Validation

I like it when what I think is true about the world is corroborated by a much more systematic view of the literature. I always have this fear I'm missing some major article, and it appears I'm not when it comes to HIV-related stigma.

I took a break from data analysis (which I'm redoing in a different way) because I just hit total frustration with the way some of this data works out... there's a question on the survey about whether the respondent used a condom the last time they had sex followed very shortly by a question asking how often the person uses condoms. You would not believe the number of people who say they used a condom last time but then say they never use condoms and, worse, the number who say they didn't use a condom last time followed by saying they always use condoms. OMG, are you not listening to your own answers! Never mind the big hunk of missing data I can't account for at all, other than people didn't want to answer the question.

So instead I'm reading, because that is way less frustrating and I have a huge pile.

Vacation has been good so far. We've mostly been bumming around, eating and shopping. We've re-devoted ourselves to making our way through the Sopranos (I already watched it all, but Joey has not). We're not doing anything fancy for New Year's Eve, just going to a tasty local Italian joint and then partying at home.

The New Year will bring attempts at: 1) real weight loss; 2) getting these manuscripts out the door because they are actually going to fill some gaps in the literature; 3) writing up a real research plan for my next study instead of having some vague notions of what might be nice.

Seriously

Data analysis has to be done carefully.  Otherwise it has to be redone.  And redone.

Chrome!

Holy hell is Google Chrome so much better than the ancient broken version of IE that is installed on my work computer!  It's probably also better than the newer version that ought to be on here.  I'm just glad it installed without the need for admin privs... I'm just going to assume I'm not breaking any regs by using a more secure browser.  Seriously, though, try it out if you haven't already.  It's so fast.

I'm still working on this damn paper.  Instead of writing, which is what I thought I'd be doing today, I fired up SPSS to check some things in the analysis.  Oh, there are so many things in the analysis that bother me, now that I actually look at it.  I'm going to try to tidy some things, but I don't think the analysis will change substantially.  SPSS is extremely easy to use, but there are some places where I'm looking for functionality that exists in Stata and I'm not finding it.  It may be that I just don't know what I'm doing, but it's also likely that SPSS is just not super sophisticated.

I'm glad I'm going over the paper with a fine-toothed comb, however... there are some clear wtf moments that I think reviewers might notice.

This week is going by a little too slowly for my tastes.  I really can't wait to get out of town.

Buttons!

One of the buttons popped off my coat late last winter season, and I just ignored it (despite how dumb it looked) until another button popped off last week (with a third button looking pretty shady). Now, it would help immensely if I hadn't gotten so, well, immense since I purchased the coat. It's now a snug fit. This morning I saw that Amazon had coats on sale, and nearly decided just to buy a new coat.

But in these internetting times there's really no excuse for not making such an easy repair -- I figured out everything I needed to know online in about 10 minutes, I dug up some sewing floss (threads wound together for things like cross-stitch so you can actually see it) and got those three buttons back on there good. Success! So now my coat works again, even though it's still a little snug, but that's a different problem.

Last night we went to Baltimore for a number of social activities. We met up at Maggie's with Joe's soc friends, and then we went to dinner for my friend's birthday (which was actually Monday, but she had horrible grant writing to do all that day). Then Joe and I went back to Maggie's before going back home. Baltimore is great when you spend 2/3 of your time there at Maggie's. Today we went grocery shopping, thus getting maximum utility out of the ZipCar. I'm kinda missing having my own car, though, and I'm pondering whether to get it fix now that it's been a few months since the last repairs, instead of an insulting three weeks. I still wouldn't drive it to work, since that commute is very hard on a car and the bus is easy enough (when it comes predictably) and gives me exercise. But it'd be nice to have it for errands and such. I dunno, we'll see.

This week is the last actually at work, and then I'm going to NJ for 2 weeks! I have to "work at home" three days in there somewhere, which should be easy enough with Joe hacking away at his dissertation. It should be otherwise relaxing.

R.I.P. H.M.

Henry Gustav Molaison, thanks for the memories!

Mid-week

I'm already looking forward to the next vacation! I want some more eggplant!

The ceiling has finally been fully restored to my office, so I think they must be completely done in here. Nothing is coming out of the heater despite my requests to the thermostat I now have in here, but it's not actually that cold -- I'm just a big baby. Now that I have a ceiling and no evening visitors to wreck my stuff, I reassembled my lamp (I hid it in a drawer because it was constantly being moved, including once out into the hallway). During the ceiling mess they installed a motion sensor on my light, which would be useful if I had a strong interest in using my light. Now that I have a ceiling for the lamp to reflect off of, I'd prefer to go back to that. I had to cover the sensor so that the overhead fluorescent grossness wouldn't click on everytime I wiggled in my chair. Now my office is cozy again.

Too cozy... I'm feeling sleepy.

I need to get this paper out the door. It really just needs some updates, but I'm finding myself tortured by some of the language we used in the paper, which is slowing me down some. Also the abstract is deeply flawed, and I don't understand why journals only give you 150 words. Gotta get pithy, I guess.

