What a coincidence - just like the last post I am (or should be) wrestling with statistics. Whew, I've almost got the t-test down although the degrees of freedom thing is still a little fuzzy. [degrees of freedom here are not roll, pitch and yaw...]So school is going well, learning new things everyday. Today I got to see a dissertation defense for the first time. At this point the doctoral candidate has completed comps, successfully defended their dissertation proposal, done the research and completed the dissertation. This was Ron Brown and he did work in exploring how teachers use a digital video library, specifically NASA's Educational Media Archive. I was also impressed (and perhaps frightened) by the sheer size of the dissertation - like 2.5" thick.
Last week I took Dave to a Interactionary Design Competition hosted by the Triangle Usability group which was really fun. After the keynote three teams of 4 usability professionals (web designers, interface designers) were given a design challenge - they had 10 minutes to come up with a solution. In that 10 minutes they can interact with the audience to do some "usability testing" and get feedback. The challenge this time had them design a Presidential voting system with 2 requirements: it must allow users to hear and see what each candidate says about hot issues; it must allow users to change their vote and move it to the leading candidate if they didn't vote for that person initially. Interesting stuff.
So Linden is learning to write some letters - her favorites are A, C, L and R. And she is picking up words and phrases that often surprise me. For example in the store the other day she said "Look Mom - check it out!" 'Check it out'??? That just doesn't sound right coming from a 3-year-old.
Dave is contemplating a job offer but also interested in contract work with Millen's, so we'll see what happens in the next few days. He has also been exploring some of the mountain biking trails here - they are pretty different from Carbon Canyon and Whiting Ranch terrain in SoCal. You don't have to worry about cactus and mountain lions here but it's pretty easy to get disoriented in the tall trees.
Last thing - the picture in the upper corner of this post is REAL - I'm not kidding - this 'thing' was actually in our garage. Actually there have been two of these so far. I remember someone saying a while back that this area has the most bizarre bugs. Yikes!
Okay, back to statistical significance.
