Resolutions

My timing is inevitably off when it comes to new year's resolutions. Anyway, I've been thinking long and hard about this one - I have been spending too much time and mental energy on goofing off on the internet. I'm going to try to change that habit pretty dramatically, here, but I think I can make it work. My new goal is to stay away from distracting websites during schoolwork hours, with exceptions for posts to LJ (because I often need to work through ideas and I type faster than I write), and checking e-mail.

I will see how this goes for a couple of days, before I re-evaluate. I'm mostly hoping to cut down on the amount of time I spend on discussion boards and on FaceCrack, because those activities end up feeling unfulfilling. This is all part of my overall efforts to see what I can get done if I really try hard to focus my mental energies.

Awesome People

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, a married couple who used to do research in my advisor's lab (and her husband's lab) have been presenting a workshop to our lab groups on how to use the statistical software package R (hey, you can check it out, too! It's open-source, so you can even write and contribute packages to it!).

I can't remember how much I have blogged about this, but I taught myself to use R last spring, and have found it to be tremendously useful in comparison to other statistical packages I'd tried previously, including SAS (I'd rate SAS as second-most-useful, and very-much-expensive). One of the most useful aspects of the program is the way it allows a person to integrate statistical analyses and output, without altering one's original data files, and leaving behind clear methods for repeating the analysis.

The New York Times actually ran an article about R's rise in popularity in January of 2009. Although I'm too late to be a pioneer, this is one trend I'm happy to hop aboard.

During this workshop, I've mostly been grateful for a lot of the details, like a couple of handy reference cards for commonly used functions. I've gotten the main ideas sorted out, but the two folks teaching the workshop have been using R for quite a long time, and have taught diverse groups of people. They've found it pretty amusing to compare our group's progress to the progress of a previous group at the EPA, where some of the participants had to be taught the value of Control-C and Control-V (or "Command", if you're a Mac user like me). In contrast, after they taught us about permutations today, they were surprised and pleased to find that nobody had a hard time understanding the function, value, and logic of loops (it was pretty cute to note how excited/happy some of us got in response to a simple loop--hee!).

One area where I've yearned for some good direction - for years! - is the realm of data management. And today, finally, MF gave us some guidance on good project organization. I am so grateful.

Now I just have to go back and implement this structure across a good 6 years of disorganized data. Ha.