Don’t know that I could say I have ‘mastered’ it. Mastery is a pretty open-ended term. I certainly know a good bit more than I did about the various types of survival analysis and how to code those in a couple of programming languages.
Terrific books I have read lately include Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, The Black Swan and The Last Lecture. I highly, highly recommend all of them.
Driving to USC to pick my daughter up last night, it was just the most beautiful sunset. It was late so there was no traffic, just the sun going down behind the skyscrapers, all lit up with the lights on in every window still. (You don’t get an office in the 20th floor downtown if you only work 40 hours a week.) The weather was perfect, it was just a lovely evening.
This was a very interesting book about a complicated subject. In short, she reviewed the choices women make and looked at the question of what makes people happy. The quick answer is that being single is better than an unhappy marriage, children are a blessing for most people and how important work is to your happiness pretty much depends on your personality, values and situation. I liked it because there were no simple answers, just like life.
I paid off the one that had a ridiculous interest rate. Paid off $12,000 in a year ! Whoo-ee. Now I have two smaller ones left, both with 0% introductory rates. My goal is to pay off the smaller one of those in six months.
I am also socking money into my 401k and paying off loans from putting two daughters in college. Should owe $0 within two years and have two daughters through college, one through graduate school.
Two kids down, two to go (-:
It is May and I only have ten pages done. Well 20 if you double-spaced them, but still, that isn’t much progress. My new plan, since Ronda is trying to get back on track for the next Olympics and she is trying to get back to working out every day, I can get back to writing every day. When I was doing that conscientiously I got two articles finished in two months. Okay, well, today is one day in a row!
The first article is still under review – the journal guidelines say to expect 4 months. Wrote another article and put it in the mail. Two down. I have started on data analysis and writing for a third. Started data analysis for a fourth.
In this economy, people are always saying you are lucky if you have a job. Not only do I have a job, but I have a really interesting job. At this very minute there about six different things, all of which I want to do.
Write pages on statistics with SAS Enterprise Guide for my USC website I am creating
Update the presentation for my Introduction to SAS class I am teaching on Thursday
Write my talk on data preparation and data management – how to not make yourself crazy
Finish a book on SPSS programming
Run a logistic regression in Stata
Finish reading two books on Enterprise Guide
Read a book on JMP sitting on my desk
About eight other things I just thought of right now.
Final draft of the first one is done and being reviewed by colleagues. Expect to submit it by the end of this week. Have an idea for the next two articles. Will probably start on one of those next week. I have all the data collected, so that is a huge start.
Finished my final draft of my second article. Sent it to a few colleagues to review. Back to working on the book proposal.
Took Julia and two of her friends to Tudor House for afternoon tea. Not cheap but worth it for the lovely time we all had. Definitely more of a girlfriend thing. I highly recommend the fish and chips (I liked the fish, kids devoured the chips) and the strawberries and clotted cream , which vanished within a minute of being put in front of each little girl.
If you have a girl in elementary school, take her and her friends out for a real-life tea party and forget about Hannah Montana.
I am going to start with my bedroom. It is where my desk is where I spend a LOT of my time and I have been meaning to tackle it forever. I will start today.
Just so you know, survival analysis is a statistical technique for analyzing time to an event. The event can be death, for various disease and drug studies, or it can be other events, e.g., how long until a parolee is reincarcerated, an addict begins abusing a substance again, or a customer drops a cell phone plan and changes to another company. Despite the name it does have anything to do with Bear Grylls Man vs Wild.
I think I am doing pretty well on this goal. Often, when I go to sleep at night, the last thought that goes through my mind is, “I have a great life.”
When I wake up in the morning, as I drink my coffee and read the LA Times before I go to work, usually once or twice, the thought crosses my mind, “I have a great life.”
I have great kids, I’ve been able to travel all around the world, I have an interesting job, and then I just have all of the daily good things, good coffee, good newspaper.
Yes, life is definitely pretty good.
Submitted to journal for publication. Now I just need to wait four months to hear back from the reviewers. While I am waiting I have already started work on my next article!
By Naisbitt – the same author who wrote Megatrends, which was a terrific book. This one was equally good. The one that stuck with me the most was about how we are becoming a visual society. I have even started adding images on my blog on statistics, http://www.thejuliagroup.com/blog/ whether it is pictures of walruses in a post on test for differences in variances or of flamingos in a discussion of nested logit models.
For Christmas, I got a Sony Reader. It’s pretty cool and I downloaded Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers. I really liked the Tipping Point, which he also wrote, so I am really looking forward to reading this one.
Amazingly, I finished one article! It is being edited to be sure it complies with APA style and the requirements of the journal I am submitting it to. So, as I had said all along, on New Year’s Eve, I will be toasting my foray back into academic publishing. I have already started on my second article.
Hurray !
I am making more progress, I think, on some of my other goals. I want to learn to focus on the positive more. One positive is the number of friends I do have who will watch my back, tell me the truth and lend a helping hand.
My friend, Jake Flores, said to me recently,
“I will always be there for anything you need, not anything you want, but if you need me, I will always be there for you.”
I know that is true. Anything Jake says, I can trust completely.
My friend, Serge, said to me today that if a person has five true friends in life, that’s one lucky son of a b-- .
I was adding it up and I have nine people who I could count on no matter what, to pick me up at the airport at midnight, listen to me on the phone for an hour if I needed a sympathetic ear or lend me their last dollar. One of those nine people is my husband and three others are my children.
I am a really lucky person. I have four spares. Hurrah!
I read Affluenza, by Oliver James. I recommend it to anyone who is not living in a box under a bridge (in which case, I assume you have more pressing problems). If you have more money than you ever thought you would as a child, have graduated from college, got a job, had children and still are not satisfied with your life, you have to read this book. In the introduction he asserts that this is not a self-help book but rather a study of why things are so f*cked up.
You should read it. It’s awesome.
Petting sharks was interesting. It was a pretty huge contrast between how the manta rays felt and the sharks. One is velvety and one is like sand paper. Julia and her friend Kiah wanted to spend the whole time going from one petting tank to another. They were not nearly as interested in just looking at the fishes in the larger tanks.
Rainbow Harbor was very beautiful at night. I would include a picture but Dennis dropped his camera in the shark tank.
