Ever thought of something that was so scary and boring that you would rather run away then face it another time. If found me that object, it’s called Methods & Statistics I. If you are not interested in a rant about a silly and in my opinion useless subject: Look away now.
Anyways, stats is the subject I’ve been working on for, well a long time now. We first needed to come up with a project. Like what we would want to spend the next 7 or 8 weeks of our semester on. So me and 4 others decided that it maybe would be nice to investigate the correlation between newspapers and intelligence. Then we discovered that measuring intelligence is not that easy so we skipped that one, of to idea nr 2.
Oeh lets do newspapers and age, to see if older people read newspapers with a higher quality or something. So that was approved, then we had to think of another variable (cursed word!), that eventually became education level. Yeah, we were stupid enough to believe that that would actually become reasonably interesting, dumb us.
We made a nice research proposal, boring thing that took forever. Handed it in, it seemed not to be that bad, then we had a discussion in class about it. It got slaughtered, we did this wrong and that wrong and how were we planning on doing this and all that kind of crap. But well we had to do something so better start quickly, so we devised a way of sampling. Sampling is a word that had now lost all niceness to me. Because with sampling we had picked 20 streets which we had to do each. In every street, scattered across my town we had to randomly select (which ended up being: oeh there is a breakfast plate on the table, maybe someone’s home, and not random at all) and then give a questionnaire to.
Ow, that questionnaire also was a disaster, it took forever to put together and it although it did the trick was not sophisticated at all. We had to do a whole bunch of different things to make it work, we had a gazilion drafts before the final one and that one actually had a spelling mistake in it, we later found out.
But well, so we were getting samples, meaning, in bitter cold, to bike around the town trying to find people kind enough to fill in our stupid questionnaire, it was cold, cold, cold, boring and a little bit more cold, and it took 4! hours to finally get 30 people.. (from the 40) so we eventually decided that that just took to long, the next day (we were cold we had to go home and do it again the next day) we decided to well not bike all the way to some far away place but just take 2 in the streets that we needed to do that were bicyclable (yes that’s not a word but I don’t care, I’m ranting remember). We now had our 10 remaining people in less then an hour, very happy about that.
So we had the samples, now we needed a Theory section, about a hundred drafts later we also needed a Method section, that’s my bit. It is not that bad to write a method section it just is not very nice to do, it’s just plain ol’ boring. It took some time though and by now I’m at the fourth draft or something, we have to hand in a draft of the final research project thing tomorrow. So that needed to be done as well.
But fore we could hand in a draft version, we needed to check the quality of the newspapers that came out of our samples. Which means that we had to check 3/4/5 newspapers on things like, does it have an astrology column and how many comic strip-pictures does it have in it, those were the easy one’s. Then we had to measure the newspaper, and measure all the photo’s and advertisements, (in square centimeters) to see whether or not it had a large amount of pictures or advertisements. That took forever, it took me like five hours to do 3. I mean, that’s too long, it was boring and we probably did it wrong anyways as the Metro, some suckey free train newspaper, ended up being ’slightly above average’ whilst it actually is quite a suckey newspaper.
So but that’s done for now, I only need to focus on getting myself a topic for my biology essay, rewriting my English essay, reading a few chapters for biology, writing some forum entries for English, reading a 100 page story for literature, make a 8-10 minute speech for English and hoping that my literature essay will turn out to be worth more than a C+
That was the rant, sorry just had to write some stuff about stats (stats can be written backwards and then it still spells stats, so now we call in palindroomvak (meaning palindrome subject), pd is short for that. I’m beginning to hate words like: correlation, data, sample, interviewer bias, questionnaire, spss (some programme that hates people), method, theory and stuff like that. But if everything goes ok, I can finish this subject in like 2 weeks or something and if I pass it, which will probably happen as I had quite high scores for my exams, I don’t have to do M&SI anymore. So let’s hope that’ll work.
Love, Lucy
