Busy Week

I'll warn you now that I'm going to have quite a few blogs on the way out in the next couple of days. I've been in the habit of writing blogs and keeping them on my desktop, publishing one a day as I see fit in order to allow me time to focus on writing, but also and more importantly time to focus on what is quickly becoming a more busy work schedule.

It's not that I'm actually doing any more physical work but I've had a lot of projects and the like which are open and running at the same time. All of these things have to come to a close soon, especially as I get ready to finish classes and head into the summer with research and literature reviews. I've been trying to wrap a lot of stuff up this week and the middle of yesterday afternoon finally marked the breaking point where I was mostly done with all pressing matters and I could collapse into temporary complacency on the rest of it. Last night we watched Megamind in honor of that and Amanda graciously sat through a movie which is not her type and smiled along with the dumb humor which I of course was very entertained by.

This week marks the submission of my IACUC proposal for starters which has been a much larger endeavor than I had originally supposed. For those of you who don't know, IACUC is an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and every research institution has one of these committees. The main purpose of the committee is to oversee research that deals with animals and ensure the animals' well-being by reviewing the protocols and making sure that the animals will be well cared far, that the research has a practical use in today's society, that animals will not be wasted needlessly in this research and that there isn't some crazy professor doing horrendous things to animals in the name of science. All of these criteria have some very specific reasoning behind them which focus on the 3 R's of research today: Replacement, Refinement and Reduction. For more on that I'll refer you to a parallel blog of mine where I've already commented on this. Let's just say that I spent over a month now refining my protocol and editing in many people's comments, ensuring the staff for the project were appropriately trained and certified and dotting my i's before it was turned in this week. I'm very glad to have it off my chest.

Second big thing on my plate this week was my last homework for my SAS class. I've got to say that apart from the homework, this hasn't felt like a class at all. I've enjoyed nearly every minute in class and out of it when I've had questions for the professor. He is a great guy and we are lucky to have him teaching here. I finished the homework and immediately after turning it in had regrets on the accuracy and appropriateness of my models; hopefully it went better than my gut feeling is always telling me.

Then the third big thing I had this week was a research seminar on the 3 main manuscripts leading to my research proposal. This was for a class and a satisfactory grade so while I wasn't super concerned about it, I have my own reputation to uphold as well and I want to be known for professionalism and a job well done in these things. I tried to throw a bit of pizazz in the presentation with imaging and using our department's new big screen TV rather than blurring my images through the old slide projector and I was really happy with how that turned out. But the presentation itself sometimes felt more like an interrogation session than a talk I was giving. It's something that I'll have to get used to during my time here pursuing my Masters, I think. Based on my impressions from Masters defenses around here they're just prepping for the big show in the future.

So with all of that off my plate, I can refocus on my other stuff obscuring my desk right now. Lauren and I still owe 4-H our final write-up from March and I have a final exam project for SAS along with finishing up data collection from elapsed video shots (~130 dvds in all!). I can't wait to be done with that, it feels like that's all I've been doing the past year.

Messing with SASquatch

For those of you unfamiliar with the beef jerky commercials, I've included a couple embedded videos. The basic direction of these ads is that people get up the courage to do something which seems stupid to normal people and then get payback from the beast similar to Bigfoot that they are trying to do these things too. (As a side note, Bigfoot's apparently dead).





Now for the greater amount of you who don't know, SAS is a computer program that I am beginning to become acquaintances with. An acronym for Statistical Analysis Software (or something similar), it is a huge program that over the years has evolved from just simple statistical work to a broad data management system. It pretty much dictates the value of your research to the world. An amazing little bit of trivia, but here as students at a contributing university to the SAS project in the beginning, we still get it for dirt cheap rather than the thousands that corporations pay for it.

So in an effort to understand this significant program which will be vital to any scientific acceptance of my labor in graduate school, I've started taking a class to try and learn how to speak the language. And I'm not making that up, we're really learning to speak a new language by learning how to type in programs and commands. SAS takes commands in its own type of sentences, phrases and word codings and a puzzle piece to using it correctly is speaking that language. If only there were a Rosetta Stone for it.

I don't know how many of my readers recall anything about typing in programs or commands, but before the days of what we have now and clicking to get what we want like lab rats in a light bulb experiment, we used to have to type in the commands we wanted just to get the games we wanted to play. Letters on the keyboard meant commands in the games and we were pretty happy with all of that. Well, it's kinda like that experience all over again and from that standpoint, I really enjoy being able to type in commands again and see the result on the output as if I really knew what was going on in the computer program's "mind". What I don't enjoy is that every time I start messing with SAS it turns around and slaps me in the face.

Example. Our professor encourages groups to do homework together so I make a pilgrimage to the other Animal Science grad office every day or two to discuss their homework. As part of our homework we have to submit the coding that we used to get the answers. While I've noticed that everyone else submits their proposed codes, I'm one of the only that submits my actual output from running the codes. And it lists the days total lines from the work alongside the code in output. Of course, nothing goes very smoothly and my professor thought it was pretty funny to see that on the very first homework I went through nearly 1000 lines of coding for only 8 problems! That's how many errors I had.

And then there's the simple fact that sometimes it just doesn't work. I get a little ambitious and try to punch in a few of the extras or label my graphics and all the sudden my functional programming went hormonal up the wazoo and I get a baker's dozen of error messages written in a language that might as well be Swahili to me. And even the online help software doesn't help that much since most of is for the cheap method of data analysis with button clicks, etc., rather than just punching in code like I'm doing. I often am reminded as I type code of the old "punctuation substitution" concept born a few years back.

So I have to do it in little bits at a time. It takes me about 45 minutes to get burned out on it and I juggle in and out of the homework all the time. If you haven't noticed, my blog posts have risen dramatically since Spring break ended and I started up with this class and its related homework. Just a little peek into my day at the desk.