So what has happened this week. Well Monday was quiet I think. I know I was busy in work but apart from shopping and such I can’t remember anything major happening. On Tuesday I finished the backlog at work and saw a PhD student who is the sort who seems to suspect statistics are very delicate electrical circuits and if you don’t treat them just right they are liable to give you an electric shock. She first presented the data as two t-tests. However on typing in the second set of data I spotted one group was identical to the previous study. So I went and redid the analysis using oneway ANOVA. Then spent fifteen to twenty minutes repeating again and again the same information on how to read the output. I also suspect I signed up for Linkedin, now I must admit at some stage I really should do this, but at the present the real reason was just to see an article. Unfortunately the sign up seems to involve providing contacts and the time I wanted to spend on it was not that much. I tried to remove from the list it found the obvious distant contacts but thinking through it at the time was beyond me. I will sort it at sometime and some stage just not at present.
However that evening I went to a prayer meeting called by Kevin Watson. Well it was one of those times when someone decides to ask relevant questions for my research and all I have to do is sit back and listen. He wanted to know what had been happening and what was God doing at Herringthorpe. Great questions from my perspective and it was worth listening just to hear what people thought God was doing at Herringthorpe. Yes they came out with the story that I was familiar with, but they could have come out with other stories, there was also one cryptic comment by a church secretary who commented that God is changing Herringthorpe’s attitudes. Well the result was I came back and wrote up immediately.
The price came the next day when I had a migraine. Actually it was strange in that I did not wake with it, but as soon as I got to breakfast I started feeling very tired. So decided to see if an hour back in bed would clear it, only for me to realise as I got into bed there was a headache and other migraine symptoms as well, so I got up, rang into work and then crashed for four hours.
However was back in work on Thursday and trying to catch up on time missed on Wednesday. I had a data set that had been problematic. I thought I knew what was wrong but it was going to be a lot of work. I tried it and it did not work. So I sat back and suddenly the obvious popped into my brain. What people had eaten for breakfast might just effect the results of their pre-race test! and that would cause problems when dealing with the post race test and altering for pre-race performance. It worked and I finished the report and got ready for a meeting with my boss on Monday.
Friday was supposedly a write day, but at least the first part was interrupted . I turned up to breakfast to find not only had some of the food not made it, but they were short staffed and the Archer Project had decided to shut without telling us. So I did breakfast duty for a while on an ad hoc basis i.e. I was both sides of the counter doing what was required. I therefore went about 8:30 and got back about 10:15. I had also picked up Philip Benedicts book “Christ’s Churches: Purely Reformed - A Social History of Calvinism” and I realised not only was the last section on “New Calvinist Men and Women?” which picks up Max Weber’s contention that Reformed Christianity brought in a new “psychological” understanding of what it meant to be a person and explores the historical evidence for this. His results would not be conclusive for two reasons., Firstly the he would not want his carefully nuanced academic tome to be read either as simply full agreement or disagreement rather as interesting hints and such. Secondly the data is largely external data such as the percentage of illegitimate children born during that time. It is quite a big jump to go from practical workings out to internal understandings. However Philip Benedict is also a good writer and I found the work intriguing. Needless to say I spent the rest of the morning reading that. The result was I only got around to writing in the afternoon and in the evening Herringthorpe ladies were having a Salsa night. The lady teaching was good and she made it simple enough that we managed a form of Salsa dancing. I had not realised you needed shoes that could slip. It was good fun. It sounds as if a group of the ladies enjoyed it so much that they will be going to her regular class on a Monday night. Unfortunately that clashes directly with writers so is not on for me.
Saturday I spent writing. Unfortunately I have not finished the essay yet. It is going to be a long one and I think it is important enough to write the extra. There seems to be some hidden rule of writing that the more time available the more time it takes to write.
Today I went to Herringthorpe for the Palm Sunday service. Junior church is definitely down on normal weeks although the creche was up due to grandchildren. This year they sort of managed a procession (last year if I recall the crosses were given out at the end of the service as Pauline had forgotten to do them). Evening service was cancelled due to the fact that two families would be away so I have only had to do the church heating this afternoon.
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