Wintersmith comes out tomorrow. I know I really shouldn't, but I confess right now: the temptation will prove to be too much, and that will be another afternoon/evening spent not working. My ruin is nigh.

irb application update II

11 pages, 13 with figures. i have to find a good place in van pelt where i can sit down and write. the cafe tables wobble as i type, the study carrels are too depressing, and the undergrad study areas have people walking in and out and yakking away on their cell phones and making general nuisances of themselves. as for other places, the other green line is too comfy (and i want it to be associated with reading fun things), and home doesn't work as i thought it would (the siren song of downloaded tv shows is too, too strong).

notes to self:
- add more figures, especially ones that take up lots of space
- at some point, the statistics section has to be written, so it may as well be soon
- blogging about it is not counted as progress

ignore if you hate math

-- and help me if you can.

say i have a function that is composed of (a) a sinusoidal component, (b) an increasing linear trend, and (c) gaussian noise. i don't want to make any assumptions about the phase of the sine wave, but i do have a definite value of its frequency.

i) how do i remove (a) from the function so that i can plot some sort of regression line through the residuals (and thus estimate (b) and find the variance of (c)).
ii) what's the easiest program in which i can do this calculation in large batches (say 120 datasets)?
iii) if i want now to say that the function is composed of a small number (n; say 1< n <4) of sin/cos waves + (b) + (c); is there an inverse fourier decomposition that works sort of like principal component analysis (in that it removes only the n waves of lowest frequency) while leaving the linear trend (and whatever other noise) intact?

(i'm not sure i expect to get any answer for this, but there can be miracles.)

#34 - Amazon.com and all accompanying goodies (especially free shipping and $0.99 used paperbacks)

#32

(With apologies if you know this story)

When I was 8, our family, and a group of other Catholics, mostly strangers, went on a trip to Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia (I think it falls into Bosnia now, but it may be Herzegovina). I suppose that for most of the adults it was a pilgrimage, but when you’re in Primary 3, the spiritual gains are incidental, and the primary force that hits you in a place like that is wonder. I had been to Europe, of course, but I think this was the first time in my life I felt like I was going someplace truly foreign: somewhere rural, somewhere with a polysyllabic name, somewhere where other the kids in school had never gone or even contemplated going.

We were put up, with a few other people, by a Bosnian family who spoke precious little English. My room had no adjoining bathroom, and every morning I had to scurry out with bare feet on the freezing cold ceramic tiles of the balcony outside so I could brush my teeth and get ready for the day. We always had to get up early – breakfast was served and cleared away punctually and remorselessly, and daily Mass dictated the schedule for the morning. We went in summer, and I remember the weather being gorgeous, day after day, riotous amounts of sunshine beaming through cool, unsullied air. On the way to church, we picked hawthorn berries, and ate them, first delicately, being city-slickers, then with more gusto when by the second day no one had keeled over. On the way back, the roadside food stalls would have opened, selling their hybrid Italian-Eastern European cuisine – lots of tomato dishes and pizza with an entire garden on it. And at night, our host family cooked for us – we always began with chicken noodle soup and unbelievably fresh bread, followed by an entrée – fish, or pasta – and a simple sweet. The meal was wholesome, and good, and very communal: lots of talk and laugher, or beaming from the parties who didn’t speak the language.

Mass, as I said, was daily, and the services at St. James not truncated like what we’re used to, but full-blown affairs. Some days we even went twice. It’s funny, but the more time I spend in church, the less impatient I am to leave it – or maybe it was because at the time there was nothing much to leave it to, except for my books and word searches (there certainly weren’t any other kids along on the trip). We climbed Mount Podbrdo – where the apparitions of the Virgin Mary reportedly occurred – and Mount Krizevac, where villagers had erected an impressive twenty-foot concrete cross. There was nothing else up those hills but treacherous terrain and the offerings of pilgrims, silence, and an aura of the sacrosanct. Climbing them was tough-going for an eight-year-old, but being at the top, even amidst all that nothingness, was strangely worth the ascent.

