The week has been busy at least work wise. For those who think that Universities have holidays can I assure you, you are incorrect. They have teaching time which is called Term and research time which is called vacations. When you are research support therefore your busy periods are distinctly different from what people imagine, largely coinciding with the holidays. The result is that I am just keeping my head about water at present. This last week I have been involved in five separate projects. Four from human nutrition and one from Education. The human nutrition ones are fairly varied. The take up of vitamin B12 in older people. Actually fairly interesting, as the take-up seems to be related to lifestyle rather than eating food groups related to B12. So you get some counter-intuitive findings, where a scale that scores highly on meat intake actually suggests poorer B12 intake (the scale also weights quite heavily for drinking alcohol and is related to smoking).
Then there is couple of sports ones relating mental ability to food allowing for exercise. Unfortunately fitness seems to be confounded with distance so the further people ran the faster their overall pace. It looks an interesting study, but I think they will have to do a follow up study probably getting people in to do a fitness check prior to doing the race. Maybe the researchers in human nutrition need to join with some from physiology and see if they can find funding to work with participants in a specific set of events. The nice thing I can see is that participating in this study might be its own reward for the participants as they would get training advice and they would take even beginners.
Then there is the study on Butyrate. This is by far the most time consuming as I am having to spend quite a bit of time “developing” a meta-analysis for it. It is not straightforward as there are only about a dozen studies and most of those are inadequately reported. They also are not reported in standard units which adds its own complexities. I also suspect that the things measured are not normally distributed as there seems to be some sort of relationship between mean and the variation in the results. So it is going to require quite careful work.
The one for education was totally different. It was a researcher who had been so busy teaching that they had lost contact with their project and so needed to sit down and think through it again. The thing was that when I had caught onto what she wanted it was very simple to give her a way to do it easily with her project. What she wanted to do was to group like things together; basically put them in the same folder so she could think about them with some other notes on the side. Sounds easy the sort of thing you can do with scissors and paper except some of her things were sound recordings or tape recordings.
Well that kept me busy Monday to Thursday and then on Friday I had an interview in Rotherham for Herringthorpe URC. This one was with a local councillor, unfortunately he was ill but one of the people who works with him was there to talk to me and really gave me a lot of contacts. There is almost far more going on than people thing and I find that quite often those in council positions are some of the few who have an overveiw. I am still in two minds whether I should follow up by actually talking to another councilor for the ward the church is actually in or if I should leave it at that.
Unfortunately by the time I had got back from that I had gone into the migraine, cycle. This one was so long in turning up I thought I might have got over them for a long while. It held off pretty well for going to the Dicksons but mucked up yesterday quite royally. Tescos delivery and migraine don’t mix especially when person suffering gets the delivery time wrong. I “coped” by eating largely dry toast and drinking weak black tea. I went to bed after they delivered and got up early evening, thinking I was better. However by evening after taking five attempts to print something on the back of another sheet of paper, I eventually gave up. My brain was clearly not functioning right so I decided to take today as another migraine day.
So today rather than have a full day at Herringthorpe I have spent it inside, quite a bit in bed and finally got up and could face drinking coffee so am beginning to feel more normal although as the children running around down stairs still makes me fragile I suspect I am not ready for facing the world quite yet. So am not going to the songs of Praise at Herringthorpe.
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