I'm Alice to the lecturers' Red Queen

Still in the throes of the project. But is more rewarding now- where before nothing much seemed to be correlated, have now fitted a linear model which suggests that (although all the effects are tiny) several things are significant- the percentage of people between 5 and 15 is fairly significant, the amount of rubbish produced per household and the percentage voting Labour or Green are significant, and the percentage served by a kerbside recycling collection or within 1km of recycling facilities (as you might expect) and the income are very significant. The last two have a positive effect, ie a greater percentage of rubbish is recycled in areas with more people served by a kerbside recycling collection or with a higher income, while the others have a negative effect, which is perhaps not what you would guess- but of course the fact that areas with more 5 to 15 year olds or more people voting Labour/ Green recycle less doesn't mean that the actual 5 to 15 year olds or Labour/ Green voters recycle less, as we learnt (in the context of different data) in Multivariate Methods yesterday!

Multivariate Methods actually did live up to my hopes in terms of interest, and it looks to be another course that's firmly grounded in What Can We Use This For? And the Regression computer course also tied the theory from the lecture nicely to actual calculation- though it went at quite a pace and the lecturer seemed constitutionally incapable of letting us just get on with it, pausing for about 2 seconds each time before getting the doctoral student who helps with the class to do the relevant calculation on the data projector. And I'm pretty sure we weren't supposed to have done it all already in our own time. This made it kind of hard to think properly and fully let the understanding of how to compute stuff and how that relates to what we did in the lecture sink in. He then progressed to doing some stuff with Maple, which he assumed we were all familiar with- even after he asked how many of us had used it before and scarcely any hands went up (I for one hadn't ever set eyes on it though it did turn out to resemble Mathematica in many ways, which I did a term of at UCL before forgetting it all). He appears to be one of those people who, just because something computer-related is easy for them now, forget how much effort went into learning it all in the first place and assume it will be childishly simple for even complete novices and they will not require any actual teaching. So instead of saying anything at all about using Maple- for example that you can go back and change previous lines (unlike R) or that (I deduce from observation during that lesson) every line has to end with a semi-colon- he just got the graduate student to type up all the stuff he wanted to calculate and we were left to type it into our own machines copying from the big screen. The poor student was hard pressed to keep up as he kept starting to dictate a line then changing his mind and he was going pretty fast. And I certainly was having problems- you can't type as fast when you're having to keep looking at a screen at the other end of the room to get what you need to write- and when due to never having used the thing before and going at such a pace differences creep in between what's up there and what you enter in your computer, and you then have to correct the errors (luckily I found out pretty quickly that you can go back and change lines). And when you have to try and notice every time they altar an earlier line... I did just about keep up though.

Non-linear Dynamics, which we had today, seems interesting but could well turn out to be pretty difficult. It's also rather more related to economics than I could wish, being concerned with time series (which can be anything but in practice the examples in courses tend to be financial because a lot of people are interested in that stuff, believe it or not- I suppose it is the London School of Economics). The lecturer says that it will be very much about real-life applications, promising us a toolbox of statistical techniques by the end, and even advice on writing consultancy contracts (not sure how serious he was about that but he didn't sound like he was joking), and there will be computer classes for this module too, so hopefully this will indeed prove to be the case- but so far we've only really had an introduction, and all I can tell from that is that it's going to be hard to get decent notes (only some of the slides he used were in the handout, and he went through the others too quickly for me to copy them down, even though they seemed quite important).

Sometimes I feel like Alice to the lecturers' Red Queen...

Goal for tomorrow: get project half written up. I'd like to believe it's possible...