And I usually like red

Starbucks is doing this Red campaign thing where they donate $.05 for every eligible drink you buy to combat HIV/AIDS. But they're pitching it as some reason to get more coffee than you usually would. How about you just donate your $2-4 to a decent HIV foundation or NGO instead of buying extra coffee?

I think the train is going to be nuts this evening. But I got my lecture done and mailed out for tomorrow, so I can just relax and read magazines.

Victory!

Seats opened up on an early evening train tomorrow, so we get to goof off tonight as late as we want and still get home at a reasonable hour tomorrow!

This means I better work on that lecture, though...

Saturday already?

Thursday was pretty much the usual family craziness. A lot of eating and drinking! We were all at Joe's parents' house for Thanksgiving, and for Christmas we'll go to the shore.

Yesterday Joe and I went out around 2:30, and it was still pretty nuts at the centers of shopping. I feel like when we went out last year to the outlets, it was dead because everyone went super early. I got some presents for the boy (which he pretty much saw/brought to my attention in the first place), but the deals weren't good enough yet for personal shopping. We came home and then went out to dinner at Villa Mannino, where we ordered our usual vodka rigatoni and eggplant parm. So delicious.

I don't know what we're up to yet today, but I'm sad we have to leave so early tomorrow morning. I checked the trains last night to see if we could switch to other options, but the entire middle of the day is booked, and everything is much more expensive than what I paid for the tickets. It's okay, I have to finish up a lecture for the proposal/project class for Monday, and it'll be easier to do it at home than on vacay.

I can't work when it feels like vacation, whereas the boy can poke at his dissertation whenever he has five minutes (which he usually stretches to ten or more, as I wait around). That's either healthy or tenure-killing.

In da Jerz for turkey day

The train was pretty awful last night... we took the last one out, and it was 2 hours late into the station, but they switched engines fast so we were only ("only") an hour late out, so we got to Trenton by 2 am. We pretty much instantly collapsed upon reaching home.

Today we went to Mastoris and then did very little. I even took a nap.

This stuff in India is very bad.

I think tomato pie is on the roster for tonight.

Counting down

I can't wait to go to NJ tomorrow night and have some vacay!

Today went by fast, since I had meetings straight through until 2:30. We're searching for a new chair (maybe... the search includes the current chair, who retired from the PHS, triggering a new chair search, because bureaucracy is awesome), so today and tomorrow there are meetings with the candidates and their job talks. Today I also gave the first half of my scintillating wisdom on survey design and implementation. Busy days are good because they move me quickly to vacay!

Tomorrow I'm going to try to shlep to the Comcast place up in Rockville so they stop charging me for the cable box I'm not using. It requires all sorts of transit.

I had to stop watching Hardball tonight because it's become all about the depressing economic situation. The election was way more fun!

Go Harvard! Beat yale!

1) I'm sad to miss the H-y game. This is the first season I didn't make it to a football game.

2) Then again, 23F feels like 14F? Maybe I'm not that sad to miss it. Jameson can only do so much.

It's cold here in the DC area too (although still about 10 degrees warmer). I think today is going to involve staying inside under the electric blanket and tomorrow I'll go out shopping when it's warmer.

I guess I should also finish my slides on survey methods.

Today is annoying

My bus never came, as far as I can tell (I was late, but there were people waiting there when I arrived). The long bus came and promptly ate my $5 that I tried to add to my SmarTrip card that will have $30 whenever the transfer from my old broken card happens (after which I have to do some magic incantation at a Metro stop machine to get it into the card). Then the bus sat at the stop for ages.

Comcast raised the DVR price just a month or so after I ordered it. They also started charging all kinds of crazy fees that I think must be because I haven't returned the old box because I don't have an easy way to get all the way out to far out Rockville (public transit take like a half hour from work, I just discovered). They're charging me like $6/month for the box to sit in a corner collecting dust.

It's effing cold out and I'm tired.

Shows

Pushing Daisies is great and I really don't want it to get cancelled.

The Office... oh! So cute! I have such life stage congruence with that show right now.

Fixed my chair!

A week or so ago, I set out to determine why my office chair was so damn uncomfortable. The seat was all pitched forward, and I couldn't get it to move. Today I opted for the brute force step-on method, and it worked! Now I don't have to scheme how to make this chair blend into a conference room when I swap it for one of the nice chairs there.

Bureaucracy

I need a computer that is not only way more functional than this clunker on my desk but that is also filled with delicious statistical software, so I can, like, do stuff. Research office folks say that comes from finance; department chair says it comes out of my startup funds, which research office is currently holding in an unknowable status.

I'm determined to push this paperwork through the system! I finished it a long time ago!

In other news, my office still has no ceilings, but I've started to be able to tune out much of the surrounding office chatter. It remains absolutely freezing, however. I hope today's faculty meeting is in a warmer room. I'm going to have to bring my new electric blanket into work.

