Keeping up the bad record

I missed today's lecture as well. Not exactly through oversleeping- I left halls at 8.30 which theoretically should get me in on time, or only five minutes late, though had I got up a bit earlier I could have left sooner and would have improved my chances. What happened was that I was waiting for a 26 bus, and not getting the 8 or the 242 because they go to Holborn and I'd have a 5 minute or so walk to LSE (the part where my lecture was, anyway)- I thought a 26 would be along in less than 5 minutes, so, given time was rather tight, it would be better to get that.

But a 26 didn't come along in 5 minutes. I'd been waiting for quarter of an hour, always thinking that, even if events had shown that my decision not to get the previous number 8 had in fact led to my being later, it would still be bad to get the next number 8 as I still believed a 26 was coming, before I cut my losses and finally got one of the 8s.

This proceeded to get stuck in traffic. I got on it at about five to nine, and it didn't get to Holborn till after 20 past- usually the bus only takes 15 minutes. So instead of being maybe 10 minutes late as I had thought I would be (bus arrives at 10 past, reach lecture room at quarter past; lectures at LSE (as at UCL and probably many other places) start at five minutes past the hour (and finish at five to)), I arrived at the nearest edge of campus at 27 minutes past, by my (slow) clock (on my mobile- sadly I lost my watch over the summer). I considered that halfway through was probably too late to come in. I admit that I hadn't been walking that fast from the bus stop- not at hurrying speed, because, I further admit, I had already decided on the bus that if it got there at 20 past or later I wouldn't go to the lecture. And finally, I admit that the lecturer would probably not have been that annoyed if I had come in at half past. It would be a bit embarrassing, but I don't think he'd consider it rude (I may be wrong). So I suppose the decision was rather more based on what I felt like* than rational reasons...

Instead, I went to the Shaw Library again. Once again there were some musicians rehearsing- I wasn't surprised since I'd worked out what that was all about, incidentally: flipping through LSE's leaflet of events I discovered that last week on the same day that I heard the musicians there was a lunchtime concert planned for exactly the same instruments**. So I think they must generally come in early to practice. Which means that if you want to go to the UGM, or want a concert with a less formal atmosphere where you can read/ sleep/ come and go while the music's going on, and don't mind the players breaking off every now and then to say things like 'I can't play that bit fast enough!' 'Can we go from 159?' or 'I think we really need to make that bit piano', then coming at around 10am will cater to your needs.

I thought "Oh well, I may have skipped my lecture, but if I have a nap now, at least I'll finish it earlier and have more time this morning to get on with work". But actually it took me a while to drift off, and when I did I didn't wake up till 11:58, or shall we say I didn't wake up and stay awake till then. I had some very interesting dreams, but I woke up rather stiff (I had my legs in an odd position) and found I'd just started dribbling down my jacket (which I think is what woke me). On the plus side, it wasn't chilly this time, or not very.

So did I then make a bold move in the direction of productivity, to compensate for the morning's inactivity? Ermmm, no, actually. It being 11:58, I decided it was just bang on lunch time and went to the Brunch Bowl (well, as it's on the fourth floor of the building that the Shaw Library is on the sixth floor of, it would have been a pity to go down to use the computers in another building and come up again). I then did go to a computer room, where I checked to see whether my project-mates had responded to my email asking if we could meet at 2 instead of 1 due to my wanting to go to the UGM- one had already replied yesterday saying it was fine if the others agreed. The other had replied in the interval- it turned out that he couldn't do 1 anyway. But the third one still hadn't got back to me. So at 1 I went to the meeting place so if he turned up I could explain about the change of plan. He didn't- but the one who replied first did, presumably in case I hadn't managed to change the time with the others. I left at 5 past 1, on the grounds that it might be bad of me to change around the meeting and leave him hanging, but that was cancelled out by him being late.

