting now that we are starting to get into some more applied stats rather than theory or just defining term as much of that was review for me since i have already had a graduate level stats class. I am hoping to learn how to do hypothesis testing or find p value in R and learn different methods of finding this probability value.

Independant Study

I have been thinking about what I am going to do for my independent study. I have data from several Mangrove restoration experiments that I could use I am just not sure what to do with it. I have already done work on it using Proc GLM in SASS and have found means and sd's and graphed most of the data so I am not sure what kind of new manipulations I can do on it.

I have three experiments, one manipulating light level for seed establishment and seedling survival and growth, one manipulation elevation, therefore flooding regime in the field and one manipulation CO2 levels and salinities in the greenhouse, although this last dataset is not complete. This is the only data I have and should be able to use it. We will see what happens.

Hard To Blog

I am not very good at this blogging thing since I am not really a computer person and have trouble just writing a diary type composition. The class is going well and I hope to learn a lot that has practical applications rather than theory as many stats classes do. It seems that this is the direction the class is going in. I am looking forward to moving out of the baseline ideas and into more applied subjects.

Finally Blogging

Ok, so it's taken me a while to get blogging but I finally have it all figured out.

So far I think the class is going well. I like the method of asking question each class and discussing the answers rather than listening to a lecture. This method helps to realize what the professor thinks is more important and also gets you thinking on how to exactly word things which can be very important in statistics.

The theory book is easy to read and understand and does not have a lot of extraneous information (except the page long foot notes but those are interesting). The R program books is also very clear and helpful with examples and line command. I find the problems helpful.