I’ve written all of this down because Medjugorje is one of the places I go in my mind when I need a bit of solace. It’s odd – I can’t be confident that I was happy while I was there – in fact I have rather little recollection of my emotional experience of the pilgrimage – and yet revisiting the place in memory does give me a sense of profound well-being. So – it gets to be #32, and as a bonus, I’ll tell you that #33 was this other, more recent trip to Redang, which I often think about, particularly things like SAFETY IS AT YOUR OWN RISK, and kayaking with the Other Brother on the most perfect day imaginable

:)

my paper has been accepted! *happy dance*

flying spaghetti monster

so brilliant it hurts.

irb application update

six single-spaced pages for the actual proposal, lots of italics for stuff that i'm not sure of, and big yawning gaps for things TBD and F[somebody's]NAP and suchlike. and a fugly .tiff file that needs a lot of work, but which got thrown in there because putting in figures means you've been Hardworking. addenda: descriptions of tasks, platitudes such as HIPAA, the canned version of why MRI scans won't fry your insides, or why PSG won't plant false memories in your head while you sleep.

there's a preliminary meeting tomorrow where all this junk (hopefully) gets assembled into some sort of a coherent structure. on the one hand: yay; on the other, i know that massive rewrites are coming up, and also at least a dozen things that i've missed/ignored. a working draft by friday is not happening, and i have reading to do for tomorrow, and i've just spent an hour on skype not to mention ten minutes typing out this incredibly uninteresting entry.

additions

yes, the poll idea may be a very stupid one, and i'll pull it if it gets boring, but in the mean time the lure of cute little radio buttons was irresistible.

it struck me at dinner today (nara: good japanese food -- uni even! -- but pricey) -- i can actually have interesting conversations with the other first-years in my department. and not just about psychology, also on topics that i could never, ever hope to talk about with so many other people (excluding you guys, and you, and you, and also you). the disconnect that i sometimes experienced at duke -- where i felt so culturally different from a lot of my classmates, particularly the americans -- that's disappeared...and i think (perhaps because of being more mature?) we have all tacitly tarred that over with the culture of being interested in each other. i can't even begin to tell you how excited this makes me, because getting along with random people, i've learned how to do that, but sitting down with someone and weaving a tapestry, playing a duet, knowing not just the chords but the harmonic possibilities: that's something you don't often find, and something you learn to treasure.

red tape

the first draft of my project proposal is due next friday, so It officially Starts. the honeymoon was nice, though, and longer than expected. the accelerator gets stepped on in psychology not because of reading (unlike in the humanities), but because of the logistics of working with human subjects -- U.S. institutions in particular make you jump through an infuriating number of hoops before you can so much as lay eyes on a human volunteer (we have the nazis to thank for this, by the way). i am glad, though, that it's not reading that i'm going to be crushed by -- vic tells me that he burns through about 600-700 pages of text a week, and although i'm sure that minz will tell me this is not uncommon, it is nonetheless staggering and not a thing i'd particularly relish doing.

the first-year project is due in may '07, which is a pretty short time, particularly for a multi-day imaging study. i foresee: 2-3 months for planning/back-and-forthing on the IRB and 3 months for data collection, minus the christmas break, which leaves frighteningly little time for analysis and writing. all this for a study that will likely not even be publishable because we will not yet have enough subjects for a random-effects analysis at the end of it. this is rather frustrating -- i'm used to having the peripheral bureaucratic annoyances kept to a minimum so that i can focus on the actual data, but penn apparently believes in such irrelevancies as "sharing equipment" and "ethics".

it is rather discomfiting when bits of the city you live in start blowing up.


the temperature crept its way down into the 50s today. for all its promise of good insulation, this apartment keeps in no heat whatsoever. this probably means that somewhere down the road, there will be a slice of time before the day central heating comes on in which staying indoors will be intolerable. (not that i'm unaccustomed to this.)

in any case, this was incentive to stay in the lab for most of the day, where i was good and read all my perfusion papers, even though i didn't understand half of what i was reading. i think i need to sit down with someone who knows this stuff and just spend an entire day asking him questions, because right now i'm sure that misconceptions are sprouting in my head like toadstools after rain. geoff aguirre or john detre would be nice, but i will settle for lesser beings as long as they know what they are talking about.

i was in the kitchen today chopping vegetables when it suddenly occurred to me that the last time i had done that i was being ordered around by su-lin amidst general chaos. chopping is not usually my job, but i was early to that dinner. my hands had smelled of onions for days after that -- i don't know if this happens to everybody, but no matter how much i wash the odor lingers with extraordinary tenacity. it stayed with me on the plane ride, and only disappeared a day or two after i arrived here, a frail olfactory filament dissipating with exquisite slowness as i made my way around the world.

#31 - Without a doubt, the Internet: for its ridiculous cornucopia of free entertainment, for putting infinite space in a nutshell, for being the enchanted place.

From The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg:

A conscientious journal keeper is really the natural historian of his own life. His model is the amateur naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers like Gilbert White or collectors like George Eliot's Camden Farebrother. It often seems as though science in this century has little use anymore for amateur observers of this kind, that science has grown too institutional, too complex, to value the private watcher of a small patch of ground. It seems that way too when it comes to our own lives. They're cross-referenced, indexed, cataloged, and witnessed by the public and private institutions whose job it is to tabulate and codify us. Even the task of introspection has been jobbed out to the professionals. A personal journal in our time comes to seem less like a valuable cache of perceptions than a naive recitation of symptoms that the wroter lacks the authority to analyze.

