2009-06-12

rebeccmeister: (Acromyrmex)
2009-06-12 01:23 pm

Small consolation

At least data analyses go a little bit faster the second time through. I <3 Excel's "Find/Replace" function. One of my favorite things to do is to figure out ways to get Excel to do all sorts of bizarre calculations for me (right now, it's mostly "=COUNTIF()"). Some day I'll have to actually learn some Visual Basic so I can start programming macros, and maybe set things up so I can do statistics - correctly - directly in Excel. Excel claims to do certain statistics, which it proceeds to calculate incorrectly.

Hopefully over the next day and a half I can make at least some heads/tails of the data I've collected so far for this summer's experiment. Yesterday I spent a bit of time calculating how much time it will take me to finish the experiment under various scenarios (if I have to do 8 days of observations instead of 6; if I attempt to do the experiment while teaching or postpone the bulk of it until after I finish teaching, etc). The worst-case scenario has an August 13 end date, which is a little too close to the end of summer for comfort, because I also have to budget in a few extra days for who-knows-what. We shall see.

Back to number-crunching.