The UGM managed to reach its natural end for once. I think perhaps I forgot to mention that the elections last week for C & S were anulled (or whatever the technical term is)? This was because some society (which one wasn't mentioned, at least not that I heard) hadn't realised that although endorsing candidates for the big elections like the Michaelmas elections is fine and indeed practically de rigeur, it's not allowed in by-elections (something to do with the voting being at the UGM instead of the polls being open for a long time in the Quad), and they sent out an email endorsing several candidates for C & S. They sent it out a week or so beforehand, but it wasn't realised by the appropriate people untill after the election. So we had to have another election this week. This time, endorsement was allowed, presumably because the candidates in question couldn't be unendorsed (no way to get that email out of people's inboxes or indeed their minds), so that was the only way to make things fair. There were also allegations of people picking up ballot papers that they found on the floor after the meeting was over and thus filling out and dropping in the box multiple copies- one person who talked to the Beaver claimed to have done it because they wanted to see what would happen, and if the answer was 'nothing', to expose a dangerous weakness- apparently they saw other people doing it, presumably not out of a sense of civic duty. But maybe they sorted that out/ found out that the claims were untrue: they didn't have another election for ULU candidate, which was also voted on last week, and according to the Beaver one of the candidates had challenged the result because of the reports of multiple ballot paper filling in.

There were various bits of timewasting as usual this week, but things like the no-confidencing of the UGM chair, a motion to suspend Standing Orders in order to have an extraordinary motion, and a motion to remove the SU Treasurer from the stage*** all falling/ failing- the last because the chair decided that the meeting would continue through the agenda while we waited for a particular person who had volunteered to to come down from the balcony and make a speech for the motion, but he never arrived. And in spite of everything there was time to debate two motions- which both went the opposite way to the way I voted, but I didn't feel too strongly about them fortunately. One was a motion to have the General Secretary read a bit of poetry at the end of his report to the UGM each week- that passed. The other was a motion condemning the work of Satoshi Kanazawa, who published a paper claiming that lower life expectancies in developing countries are the result of lower IQ levels. I voted for the motion- I believe in academic freedom, but as far as I could tell, and admittedly it wasn't that clear, they weren't saying he shouldn't have been allowed to publish it, but just that LSE should distance itself from it- because several people who should know say that it's bad science as well as because it's racist. I haven't read it myself, but from what people have been saying it does sound rather dubious (as you would expect any paper reaching that conclusion to be).

The group project went ok. The fourth group member still didn't turn up- maybe he's ill. One of the others had gone away and worked on the next question by himself and practically done the whole thing, which represented a big leap forward for us as we'd only got through nearly one of the two questions up to that point. However, I disagreed with his method. He was taking averages before using a value to make a prediction, and I wanted to take averages afterwards. We spent most of the session writing functions that did it my way, though we certainly hadn't decided that was better- and may even include both versions with comments on their effectiveness. When I try to think about it, doing it my way seems to make so much more sense than doing it his way. But when I take a step back, and think about it in more general terms, I can't help being aware that I'm less experienced in statistics than the others in my group and know much less, and therfore could well be wrong. Including both versions might ensure that we've got the right idea in there somewhere, but it might equally be hedging our bets too much and not get us the marks for whichever is the right way.

The guy who'd done the second question had to go at 4, and the other guy was vaguely leaving too, but I kept him to ask about the function that I was working on last time- I had a graph and I wanted to know whether it was telling us what I thought it was telling us (given my lack of knowledge). But without even seeming to evade the question, he wouldn't answer it- because he was trying to understand some very fundamental things about the various estimators and models that we had first. He was trying to see whether and why the general shape of my graph made sense. It was frustrating when I reallly needed my question answered, and when I didn't get most of what he was talking about (with bias and variance and so on, simple things that I should probably know about, but I didn't understand why they meant what he said they did). But I wrote some functions to graph things like bias and mean square error while he decided what we needed graphs of so we were working quite well as a team and I guess it was quite interesting, if rather incomprehensible.

