Light and Momentary

A Whole Lot of a Good Thing

I have started the first of the four big analyses for my dissertation. In this one I'm looking at kids' use of derivational morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In some cases, that's a whole word. In some cases, it's something smaller. When toddlers figure out that they can add -s to a word and it means "more than one," that's a grammatical morpheme. And it's a big step forward linguistically. (It gives me a geeky little rush, actually, to watch that skill unfurling. How do they know, at 18 months, how to do that? Why do some kids struggle so with it?)

We keep adding morphemes throughout childhood. They're a huge part of the vocabulary expansion that happens in the later grade school years. Quick becomes quickly. Attract can morph into unattractive. One of the questions I'm looking at is whether the control kids use more of those affixes than the kids with risk factors.

(Oops, diaper break. It's a good thing I don't count how many times I get interrupted writing a blog post or I might give it up in discouragement.)

For several of my analyses, I'm using a powerful but not very user-friendly program. The manual section that covers the morpheme analysis tool is pretty forbidding. This is for the serious user, it says, who's willing to put in a lot of time getting it right. Not quite "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," but still rather alarming given the learning curve for the other tools in this package.

But I've started, and I haven't thrown up my hands in frustration yet. It will require me to go through every line of my 301 transcripts and check whether the automated parser assigned the right function to each word -- and, in many cases, to parts of words. I have begun seeing morphology tags everywhere I look, involuntarily parsing the sentences in picture books.

The sentence that I'm typing now would look like this.
det|the n|sentence rel|that pro|I~aux|be&1S part|type-PROG adv|now aux|will&COND v|look prep|like pro:dem|this.

I find myself thinking of the parser as a living and not very bright entity. He reads "Bob and Mary" and calls Bob a verb (which, granted, is certainly possible) and Mary the adjective form of the verb "mar." I guess a mary table is one that's had too many glasses of cold water left sitting on it? Anyway, there are many errors to untangle. Many many.

I have moments of thinking,"I was born to do this," because I love grammar with a rather startling passion. In eighth grade I would take home my English book and diagram sentences for fun on the weekends. (Why, no, I wasn't very popular in junior high school -- why do you ask?) I also have moments of thinking, "This is a staggering amount of work." I have done 16 transcripts. Only 285 to go. If I'm scarce, blame it on the morphemes.

The Plan

All right, I have a dissertation to work on here. I was always vague about my early research project because I am the only person ever to look at that particular relationship, but my dissertation is less unique. (Which is good, because I don't have to argue so much about whether it's a reasonable research question.) I am analyzing three sets of language samples, collected a year apart, for two groups of kids -- one with a set of risk factors and one without. I am running nine computerized analyses on a total of about 160 transcripts. Four of the analyses are big and hard and will provide me with opportunities to grow in patience. (You know how I love opportunities to grow in patience.) The remaining five analyses are easier, but three of those require me to use results from one of the complicated measures.

So: last week when Pete went back to preschool, I pulled out the transcripts I'll be analyzing, converted them to the appropriate format, and fixed the errors that popped up in the conversion. Now I am going to knock off the two easy analyses before I roll up my sleeves to tackle one of the hard ones. My goal for the week is to get the two easy ones finished and get the program I need running on this computer by Friday. We'll see how it goes.

...and they said

Pass!

Roads were nasty in the morning but fine by the time I needed to leave. It was much less grueling than I expected. After it was over, my advisor asked me to meet with her in the lab for a few minutes, and when she opened the door there were shouts of "Surprise!" She and my labmates had arranged a little congratulations/welcome baby party. I was floored -- didn't expect that at all.

When I got home we went straight to Mass. Time now to sit down and eat some dinner. Thanks so much for all your prayers and good wishes!

Countdown

Prelim in less than eighteen hours. Precipitation expected, with temps straddling freezing. Here's hoping there's no ice on the roads. Must remember to take a beta blocker along in case my arrhythmia acts up under stress.

It is extremely unlikely that my committee will fail me, but I'm feeling decidedly what-iffy.

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

<- Look

Over there, in the left sidebar. See what I just did?

