This week has been quieter, if only slightly than the last two. I wrote last on Monday so I pick up Monday evening when I went to writers group. I had not made it the previous week due to writing. I got asked a really awkward question about how long it takes me to write a poem. Sometimes I can give an idea, but last weeks was pulled together of so many small bits that really it was impossible. How does one even start the timer if one wanted to. It started with bits attracting my attention, short snap shots of scenes. Then I realised I had about half a dozen of these which weren’t going anywhere. Too little content to really be a poem. Poems don’t need to be long but they do need content. So I tried putting them together and was still at the wondering stage. Then the snapshots themselves were not neat tidy aspects, clicked on a camera and frozen. Some of them actually started out as photographs rather than poems, some happened simultaneously but are separated. It was only in the final couple of stages when I got to first writing them down on the same page and secondly organising them into a poem that any order was brought to the process.
Tuesday I really can’t remember much it was an ordinary day in all the business of the week. I spent a good time dealing with a PhD student from Landscape who was wanting to know how to sort her factor analysis out. It took quite a long time. In the end I did a exemplar analysis and on leaving she asked me where next and I said “Linear regression” but come back to me when you are ready to tackle that. I just hope she has gone away and done the practical work that I had set her earlier as that is the basis on which she needs to work to understand the higher levels.
Wednesday was a supervision in Birmingham, mostly this was routine. That is the papers I had done were fine, there was nothing huge to talk about. My supervisor was just reminding me of where we were in the process. That is I should be looking to clear my thoughts and start to actually decide what I want to write about for my thesis. I guess that most people actually do this far earlier, but I have enjoyed the random tangents of exploring the ground around here. I said I would therefore do thorough reading through of the papers I have written in the past four years over Christmas and try and prepare a diagram and brief outline of what themes and such have come up. I have however another paper to write before I do and am thinking that I might have to write about introversion and extroversion in churches. That may not be quite the right form but I suspect that there are three different aspects to it. The most basic being that certain churches will tend to attract people on certain parts of the spectrum. I am normally drawn to smaller churches because I find people easier to cope with in small numbers. So you might actually get quite a healthy small church that is growing slowly but attracting more introverted people. However this effects all sorts of organisational aspects of the church as well. The next is the churches mission-pastoral balance. A church that puts all its efforts into developing and caring for its own members is introverted, a church that spend all its efforts on connecting with those outside is extroverted. Now I hope you never get a purely introverted church in this sense as it would almost certainly be dying, equally a totally extroverted church is likely to find people have gone off elsewhere and it no longer exists. So somehow a congregation must balance the two. However I suspect there is a third one and that is one of potential direction. A congregation needs to be looking to ways of growing but growth takes time. A congregation that thinks it has arrived and wants to stay where it is, is going to shrink. For a congregation to try to maintain itself is to doom it to failure. The only answer to this is that it must try to envisage being something more than it is now. If you want to liberal terminology, how better to serve the kingdom of God than at present. It nearly always will mean looking for resources congregations don’t have, and it will be risky, although sometimes it is right to take small risks rather than big ones. If you want to learn to swim you need to get into the water, but diving in at the deep end is not always the brightest of ideas. Anyway that is me writing out ideas.
Another thing that came out is that my supervisor would like something like a discussion board for his tutorial group. I am pretty sure I can set one up on my web account but at present every time I go to it the specialist software that I thought I would use won’t install. However Drupal will so I think I will have a play with that and see if I can get a simple webforum up. It does allow me to set things so that people who aren’t logged in cannot see. However I need to talk to Zen about getting a second web address set up for WigtownWanderings.
The supervision time was 4pm so it had gone 5pm by the time I left my supervisors office, so I wandered back via Waterstones and ended up on a whim buying three notebooks. This was funny, I spotted them earlier, and kept going back to look at them. Usually I have some idea what a note book is for before I buy it but in this case no idea. The books came in packs of three which is why I bought three. The train was fairly full. With the timings I wonder if it isn’t better for me to get a meal in Birmingham and catch a later train home. The snag with that is I am even later in.
Thursday felt like a day when I achieved nothing in work. Instead I suspect that I did rather a lot of getting my head around two research projects. The thing is that they were both written out and you would think just reading them would be enough but no I have to think about what they are doing and try and sort out what I think they are doing. The language of science (whether biomedical science or chemistry) does not translate easily into statistical design. Just reading them over and over again and taking hints from here to there is quite difficult. The things that seem important to the chemist in the laboratory are not what seem important to the statistician trying to analyse the data although the two are connected.
Friday I spent most of the day sorting out the chemistry one. The initial stage was to clarify what had happened from a statistical perspective. The one thing that is still worrying me is that there were blocks of 96 cells but no where can I find in the data given me blocks of size 96. I am presuming that some cells were left empty. The best I find is 45 cells per card or there may have been 90. The examiners had asked a question, but that question was no solvable the way that they suggested. There was no simple link between control and treatment which would have allowed the student to use proportions and the data also showed no sign of requiring a log transform (yes the data was well behaved, if only all data was). Indeed on inspection it turned out that the problem was not what they thought it was. I just did a more complex form of the original analysis and sent it back to the guy.
Saturday my parents came over. As usual they had shopping they wanted doing. This time it was to get de-caf coffee beans from Waitrose. So we went and did that. They also got a plain christmas cake, the smallest there was in Waitrose and some other coffee beans. We bought a Seriously Lemony Tarte Au Citron for lunch as the weather was cold and I fancied a warm dessert. It was like a rich lemon meringue pie without the meringue. At one time while we were chatting my property management company decided to ring me. My next door neighbour is wanting them to put in plastic glazing rather than the current wood. The wood has done eighteen years, with not the best paint jobs in the world and it is beginning to look as if the wood frames will start to give out. The thing is that the building will have to have scaffolding to do the top floor and it therefore would make sense to do my flat’s windows as the same time. I need to know how much this will cost but I can think of several advantages not least getting the window by my computer to shut properly. However it is also important that the installed system is at least as good as the present one and that means sound proof glass for the living room and kitchen windows. On the afternoon we went out to Ecclesal Woods. They are in the process of creating a Forrest Discovery Centre there where the saw mill was. It looks interesting and we will probably go back some other time as it is relatively nearby.
Today I went to Herringthorpe. It was a Remembrance Day service. This is certainly not my favourite service in the year although I must admit it is easier at Herringthorpe than at St Andrews as there is less pomp to the ceremony. Partly surprised that the all-age worship is next week as I am used to Guides and such wanting to parade on Remembrance Sunday. I think the congregation was lower than usual which is what I remember from last year as well. It may be that some were attending the main Rotherham activities, but I suspect there are others who find it a very ambiguous day as well. I then did an interview with one of the members during coffee.
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