I'm at the office because I started working on a project yesterday afternoon and have become excited about it. Really excited. So excited I can't stop thinking about it. So excited I dreamt about it in several dreams last night. And do you know what this project involves? Data analysis. Not anything creative. Not anything related to writing or music or painting or beauty or truth or God or people. Analyzing numbers. Finding patterns among the confusion. Collapsing data across categories to find significant differences between the changes in output at different times. Am I crazy to get so turned on by statistics? I LOVE this. But I am seriously pissed off right now because I can't figure out how to make SPSS do what I want it to do. I don't want to collapse across a certain category that it's forcing me to collapse. I have 1400 schools that I want to look at separately -- I want to find their growth or decay in use per capita over the course of three years. I can do this for the mean per capita rate of use over three years, but I can't do it for each school, and there's no way I can do it by hand for each school. Not only would that take forever, I don't even know how to do *that* with this software. Which is bumming me out because I used this software in college to analyze my psych data. (Heh - even then I was obsessed with statistics...I took a class in Probability and Statistics, one in Advanced Statistics, and one in Psychometrics. And I've forgotten it all! I can't remember what any of the tests do! None of the results tell me anything. I'm trying to bring order out of chaos and IT'S NOT WORKING. This is killing me. Gah. |
are all phantoms which are chased but never caught. but there is a cold comfort in mathematical certainty humans will ever turn to. that is not what i meant to say at all. nerd! |
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I had to re-input all the data twice because of some weird goings-on. That took a lot of time. I'm glad I came in over the weekend to work on it because there's no way I could do it now. I would have to unplug my phone and snarl at anyone who came by to talk to me. Not very friendly. Let's hope the boss thinks the report is as exciting as I do. *After going fossil-hunting with my brother at Matoaka Beach on the Chesapeake. We found: 2 fossilized crab claws Pieces of fossilized snails One shark tooth Fossil coral 2 tiny fossil sand-dollars And the coolest....a fossilized piece of a sting-ray |
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My brother's taking a Paleontology class and is doing a paper on the fossils found in that area, so he took all our samples with him. I already have some fossil imprints of scallop shells that I found about 6 miles down from yesterday's site, and they're sitting on top of my computer here in my office....I'd like to flesh out my collection with some coral or something. This is a page that shows the kinds of fossils we found or could find at the site. |
But now I am to have done the analysis on all 6 services by Thursday. I might have to download a demo of the software on my home computer and work at night. I'm scared. I don't trust my numbers. But I'm happy. I'm finally using my education! |
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Is your boss behaving himself? |