The people with feed readers are grumbling, "No, your sidebar doesn't show up in the feed reader, silly." So I'll tell you: I just sent off my first two dissertation chapters to my committee. Two weeks until my prelim.

And she lived to tell the tale.

I just spent two nights sleeping alone for the last time in the foreseeable future.

My professional organization just had its annual meeting, in Chicago this year, and I was presenting my early research project. I had been dreading it because people in my discipline have been consistently skeptical about my hypothesis, and I imagined a long line of naysayers. I have the numbers to support my hypothesis and a pair of plausible mechanisms to explain the numbers, but I still wasn't looking forward to it.

It turned out really well. I was supposed to be there for ninety minutes but people kept talking for more than two hours. By the end I was thinking, "If I just lay down on the floor and closed my eyes, would they figure out that it's over?" Several people said, "I saw this in the program book and thought it sounded crazy, but it makes a lot of sense," which was gratifying.

Only one guy was obnoxious. He was asking me for more information about one of the mechanisms I'm proposing and I mentioned that some of the contributing evidence comes from animal studies. He leaned in and said, "Well, you see, animals don't talk." In response I said, "There's compelling evidence from performance in other domains," though what I thought was rather less charitable. When my project director came back she rolled her eyes -- I hadn't connected the dots but this is a guy who hates her work with an unflagging passion and probably stopped by the poster especially because she was the second author. He has a long history of trashing her wherever possible, so I won't get bent out of shape about it.

I stayed in Hyde Park with friends from college and we had a lot of fun together. (I wondered if I might spot Obama but no dice.) The last time I took Amtrak, the train caught fire and I was delayed by five hours; this was a peaceful trip with no firefighters in view.

Tomorrow I am scheduled to send off my dissertation chapters to my committee; last night I dreamed about the final edits. In my dream I was horrified by my verbosity ("This sentence doesn't even make SENSE!") and by the scrawled unfamiliar citations I had to put in the bibliography ("Why am I citing Leakey and Leakey when this dissertation has nothing to do with anthropology?"). Here's hoping the actual undertaking goes more smoothly.

Submitted

I just sent off a draft of chapter one to my advisor. Lots more work to do, lots and lots and lots and lots, but it's a start.

Progress

Goal for the week: met.

Word count: 6586. That includes my bibliography, though. Hold on -- actual word count for chapter one: 5274.

I am going to tidy up my messy desk and go relax by folding a monster pile of laundry.

Ack!

I found out why my page count didn't increase like I thought it would: Google Documents ate part of what I was writing on Thursday!

Thankfully, the revision history feature allows you to go back through and restore missing pieces. Kind of a pain, but at least I didn't have to recreate it.

Back to work with me -- glad tomorrow is Sunday, when I will not even say the word "dissertation."

Ifs

...If I told God that I was content with a little bit of patience, would he stop sending me all these opportunities to become more patient?

...If I schedule my preliminary exam for the middle of my 39th week, what are the odds that I will deliver precipitously in the middle of it? (And would they pass me or make me reschedule?)

...If I were going to knit a soaker or two for this new little one (in my abundant free time, you know), what pattern should I use?

...If I have put in as many hours as I recall putting in today on my dissertation, why doesn't my page count look like it?

My first chapter is coming together. I'm enjoying it. It's a big job, though. My goal is to finish drafting the sections that explain my independent variables by Saturday evening, and then to draft the sections that explain my dependent variables over the following week. I'll still have gaps to fill in, but I'm planning to submit a draft of chapter one to my advisor by the 15th. Then I am planning to take a little nap before I start chapter two.

Can I really pull this off?

To write a dissertation in my field, you come up with an idea that will fill in a previously unmapped corner of the field, or that will add some useful detail to an existing map. You explain why it matters, and what previous cartographers have sketched out (chapter one, introduction). You write about where you'll be surveying and what you're going to measure (chapter two, methods).

Then you meet with a committee that tells you what's missing from your chapters, and what's inadequately supported in your arguments, and what measurement tools you really must employ that you somehow overlooked. When they agree that you can proceed with your study, you can call yourself a doctoral candidate. (Right now I'm just a doctoral student.)