But many of the great journals - I think especially of Samuel Pepys' seventeenth-century diary and James Boswell's eighteenth-century journal - are not marked by self-consciousness. They're marked by a dogged absence of self-consciousness, a willingness to suspend judgment of the journal itself, if not of its author, in order to keep the enterprise going. The value of Pepys's diary and Boswell's journal is the world they depict and only incidentally the depiction of their authors. Their journals weren't read until long after the authors had died. Both men wrote for an audience of one. Judging by my own fragmentary journals, that's one too many. It's not enough that I should be dead before anyone else reads them. I should be dead before I reread them myself.

#30 - Bach

Sleeping Beauty problem

Sleeping Beauty agrees to take part in an experiment in which the following things take place.

Sunday:
Researchers give Sleeping Beauty a drug that puts her to sleep. They then flip a fair coin.

Monday:
Sleeping Beauty is woken up. She is then adminisered a memory-erasing drug and put back to sleep, (without any memory of being awakened).

Tuesday:
If the coin flip came up tails, Sleeping Beauty is woken up again, and again put back to sleep.

Wednesday:
Sleeping Beauty is woken up, and the experiment is over.

When Sleeping Beauty is woken up for the first time, what should her degree of belief be (as a fraction) that the coin toss came up heads?

(If you care, you can check out current opinion on the answer here, and here, and finally here.)

can i just say, von, that i really very much envy your gastronomic adventures -- there is unbelievably good food in center city, or so i am told, but i will have to take it on faith until i find some rich patrons (now accepting applications).

in case you have not done so already

you should, indeed, go here, and click on it. it reminds me very much of the time when the other brother and i were trying to come up with lyrics for "there is a whiteness in god's mercy".

justifying my decision (to myself) (again)

there was a cookout today next to hill house, mostly singaporeans, but also free food, so it was a tough decision. my wallet won. a couple of first-year grad students were also there, so we stood baking under the sun (the temperature exploded into the 80s today), eating half-cooked hamburger and discussing why in heck we wanted to spend five years of our lives studying our own miserable quarks in the vast cosmos of scholarship (most probable answer: we're sad). victor is a history major, studying the spread of islam in china in the 19th and 20th centuries, and KS is in computer science, dealing with the mumblemumblesomethingartificialintelligencehebbianlearning- neuralsomething, and how to represent that algorithmically, and why deep blue is not blue, and whether robots will one day take over the world, so the conversation was desultory, its only real nexuses being traffic laws in manhattan (or lack thereof), why a*star sucks donkey balls, and episcopalianism.

it is comforting to know of people who made the same decision as i, and the more people i get to know the more comforting it is. it is funny what one will do to mitigate the sense of loneliness -- not physical loneliness, mind you, because i have met more people here in three weeks than i thought i would -- but the loneliness of being different, of being forced to belong on other people's terms. and the very fact of knowing that there are other people who left behind home, employment, familiarity to come here validates that decision in a way, and the more similar the person is to me, the greater the validation. this may seem ironic when you read this over -- is that not the very definition of belonging on someone else's terms? -- but the distinction is subtle -- the first instance being "me defined as grad student in the psychology department", and the second being "me defined as someone rejecting the well-travelled road of career, rat race etc.". the second, of course, being the critical decision (and thus, the point of commonality with victor and KS), and the first its logical, necessary but entirely incidental consequence.

so akeelah and the bee has restored my faith in how awesome laurence fishburne is, the matrix parts ii and iii notwithstanding. cp: how was othello?

it continues to amaze me that there is such a wide variety of quite decent food within a three block radius of my apartment. on 42nd and chestnut is a place called kabobeesh, a converted american diner that now sells fairly authentic tandoori and naan. admittedly, there could have been more meat, but it was the real stuff, and at $9, enough for two meals. next to it is a little indian minimart type thing that has such wonders as curry powder, gaulb jamun, frozen roti, basmati rice, maggi stock cubes, and horlicks. also: about eight shelves of bollywood vcds, which interested me not.

in other news, my kitchen looks more like a kitchen now, in that it actually has food in it, and things with which i can cook said food. this is good news for my body, which has probably doubled in sodium content since i got here, despite my best efforts. (how do americans not die at the age of 25?) i also am the proud owner of my first ever potato peeler (su-lin will attest to the fact that i had never used one before that last party with the gumbo and "fried""chicken"), which i will use with gusto, once i have some potatoes.

for su-lin:

the new ben and jerry's flavour is turtle soup, and i had a scoop while thinking of you. chocolate turtles!