bookface

jim halpert: yes, i am the popular social networking site known as bookface.

so, i'm not sure if you've heard of this phenomenon sweeping the nation, but it's called facebook. oh, you have heard of it? you have your own page? you check the site every couple of hours to see what witty new comments one of your friends might have made? to add expositions of your own? do you think about it when you're away from a computer? longing to log in and check what's going on? to see who has newly befriended who or to note who else is logged on for an 'instant chat'. oh sure, you act nonchalant while you're away from the site, but inside, you're counting the minutes until you can get back there. sometimes, you don't even realize you've logged on until you're there, halfway through the last fifteen minute's banter. you think you can stop anytime, but you can't. and the truth is, you don't want to.

i'm not judging, i'm one of you! just tonight, i was struck again by the pull of this website. in between vacuuming and cleaning the bathrooms, cooking dinner (ok, reheating leftovers) and reading for school, i kept coming back to my laptop and hitting f5 to refresh the screen and see if there was any new news.

i didn't used to be this way. up until a couple of months ago, i logged on to facebook about once every three months. but then i started making friends here in madison and i started getting 'friend requests'. i logged on and accepted the requests. for those of you who don't know (which is probably none of you), this is how the whole networking thing works: when joe becomes friends with jane, his page notifies the world that 'joe is now friends with jane'. all of joe's current friends see this new friendship and those who know jane and are not current facebook friends with jane send jane friend requests. this chain of event continues until jane has six thousand friends, making jane feel very popular. jane, i mean, i added four new friends, just today.

and so the madness continues. with an increase in friends comes an increase in notifications - every time one of your friends updates his/her page, comments on your 'wall', is looking for a farm animal, becomes friends with someone new, sends you a message, gets tagged in a photo, etc., you receive a notification (case in point: i just found out my sister is attending a lia sophia jewelry party). if you have a blackberry like me, or some other type of smartphone, your phone doesn't stop vibrating or ding-donging (onomatopoeia!) all day. as an added bonus, facebook allows you to poke people whenever you want. really! i've never done it, but there it is, a 'poke' button. 'poke kristin', 'poke john', 'poke rachel'. poke poke poke. am i the only one who thinks that's weird?

in case any of this sounds negative, i think facebook is great. it's a quick and easy way to stay in touch with everyone you know and have ever known and everyone they have ever known and, let's not forget, there's always the option to poke one another.

pretty little stick bush

it's a beautiful day in madison. i had the pleasure of enjoying it as i walked the fifteen feet from my car to the door of my office building. spring has definitely arrived. there's this stick bush outside my garage door (at home, not work) that i haven't been able to figure out the value of until this morning. every day for months, i would look at this brown bush of sticks in the morning when i left my house and in the evening when i returned and wonder, why does the property management keep this? the only thing i could figure was that the ground this bare and stick-ly bush sticks up from is covered in rocks, so it must not require much maintenance. and then this morning, as i pulled out of my garage, i glanced over at the stick bush and to my surprise, it was covered with pretty green leaves. so now i have a pretty little stick bush outside my garage. this season thing, i kindof like it.

logistic regression for dummies

yesterday on my way home from meeting with justin, my bff and e and e and e (and biostatistics genius hero), i stopped by borders to see if they had a 'logistic regression for dummies' book. the very tattooed, very hot guy at customer service said, logistic regression, that would be math, right? i responded with, that would be math from he**. he said they don't have a math from he** section at borders. turns out, there is no logistic regression for dummies book. the hot guy said if i was doing logistic regression, i probably wasn't a dummy. oh, go on. no, really, go on.

the picture is of me and my one-dollar garden gnome, purchased from target this morning. i received a gift card to target as a present to commemorate the day of my birth and i found myself buying all practical, necessary items so the mini garden gnome was my just-for-fun purchase. see? i'm a wild and crazy gal. i don't even have a garden.

rick, rick, rick, rick

e-mail received last evening from my quantitative methods professor regarding our current homework assignment [my comments are in brackets]:

"1. Problem 1 Part d) asks about estimating an odds ratio in the presence of an interaction. This is quite similar to problems discussed with respect to ordinary least squares (except we exponentiate the effect after we calculate it). However, Part e) asks for a confidence interval. For that we need the variance of the estimated effect (estimated log odds ratio). This is a weighted sum of coefficients. The following formula (contained in the book, but not so conveniently accessible) is useful for the variance of a weighted sum of correlated random variables. Call the random variables "B1" and "B2". The weights are real numbers denoted a1 and a2. Then:

Var(a1B1 + a2B2) = Var(B1)*(a1**2) + Var(B2)*(a2**2) + a1*a2*2*Cov(B1, B2)

The variances are listed on the diagonal of the estimated variance covariance matrix given on p. 683; the off-diagonal elements are the covariances. []

2. Problem 3 Part a) asks about conditional vs. unconditional logistic regression. Conditional logistic regression is usually applied to paired or matched data (matching is a generalization of pairing). These data are not paired; however, conditional logistic regression can also be used to give more precise results when the sample size is small. I think that the authors are aiming at this second use here. [clearly]

3. Although Problem 3 Parts f) and g) ask you to calculate something similar to what you did in Problem 1 Part d), you aren't given the covariance matrix. Please skip these two parts of Problem 3. [while seemingly generous on his part, i'd like to point out that problem 3 has parts a through m!!]