Since I learned I was pregnant, my goal has been to get to candidacy before the baby comes. I just got an email from a developmental pediatrician whom I asked to be on my committee, saying he'd definitely be interested but he'd need to schedule the committee meeting now. He's already booking up in December.

So it's great that he's interested, but I'm wondering -- can I really be ready by the beginning of December? Am I confident enough to say, "Okay, then, let's set a date"? Also, I've been assuming all along that I would be late again, but what if the unexpected happens and baby is early?

I suppose we can set a date for the first week in December, when I won't quite be 38 weeks along. I will just push aside thoughts of the ice storms we've had in early December in recent years. Global warming, right? And you know, I haven't missed a deadline yet in this program, so I suppose it's reasonable to be sanguine about getting two chapters written by mid-November. I hope. Did I just jinx myself?

Unexpectedly

When I found out I was pregnant, I immediately thought I'd have to give up my fellowship for next year. Both Elwood and my advisor encouraged me not to be hasty, and in the weeks since then my advisor and I have talked a lot about how I could meet the requirements of the fellowship after this baby arrives without losing my mind. I have been gobsmacked (in a good way, a grateful kind of gobsmacked), by her flexibility and willingness to work with me.

But I have been a little worried about talking to the professor who administers the grant. She is very careful about following the rules, which specify that I am supposed to be acquiring teaching experience and putting in a specified number of lab hours, and she is also 15 or so years older than I am. She came up through the ranks when it was much harder to be a woman and an academic than it is today, when it was still acceptable to say things like, "You're pretty smart for a girl," and I think she remains ambivalent about the compromises required of her as a mother who was also a scientist.

This could, it seemed to me, nudge her in either of two directions. She might think that I need to pay my dues, and man up (woman up, it has to be, since this issue is far less painful for men than women), and teach next spring as originally planned. Or she might think that it's about time for the department to make it easier for women to be mothers and scientists at the same time.

I just didn't know. I knew it wouldn't be a disaster, since even if she recommended that I decline funding for this year, we'd figure it out financially. I was dreading the conversation anyway.

Then I got an utterly unexpected email from her. She was talking about rescheduling a meeting, and she said, "Now that I am experiencing life without day care, I realize again what a tremendous effort you make to work on your Ph.D. while raising your boys.  If you ever need to make special arrangements for your involvement on the grant, please know that we will be very willing to accommodate your needs, whatever they might be." She went on to suggest some specifics that could make my life much easier in the spring.

Last fall I kept meaning to post about this fellowship, which was simply providential. I am sitting here tonight and re-reading her email, feeling gobsmacked again. It seemed like a crazy idea to work on a PhD with four young children. I would have guessed it would be impossible with five. But these gifts keep falling into my path: a great fellowship, a fabulous advisor, this email out of the blue. I keep on working, and it keeps on working out. How cool is that?

Defense

This morning I dreamed that I opened my closet and found the perfect outfit to wear for my defense this afternoon. There was a cotton blazer hanging next to a sundress, fitted but with enough give to accommodate my burgeoning belly. "They're so colorful!" I thought in my dream. They certainly were. They were turquoise, lime green, and yellow plaid -- slightly different plaids for the two pieces. I am cracking up at the memory -- I hope the idea of this ensemble amuses you even a quarter as much as it does me.

For my defense I wore a white T-shirt with a knee-length khaki jumper. No one could have accused me of being overly colorful. I got more and more jumpy as 2:30 got closer. My prospectus meeting last summer was tough, two hours of unrelenting questions and then many, many revisions requested in my document.

This meeting was also two hours long, with plenty of tough questions, but it was less stressful -- whether because I was expecting it to be long and hard, or because I have the data in hand confirming my hypothesis, I can't say. (Data! Confirming my hypothesis! I still get a little rush when I say that.) I collected information from mothers on a variable that is a Hot Topic in the mommy wars, and I think for as long as I am talking about these findings to women, I'm going to be dealing with ancillary issues arising from their own experiences. Oh, well. That's part of why I'm choosing a different focus for my dissertation.

Anyway: I passed! I was holding back on feeling gleeful until I looked through their marked-up copies of my document, because I was not going to rejoice if I had a hundred hours' worth of revising to do. But I took myself to dinner at my favorite place in town and looked through their comments, and it seems like the revisions should be very manageable. I passed! Hurray!

