Rough times ahead

I've been lucky. My advisor and I have always gotten along, and our differences (for example, I don't wear a bow tie) have never been a problem. Unfortunately, all that is about to change.

You see, I am a Cleveland Indians fan, and he is a Boston fan.

We all need a little good news

In November, word on AERA proposals is supposed to go out. However, we discovered last year that about a month before official notices come out, we could log in to the online submission system and see acceptances as they are decided. While the status line may say "awaiting final decision," if a paper has been assigned a session, it's in. If it doesn't give a session, it may have been rejected, or the decision may not have been made yet.

So I'm excited to say that at least one of my papers has been accepted. The paper Mr. Kindhearted and I submitted will be featured in a session on "External influences on institutional expenditures, revenue, and organization in higher education." We're going to New York City!

In honor of my research partner, then, I will fulfill a request he made a few weeks back. "I only check on your blog occasionally," he said. "You never put anything controversial in it. You should."

Alright, here goes. A professor recently told our class, "The only necessary requirement for OLS regression is that the independent variables and error terms be uncorrelated. The rest of the 'requirements' are nonsense." Discuss.

If you need to brush up on the theory behind OLS, click here. If you aren't sure what OLS stands for, weigh in anyway. That's what makes the internet great!

Back to Monday

For some reason, all the rare social bits of my social life decided to activate themselves Friday night. First was the opening night of the Peabody kickball tournament, in which our department won both of its two games - the second one just barely, because Teaching & Learning is very evenly matched with us. After that I ran off to a talk by Stanley Fish. The talk wasn't sufficiently advertised on campus, and I suspect the turnout was disappointing. It was part of a two-day conference that cost money to attend, so most students didn't even look into it; I only found out the day before that students could attend for free. Then, finally, I went to a wine and cheese party one of the first years was having. It was a good time, but I had to leave before it was over, as I was teaching the next morning.

So I taught and spent the rest of the weekend doing homework. For some reason, though, I was dead tired Saturday night. I was a little short on sleep the previous night, but not enough to justify sleeping for 13 hours, and that's what I did. My body must be hoarding sleep for some reason. Maybe it's the colds that are going around now - which seem out of place, since the weather is still hitting 90, but it technically is fall.

In other news

In research news: Today we offically finished going through dissertations for Project Snowball. We should have cracked open the champagne or something. Woot.

In sports news: Indians > Yankees.

In art news: Soviet poster blog.

In health news: "Not a morning person? These Ayurvedic rituals will turn you into an early riser and change how you face the day," said the email. Well, I guess I can't argue - if I do all these, I'm going to have to start getting up earlier.

In world news: The prof coming to CWRU whose visa was stuck has had her visa issues resolved.

In business news: Stupid office morale games.

In intellectual news: An interesting approach to morality.

Staying organized

I have a new favorite piece of software called Check Off. It's nothing fancy, but it's dead useful. I am an inveterate list maker, and for some time now I've been using Stickies to post virtual to-do lists on my Mac. However, this is unsatisfying to me because I can't cross off a finished item. I can delete it, but then I don't get the satisfaction of seeing all my completed items. Check Off lets you, guess what, check off what you have done, so I just check off things and at the end of the day delete the finished tasks. You can also create folders for sets of tasks. This makes it easy to focus on "stuff to finish this weekend" or "dissertation tasks."

You can download Check Off here (if you have a Mac).