celebrate, celebrate, dance to the gray-ades

finals are over, i passed my classes (barely), and now the real fun begins. quals are in forty-nine days and counting. i've coordinated a biostat tutor (my genius friend justin) and organized my materials (a fantastic procastination technique), now i just have to dig in. i've been preparing all semester, but now it's crunch time.

two days of exams. three subjects: epidemiology, biostatistics, and health services research. level of importance to continuing in the phd program: critical.

my last final was last thursday. i didn't study at all for four whole days; i can feel my brain atrophy-ing already. i need a theme song to get me pumped up. all i can think of is the rocky song where he's getting ready for the big fight, his cute little old man trainer keeps appearing to him, he's running up stairs and doing his victory dance at the top. let me know if you have any other theme-song suggestions.

regardless of the song, there will be a victory dance on 8 july around five pm, followed by mental exhaustion and shutdown. bring it.

boxed hair color

i'm confused about celebrities that endorse boxed hair color. i feel fairly confident that celebrities do not use boxed hair color. i've used boxed hair color; it involves going to stores like target or wal-mart or cvs, picking out a color, and spending seven to eight dollars. and then the fun really begins. plastic gloves, smelly gels or pastes, and a plastic hair cap. if you're highlighting, there's a second plastic cap and a hair pick. you get to wear an old towel around your shoulders so as not to stain your shirt and you have to wait a certain length of time to let the color set before you wash it out. the point is, there's real work involved. and the result is not always pretty. i can name at least three people who have ended up with a green tint due to some interaction between the dye chemicals and the hair - and no, green was not the intended outcome. i'm not suggesting that celebrities are not just like us, that they don't shop at target and wal-mart and cvs, or that they don't perform their own beauty maintenance. i am, however, suggesting that when it comes to hair color, celebrities are more likely to go to a hair-care professional than to rely on their own skills and a boxed tincture. could it be that they are not endorsing the products because they use them, but for the money they receive in return? hmmm...

so, the plan tonight was to do homework but i'm staying at my sister's to take care of the dogs and they (the gibsons, not the dogs) have cable so i've sort of been watching tv instead of doing homework. hence the diatribe on hair color commercials.

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

sick poetry

sick and at home and laying down in my bed
there's pain in my chest and pain in my head
i'm cold and i'm hot, these symptoms in tandem
i hate this attack on my weak immune system

my left nostril drips while the right stays plugged up
i sneeze, my eyes tear, and if that's not enough
i've become a mouth breather so my tongue is all dry
and now the left's plugged and the drips on the right

went to work for an hour, didn't go to school
but i've got friends, so no worries, it's cool
thanks to netflix, i've watched 10 law and orders
detectives, you're being called to the judge's quarters

no time to be sick, i have too much to do
family's coming, homework, not scheduled this flu
no orange juice, no soup, no meds, no clean spoons
guess i'll just have to get well soon

spring break

so, so close. two and a half days. i mean, i have to work next week, but no classes. i almost get teary just thinking about it. ok, and i'll have homework to work on, but no classes. sigh.

everyone here at school is so ready for break and it shows. we come to class, walking slowly, only going into the classroom at the last minute. we're tired and grumpy and indifferent. had a mid-term exam on monday and the post-mortem discussions were decidedly lackluster. oh spring break, how we long for thee!

mom, dad, and sister arrive from so cal on saturday. haven't seen them since july. they say they're looking forward to seeing me, but come on, the only two grandchildren in the family live in middleton, you really think they're coming to see me? can't say i blame them, my favorite nephew and niece are the cutest children ever. hah! they thought they were so clever, waiting until the snow melted to visit; they don't know about the bicyclists.

winter showers bring spring cyclists

almost as bad as driving around snow is my newest challenge: driving around bicyclists. as the snow melts, hundreds of thousands of bicyclists emerge in madison, pedaling their way to and fro, enjoying the sunshine after the long winter months.* many are commuters, cycling to work and/or school, and were i to wear a hat, it would be off to their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint. others are serious bikers, wearing special biking clothes, helmets, shoes. a friend of mine here owns five bikes. seriously, who needs five bikes? but, you see, they're all different kinds of bikes. utility, racing, mountain, and variations therein. madisonians do not fool around when it comes to cycling. [to give my friend her props, she did have a tramatic bus ride last week - she got hit on by a toothless man and a blind woman sat on her lap. i'd ride a bike too if the bus was my alternative transportation.]