I joined the Climate Change group at the weekly People and Planet meeting, because only one other Trade Justice person turned up. The Climate Change group want to do something on the Ditch Dirty Development campaign, in particular getting people to stop banking with Natwest (same company as Royal Bank of Scotland which has apparently been doing some very bad things from an environmental and human rights point of view to do with oil- someone's going to go away and do some more research and come up with some stuff to brief us all next week). I managed to make something of a contribution by suggesting we provide people with an alternative (or several) so they don't just say "Well, they're all as bad as each other, what can you do?", and that we tie it in with New Year's resolutions- "New year, new bank", and that we use their "Another way" slogan against them. As you can probably tell, I was quite proud of all that. I didn't quite understand though why the "New year, new bank" thing got the biggest "Wow!" factor- people were saying that was really good and it didn't seem all that great to me.

I should probably get rid of my own Natwest account**** before going too far with this...

The other thing being planned sounds more fun- a joint event with the Trade Justice group in the last week of term, selling mulled wine, hot apple juice with spices, and mince pies, buiscuits etc that all use mostly fair trade or local (and organic?) ingredients- like our stall at the Food Fair. There will also be leaflets for people to take, about things like saving energy over Christmas and the effect of climate change on places that people go on holiday over Christmas (tropical islands, ski resorts- well, that'd probably not be the impecunious students so much as the impecunious students with rich parents...)- and they're letting me do them! Hurrah! After Climate Change Awareness Week, I love doing leaflets! Hopefully I can manage to make it informative, engaging, and friendly rather than preachy and sanctimonious- though I will be fighting against a natural tendency of things like "Switch off all appliances when not in use" to be the latter. I think I'll go for the (gently) humorous dialogue approach of the CCAW leaflets- that seemed to work.

I was going to treat myself to a take away curry tonight, since I had cravings and haven't had even one take away all term (though I have been out for a meal quite a few times which a purist might argue counts even more). But I went to Brick Lane (living so close how could I go anywhere else?), and not only were the prices rather more than I expected, but I couldn't find one restaurant without a waiter standing in the doorway waiting to pounce on anybody stopping to read the menu, and I refuse to eat at a place where they have pouncers (I can't think properly when someone is trying to persuade me to eat there at the same time that I'm trying to read the menu, and I don't like having to think of something to say along the lines of "I'm just going to have a look further up the street but I might come back" when I've decided against somewhere). And it was getting late- I had to meet the Residents' Committee Treasurer to hand over the receipts from the food for the Quiz- so in the end I gave up. Anyway, I remembered there was some of last night's lasagne left.

I have to write a 3 sentence summary of my proposed individual project for Computational Statistics by tomorrow. Three sentences, you say, not that taxing, right? Well, the problem is that while I've found some of the data I want to use, I haven't yet tracked down statistics on how rural/ urban different district councils are, for example, as well as a number of other things. And before I can write half a sentence committing myself to investigating the effect of rurality/ urbanity on percentage of waste recycled, I need to do half an hour or more's searching on the internet to check I really can lay my hands on the relevant information. Hopefully it'll all turn up amazingly quickly and I won't be staying up into the small hours...

*As in my inclination, not my state of health- though I do still feel a bit ill, which may just about serve to excuse it. Possibly. If one is feeling generous.

**It also listed what music they were going to play, which was good as I wondered what the music was last time


***where he had taken a seat in order to see who was throwing paper so they could be given warnings and then asked to leave if necessary, since the chair was generally too busy chairing to identify the culprits, the first she was aware of any throwing being when the missile landed on stage

****I opened it at UCL for the chequebook, but also because they were offering a free portable CD player. I never got the CD player. Maybe it's because I moved house at around the time they might have sent it- a parcel did come for me but by the time I found out about it and got myself down to the parcel depot or whatever it was it had been sent back to the sender. It was really a little early to be the CD player though. I know, I know, I should have chased them up...