This blog endeavor was supposed to be about my scholarship and teaching (“with occasional forays into knitting and audio books”) but this semester my teaching load does not lend itself to inspired posts. I am teaching Research Methods and Statistics (twice) and I supervise Senior Project (16 of them this semester). Although *I* find the two domains interesting I am not convinced that the students do, nor any readership I may have garnered.
And the place I am at with my scholarship/research is the tedious place endemic to all scientific endeavor…I am slowly, oh-so-slowly, plodding through data analysis on just about all my current projects. Readers are unlikely to care that one must use Menchley’s Test of Sphericity in a within-subjects ANOVA to correct for any lack of homogeneity of variance across repeated measures conditions. I can barely believe I just typed that and knew what it meant!
I’m knitting up a storm, but I’m always knitting up a storm…nothing exciting to share on that front. And my current audio book is a non-fiction exploration of the latest nutrition science on the best ways to decrease obesity. Unlike other “diet” books I have read I actually believe this author (a leading obesity researcher and endocrinologist, I believe) is relying on good science and I am likely to attempt some of his suggests: Always Hungry (an unfortunate title, in my opinion) by David Ludwig, M.D.
I guess all blog posts can’t be inspired or coherent. Sorry…let’s just call this a blog “check in”!
Count me as a reader that finds your scholarship and teaching interesting, even if I don’t understand it. I’m always glad to learn (or at least read about) new things, and since my knowledge of statistics is limited to one college course decades ago, this is new to me. I’m sad to say that I didn’t understand even wikipedia’s explanation, except that I gather sphericity has nothing to do with spheres. I was glad for your blog check in!