madison is a pretty friendly bike town. there are bike lanes on most major streets and most bicyclists are defensive drivers, but omg, there are just so many of them! to your right while you're driving, crossing the street while you're waiting to turn left, waiting at a stoplight next to you. and what happens when the bike lane ends? all of a sudden, you're sharing the road with them, you can't get too close to the car on your left, you don't want to hit the biker on your right, you find yourself gripping the steering wheel at 10 and 2 with white knuckles and a tension headache. the worst is when there's a right turn lane, a bike lane to its left, you're in the driving lane to the left of the bike lane, and you need to get into that right turn lane. you have to cross over the bike lane. i think i check my mirrors and over my shoulder, like forty-five times before i cross over.

oh! and you should see the looks the bicyclists give you! behind their special bicyclist sunglasses are eyes full of judgement. 'why don't you ride a bike?' they ask. 'why are you driving a car, polluting our environment, not being healthy and exercising like me?' my eyes send messages right back. 'why don't you move to madison from los angeles where no one rides their bikes or takes the bus because the roads aren't pedestrian friendly and the bus system stinks? how do you have enough time to ride a bike or take the bus which takes three to four times longer than driving your own car? oh, not in a phd program and studying sixteen hours a day? excuse me while i cross over your bike lane.'

so, yet another challenge, albeit one i can definitely handle. although, come to think about it, when i was learning to drive around snow, i did hit a car...bicyclists beware.

*these numbers have not been verified

winter's legacy

it's not yet spring, but the snow has mostly melted, leaving in it's wake mushy brown sod. like a receding hairline, the white blanket of frozen matter slowly changed from a solid to a liquid state, revealing, inch by inch, lawns, parks, those strips of land between the sidewalk and the street, landscaping long forgotten.

but there's snow that doesn't melt. heat doesn't melt it. rain doesn't melt it. sodium chloride doesn't melt it. black snow. snow that sits in piles along the streets and in parking lots. snow that has become so mixed with exhaust fumes and other pollutants, it is no longer recognizable as the pretty white snow it once was. what will it take to make this snow go away? how long will it take? and where will it go?

(picture courtesy of google images)

oh wisconsin, what have you gotten yourself into

well, it's official: i'm official. officially a wisconsinite. i finally made it to the dmv today, while it was open and with all of the necessary documents. i'll get my new wisconsin driver's license by mail in 7-10 days. in the meantime, i have a 'driver's receipt' to carry around. it's pretty not awesome and i was very sad to relinquish my california driver's license. as far as the title for my car, because i didn't bring in my current title, and apparently, there's some law that you can only have one title per car at any given time, i got to pay for a wisconsin title but i didn't actually receive a wisconsin title. i didn't even get a 'title receipt'! the very nice woman behind the counter did say, however, that if i bring in my california title and pay the dmv another $5, they'll give me the wisconsin title. finally, wisconsin license plates. these, i actually walked out of the dmv with. haven't put them on my car yet (what! i just got home, like 10 minutes ago!) but i have them. can't complain about the wait at the dmv, it really wasn't bad. i will however complain about the $177.50 that the three transactions cost. ridiculous.

so there it is, i'm a wisconsin resident with wisconsin license plates, a wisconsin title (theoretically) and a wisconsin driver's license, i mean, receipt. i've even made it through most of my first wisconsin winter (i think 40 degrees sounds heavenly warm). the only thing left is to develop a love for beer, brats (bratwursts), and cheese curds.

i might have to be ok with living on the fringe of wisconsin society.

smell my breath

dentists, dental hygenists, dentist office secretaries who wear scrubs, my friend kristin. for years i've been hearing about the wonderful blessings that will be bestowed upon one's teeth if only one will use an electric toothbrush. sonicare, oral-b, doesn't matter. the key is the vibrating brush that properly hits all the surfaces of your teeth for a full two minutes.

so, you guessed it, this weekend i got my very own electric toothbrush. this morning, i used it for the first time. i put toothpaste on the brush, turned it on, and proceeded to fling toothpaste all over the bathroom. my second attempt involved putting the toothpaste on the vibrating brush really, really close to my open mouth. tonight i'll try turning on the brush after i put the brush in my mouth (thanks, kristin - genius!).

so to get everything brushed proportionally and for a full two minutes, you're supposed to brush outer upper for 30 seconds, inner upper for 30 seconds, outer lower for 30 seconds, and inner lower for 27 seconds. just kidding! 30 seconds. there's supposed to be a 'beep' (onomatopoeia!) to notify you of the 30-second mark. apparently, i missed all of the beeps because the toothbrush shut off and i was still on the upper outers - they got a really good cleaning. i thought it seemed like a really long 30 seconds, but who am i to question an electric toothbrush?

so, who knew? there's a learning curve for electric-toothbrush use. despite my inability to master my new toothbrush right out of the box, my teeth felt really clean so i couldn't have screwed up too badly. is it wrong to feel so victorious?