Rick Chappell"

and now i hope you realize why i'm a wee bit worried about the qualifying exam.

scent memory

many, many moons ago - like, maybe, 324, 325 - i had a strawberry shortcake doll. i didn't have her friends, blueberry muffin and lemon meringue, but i knew girls who did. strawberry shortcake's big draw was that she was supposed to smell like strawberries. and she did, sort of. overly sweet, plastic-y strawberries - more plastic than strawberry. i remember her shoes came off and her stockings were green and white striped all the way to her toes. her hat did not come off and i suspect that was the source of her parfum de plastique (and strawberries). i hadn't thought about my doll in a long, long time until i walked into the ladies' room at work a while ago and the memory-inducing scent of plastic strawberries assailed me. i don't know the source, don't want to know the source, but i instantly recalled my little strawberry shortcake doll. then i came back to my desk, did some research on the link between scents and memories, found a picture of ss, and wrote this nonconsequential post. anything to avoid homework!

jose, can you see?

yesterday i went to the opthamologist for my three-month follow up exam. both retinas are still attached, i'm happy to report. some of you may be amused to hear that the doctor caught me using her magnifying glass to examine a scratch on my hand, but this was definitely not the most entertaining part of my visit.

as per normal modus operandi, i was first called in by a nurse/assistant who asked me a bunch of questions; took my blood pressure; tried to engage me in a friendly chat; dropped liquid into my eyes, which proceeded to run down the back of my throat, so gross; and finally, took me back to the waiting room to let the dilation drops work their magic before the doctor saw me. if you've ever had your eyes dilated, you'll know that your vision gets blurry and you can't read anything, which is a bit of a bummer because i really wanted to read cataracts weekly and aarp the magazine. oh, didn't i mention? i was the only one under the age of sixty in the waiting room. i may not have been able to read but i could still see the lumps of carbon mass sitting about, many with eye patches. so not fair, by the way. i didn't get an eye patch after my surgeries. fortunately, the television mounted in the corner of the waiting room was blasting (loudly, i suppose, for the hearing-impaired elderly demographic) the view so i had the pleasure of listening to four women banter - and oh, how i wish i could describe it as intelligent or witty - for a good thirty-five painful minutes until i was called in to see the doctor. i had one blessed moment of comical relief when a commercial came on playing the isley's brothers' song, who's that lady? and a guy sitting a few seats away from me, maybe mid-forties, started mouthing the words - who's that lady? sexy lady! and kindof moving around like he was dancing - all while pretending to read his magazine. fortunately, i, too, was pretending to read a magazine even though my eyes were too dilated to see the words, so i was able to cover my face so he wouldn't see me laughing at him. if you guessed that he was wearing a gold chain necklace, you would be right.

i go back in six months. after that, i'll only have to see my regular eye doctor, no more opthamologist. i'm gonna miss that waiting room. old people greeting each other by name; men slumped over, sleeping in their chairs until their wives elbow them awake. 'honey, it's your turn!' 'what?' 'they called your name, wake up!!'; complaints about the free coffee running out. sigh.

who's that lady? sexy lady!

hello again

every good blog writer knows that she must post something fairly frequently in order not to lose readers' interest. when i was reminded today by a reader that i had not posted in almost two weeks, i was faced with a dilemma. do i write something simply for the sake of posting and risk disappointing readers with something banal and forced? or do i wait until i have something good to write about and risk disappointing (all three) readers by making them wait even longer? so i wracked my brain for something to write about, a funny anecdote, a witty joke, a clever way to tell an otherwise boring story. i ended up with a weather report (it snowed last night) and an update on the courses i've selected for summer and fall. needless to say, i care too much about all of you to post that so it's been deleted. there was something funny about a re-cap but since i was writing about it for the first time, it was really a cap, but the context is too long to explain, so you'll just have to trust me that it was funny, you would have laughed.

obviously i decided to write something just for the sake of writing something. school's back in session, the semester's winding down, and there are 89 days left before the first day of the qualifying exam. i'm on day three of a tension headache and i suspect, by the end of 8 july, i'll be on day ninety-four. "one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. this coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, i found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year." - albert einstein