Whiplash Warning

I've been thinking about posting all day, but I felt a little silly putting up a happy post after that hand-wringing post. I think periodically, "Maybe I should drop out of school. It is just too crazy to be a mother of four and a full-time doctoral student. With two part-time jobs." But the thing is, I love school. I'm good at school. If I could drop out of bill-paying, or laundry-folding, or or or -- then maybe I'd be on the right track. I had a great day on campus yesterday and my stress level is lower.

Today I have been working away (I started to say slogging but it honestly hasn't felt like a slog) on my results and discussion sections. I have a beautiful sentence to share with you:

The results of this test were significant, χ²(2, N = 46) = 6.3288, p = .042.

Which means I can assert in print that my idea, my baby idea that hatched almost ten years ago and has been waiting to flutter out of the nest, was right. It feels awfully good.

I might see some fluctuation in that p value as the last of my data trickles in, and I might end up back in marginally significant territory again. But I have several marginally significant results, from testing various ramifications of my hypothesis, and collectively they are enough to say, Hey, we should pay attention to this. I am hypothesizing a modest effect size and my sample is not enormous, so the consistent trend toward significance in my results is pretty intriguing. And I'm going to enjoy that .042 while it lasts.

Tonight I wrote a rather emphatic conclusion to my paper; before I submit it to my project director I will have to go back through and sprinkle in some potentiallys and putatives. But here on my blog I can say what I am really thinking, which is, Yes! My idea was right!

News!

I just found out that I won a departmental award that comes with a $1000 prize. It's given in honor of a wonderful professor emerita -- I was lucky enough to work with her as a master's student and I learned so much from her. Award notifications were supposed to happen earlier this week and when I didn't hear anything, I assumed they'd chosen another applicant. Turns out they issued paper notifications in our campus mailboxes (how twentieth century) and only followed up by email today. Hurray!

Let's Just Get It Over With Already

I have a take-home final due Friday and I have been feeling distinctly grumbly about it. Because misery loves company, I am going to indulge in a little liveblogging here. Instead of stretching it out until Friday I am BY GOLLY going to turn it in tonight. As of this minute, one of the four parts is pretty much finished and three are halfheartedly begun. On my mark! Getting set! Go!

Oiled

1. The principal called me and said she agrees with me: kids need to move, she said, and taking away Joe's entire recess was too harsh. She's going to follow up with the lunch monitor.
2. My project director agreed to meet with me this afternoon. I am hoping to get her stamp of approval on my letter and the final version of the questionnaire so I can send them out (finally!) as soon as the Christmas mail rush is over. We shall see.
3. The semester is almost over! One in-class final (Monday), one big stats project (due the following Monday but I need to finish it early because next weekend is busy with family stuff), one take-home final. Lots of work to do, but one way or another it will all get done.

A Couple of Tips for Newbie Users of R

(Note to the usual crowd: sorry for the boring post. Halloween pix soon.)

In looking for helpful documentation on R, I was surprised by the unwelcoming tone of many of the resources ostensibly intended to help new R users. On one mailing list, for instance, I found a higher incidence of RTFM and STFW than I've ever seen before. Believe me, I wanted to RTFM. Unfortunately, the FM seems to be written in --I don't know, Klingon. Some language that uses an English sound system but is utterly unintelligible to me, some language spoken by a clever but apparently cruel race of beings who scorn the idea of intelligent life outside their demesnes.

To anyone who arrives here via Google, similarly battered by attempts to learn R, I suggest that you start with this friendly tutorial. If you want to copy a graphic from R to another program (like the Word document in which you are chronicling your maiden voyage), do it like this:

> png("file_name_here.png")
> plot(x1,x2) [or hist, or whatever else]
> dev.off()

I hope this saves you the many hours it took me to figure that one out. Oh, bummer, I was going to credit the web page where I finally found the magic sequence but I closed that tab and I have no hope of finding it in the moment. I am being instructed to hop off the computer so that Pete can watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos on YouTube.