I got my blood drawn Tuesday for a variety of tests, and all was normal except that I have high total cholesterol. Five years ago when I was participating in the diet study, I had totally low cholesterol. It's gone up like 70 points! Then again, I am a lot fatter. But I've lost weight since I started incorporating like 3 miles of walking into my commute, right? False. I'm not eating any more than I was, as far as I can tell. It's bs.

I just found out today that the Prez might possibly maybe give us feds the day after Christmas off. This would help a lot in my pusuit of 2 weeks away from the office with only 4 accrued vacation days. I'm excited to go to the Jerz for Thanksgiving next week, despite my disbelief that it's already next week!

This just in: As of tonight, all USB storage devices aren't going to work on any of our computers. Awkward. I don't know why DOD cna't put us on our own network so we can act like a University.

Ask a lot, give a lot, get a lot

Today was the last day of class, and I've gotten some really nice comments from people about the course and my work. Most of them include some version of "it was hard," but that this was not necessarily a downside. I got a little feedback before the class suggesting that I may want to dampen my expectations of the class, that I might be demanding too much. But this experience, building on my prior experience, is that high expectations -- not just asking for a lot but also communicating the expectation that the students are capable of pushing themselves to achieve a lot -- are generally more associated with good classes than setting an expectation of easiness. A key element to making that equation work, however, is giving a lot: I worked my ass off to get this course together, and it showed.

I hated in grad school when the professor would say, "Oh, I fully expect everyone to get an A in this course if they work hard" or "Oh, this class is pretty low-key." Maybe there was some social desirability issue there (like me! like me!) or some attempt not to scare off people from other departments. I hated even more the courses where the professor didn't seem prepared or didn't seem to care about getting the syllabus up on the web by the first day or about providing extra help to students who wanted it.

The best courses were those in which the professor was prepared -- or at least apologetic when things weren't quite up to speed, which happens -- and in which the bar was set high. My advisor's class is a great example of this, and I completely stole his grading philosophy: A perfectly competent job will get you a B. To get an A, you have to show innovation, mastery, and a strong sense of having pushed yourself to think things through. Instead of wondering and whining about points getting taken off from 100, people worried instead about how to add points to the defaul tof 85, how to go above and beyond. The grade distributions ended up pretty similar in the end, but the actual product and process of creating it was vastly different.

I think another characteristic that comes from giving a lot and asking a lot is that it engenders a lot of mutual respect. You don't ask a lot out of people when you don't have a lot of respect for them. Students know that, and they reflect back the respect they intuitively feel themselves receiving.

So, I'm sure not all the evaluations will be glowing, but I'm certain that the criticisms will reflect a norm of high expectations (you've done a lot and we know you can do more) and a tone of respect.

Teaching is hard, but fun

Teaching is going well, all things considered. The class is really working hard. This first go feels like a rough draft, though: everyday I think of a ton of ways to improve it for next year. More when I'm not buried under grading (note to self: next year, halve the homework assignments).

Busy bees

Things have been busy, with moving and planning my class and all. Moving is always painful; combining households into a place with no storage is doubly so; not getting all your friends to help shlep boxes is triply so. But the commute to work is greatly reduced and much more pleasant. It's good to get out of Baltimore.

Today I had lunch with the boss. She liked my syllabus a lot and said she could tell it was a lot of work, which made me feel happy, because it was a lot of work, and I really think it's pretty good. I borrowed a lot of readings and will borrow a lot of lecture points from the classes I took at JHSPH (particularly my advisor's class in terms of grading philosophy and the final paper), but I think I managed to synthesize a wide range of important stuff. It's been a fun exercise, because working on the dissertation gets you so drilled down into one topic, it's nice to have to go back and think about the entire field again with a more experienced eye.

Making lectures is hard, though.

Submitted!

I ran around like a crazy person today trying to get my dissertation submitted. First I had to make some last-minute updates to the Table of Contents (utilizing the This Page Left Unintentionally Blank technique for a figure I removed so I wouldn't have to get copyright permission for it). Then I had to find acid-free paper. The campus bookstore had two sad little 100-page packs (good for one manuscript, but I needed two on acid-free), but they kindly directed me to printing services on the outskirts of campus. Paper secured I printed one copy and took it to the library, where it was deemed okay by the very nice woman in the binding office.

I came home to print the other three copies, with time running short on the 4pm deadline to get it in to the registrar. So, of course, right at the beginning of the last on the toner started going on the printer. I zoomed to Staples and back, printed the last copy, and jetted over to school, raging at traffic. But I got to the office at a quarter to four... and they asked if I could come back Monday, because the grad records person wasn't in. Which I knew, but I figured I could still drop it off. The other woman at the desk said, oh, write the check and we'll just put it on her desk and she'll send you a receipt later. Yay!

I went to the department to turn in a bunch of receipts and stuff. It was sort of sad because I won't be seeing people as often.

Then I got ice cream! Good thing they got an ice cream cart at school after I leave! I don't need it!