Before I do: swimmermom asked me about my results at Freerice.com and I have gone back and forth about whether to reply because was it boasting to put that on the web? And maybe it is, but maybe an admission of weakness (see: the rest of this post) cancels out a boast. So I will say that I can get to level 50 pretty easily: the last time I was there, I missed 2 out of the first 47 words I was given. Then I stopped, because I wasn't sure about the word on the screen, and I have this compulsion about finishing at level 50, AND I have a statistics assignment that is (have I mentioned?) due tomorrow. So in sum: English vocabulary strong, Klingon vocabulary dismal.

Need Some Tea and Sympathy

On Monday I took our aged laptop to campus to give my presentation to the other doc students. The laptop appears to have found this a disagreeable journey, because yesterday it died. Or it mostly died, as Miracle Max might say; my husband has coaxed it into a Linux-driven new life.

The problem is that I have a big stats assignment due on Friday. With the Windows machine, I had a GUI that gave me access to the SAS server. We now have two Linux boxes and I have no access to stats software with friendly little check-box windows saying "make me six histograms, please."

I have a powerful but forbidding stats program on this machine. It makes me want to cry, actually. As I have posted before, the topic most likely to trigger a big argument between Elwood and me is the computer, and that kind of makes me want to cry too.  Oh, UGH, now I am crying. Over the computer. Time to get a grip.

It's also time for me to run and see a family for therapy. Here's hoping the learning curve for R (the scary stats program) seems less precipitous when I get back.

Y oh Y (and more)

For anyone who wants to know more about the /y/ thing, here's a bit from Wikipedia.

What does it say about a person if she sees an article called "Phonological history of English consonant clusters" and responds with an excited "ooooooh!"?

I had such a good day. My advisor has been trying to derive a linguistic measure with a language analysis program that is not very user-friendly, and I have been working for weeks on the "fell swoop" approach. I was assigned to this project in August and it was immediately clear to me that we could obtain the measure far more efficiently. I've been working out the details ever since, and today was Fell Swoop Day: in my lab hours today I generated results that would have taken approximately 125 hours of woman-power to obtain under the old system. I have also learned lots of useful stuff about a program that's very powerful even though its learning curve is steep and its manual is less than helpful. I'm going to use it for my stats project later this semester. On which topic--

My stats prof is earnest but...less than dynamic. I am learning the material mostly from the slides and the book, because I have trouble with his lectures. But today I spent most of class tracking, even though the material wasn't in the book. He was talking about logarithmic transformation, which is extremely useful but not really intuitive for me. It's also not in our book, so it's a good thing I was able to follow today's lecture. Here's hoping for more of the same.

This afternoon I went to a seminar on the impact of No Child Left Behind on kids with disabilities. I was not looking forward to it, because our guest speaker was the author of two articles we read in preparation for the seminar and he seemed astonishingly pro-NCLB. I loathe NCLB. I mean, I really, really despise what it has done to American public schools. The goals are worthy but the execution is a disaster. How was I going to sit in the seminar and be polite to someone who apparently failed to recognize that much of what is valuable in an education is difficult to quantify? How, for instance, does one quantify "qualified"? (I find the criteria for "qualified" teachers" woefully inadequate.) I was happy to discover that virtually everyone besides the speaker shared my reservations, so I was able to participate without frothing at the mouth. Or with the merest modicum of frothing at the mouth.

The midterm for my departmental class was tonight and it went really well. I wasn't sure about taking this class because I'm the only doctoral student in there. But I've learned a ton, and pretty painlessly too.

Oh! And I also spent some time today communing with the file cabinets in the basement, whence I am digging out addresses so I can send out the questionnaires for my early research project. I want to get them mailed off very soon, so they do not arrive with a slew of Christmas cards and charities' year-end pleas for money. But it's been hard to put the time in. (Plus I am a little resistant to putting the time in. What if nobody responds? What if my pet idea is wrong? If I don't send out the questionnaire, my study can't be a disaster. Spot the error!)

All right, if I don't get to bed I am going to be ill-equipped to provide fun and enriching speech therapy in the morning. And that, my friends, would be a bummer. Night, all.

P.S. Are you in need of a way to waste time on the web? Yeah, I know, you need a web time-waster approximately as much as you need a gaping hole in your head. But still: check this out. (Totally addictive for a word person like me.)