Thesis timeline

Here is the short version: TOO LONG.

Now for a little bit longer version: TOO LONG, but it may end.

And for further details:

My graduate studies have had a few breaks here and there. I didn't go to any classes for an entire year. (I did attended one class, but I didn't get credit.) I got married in the middle of one semester. I went through a strange change in my program of study and traded out one committee member for another the next semester. I still really like this former committee member (Hi, Cliff), but I moved from a thesis in Science Education to one outside of Education. Next up, there's no financial assistance during the summer. There's a year for you.

While I've been in school I'm sure I could have done more along the way, but some of the time has seemed to slip on by. After babies being born (we've got two you know) and Laura's surgeries following having babies (she's had two you know), I lost a little bit of time to just taking care of the family. Laura wasn't supposed to be lifting our girls for a good while after each surgery. Some class loads have been heavy some semesters, and it's hard to work your TA hours part-time and study full-time and see your wife at least some-time.

And then there is the total work load. ¿Who knew that there would be so much work to sorting all of these bugs? So many people have put some time into these bugs:
- a dozen and then some undergraduate students
- at least four graduate students
- 30+ secondary science teachers.

Some people have put in less than 10 hours. Others put in a few hours a week for a semester. A few have committed to a solid 10+ hours per week for more than a semester. I have no idea how much time I have spent with these bugs, but I'm sure I've pulled every sample out of every bag at least once, if not twice and many of them 3 or more times. SO MUCH TIME.

here are the numbers:
- 11 Orders of insects
- 13 Orders of arthropods
- 44 families of flies
- 66 overall taxa
- 71 samples sorted completely, and another dozen partially but we won't use their data.
(one bag got lost somewhere that we did want to sort, but what can you do.)
- Over 81% of the individuals identified was a fly of some sort. In non-scientific terms, you could say that we had "a lot" of flies. (one, two, many, lots).
- 62,497 individuals have been identified, and sized. (a few estimates were done with a couple of groups, but seriously... i checked the accuracy of our estimation procedure and 62,497 is the number I'm sticking to.)

I personally had gone through all of the samples at least once by Friday, March 5th. By then, every insect had a name label connected to it. There were bugs that still needed to be sized after that, but all of them were named. ¿Didn't I tell you that our experimental design guaranteed that every bug was going to get handled at least twice? YEESH.

Since March 5th I've consolidated multiple spreadsheets, corrected spelling errors from all of the different people who have entered this data on to a computer, and tried to make one coherent body out of this information we've collected. Spreadsheets, pivot tables, databases, statistical and community analysis software. With scientific names, there is a high propensity for misspelling. Misspelling really makes your data come out wrong when you're trying to explain how many groups of things you have caught.

I also spent time going back and identifying insects that were named wrong the first time through. There are a few names that I knew gave other identifiers problems. There were a few names that I knew that gave me problems. I got smarter, so I went back to as many of the problem children as I could find.

I have made quite a sum of graphs and charts this last month and a half. Today, I slapped some of the results together into PowerPoint. I had my Defense of Research. The Defense of Research is with your committee members. I basically got to say, "Here is my data so far," "This is how I plan to analyze it," and the committee tells me what I REALLY should be doing instead.

We collected in two habitats, during two summers, with two types of traps. From what I've analyzed so far the habitats are significantly different, the years are probably significantly different, but trap type doesn't seem to matter.

My committee likes my data. During the defense they wondered if I could do both a methodology paper (trap types) and a diversity paper from my data. Then, right at the end I remembered that I had done a bunch of Jaccard's similarity indices with my data. ¿Why did I do that? Nerd is the answer. The abundance analysis (#s of individuals per category) in my presentation says that habitats are different, but the richness analysis (# of types of bugs) using Jaccard's says that habitats are very much the same. My little "oh, yeah" at the end of the defense gave my committee even more reason to consider two publications. And if we don't get two publications, we lump the whole study into one submission and try again.

Here is some other good news. I was going to do a species listing of Bombyliids (Bee Flies) from the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument, but my current data will give me enough to graduate. I didn't present any data on the Bombyliids today, and my committee was fine with that. Riley would like me to finish my work, but my Master's will not depend on finishing the Bombyliid study. I can sort Bombys after I submit my thesis at the first of July. It would be good for me to work for another publication or two and I know too much about Bombys to just let them slip away. Above all, it's nice to know that I don't have to also have all of that sorting done by the end of June, in addition to writing up all of this work.

All week long I was working out how I was going to discuss the Bombyliid issue. I got exactly what I was hoping for: A place to work on those bugs if my time works out for that, but I can still graduate without knocking down that next mountain before July.

Here's to defending my thesis at then end of June. Whew!

Some are smart - others, silly

i was digging around on the internet looking for some alphabet flashcards for Maggie. Yes, Maggie is learning her letters. She has started to identify them off of labels, T-shirts, boxes, her blocks, etc. i was hoping to find a set of flash cards to use with Maggie so that we could have a little play time around letters - reward some of her curiosity with something easier to handle than shuffling through the letters on her blocks.

i found a few sets of flash cards with okay fonts, but i also found someone's not so bright idea: American Sign Language alphabet flash cards. These cards have the letter and the hand sign printed together. There is an important word in that last sentence.

If you know the ASL alphabet, there is this wonderful teaching tool generally located just past your wrist. If you want to teach your kids the ASL alphabet, learn the alphabet and then use your hands as the flash cards.

i know that the flash cards could be used to help an adult as a starter to learn the ASL alphabet, but they were in a section for kids. When i found the cards, they just seemed plain silly to me. Maggie would be served better by trying to read my finger-spelling than trying to interpret the drawings of hands on the cards.

Maggie's favorite letters so far: Z (a fun action letter), X ('x's are everywhere), R, P, Q and sometimes Y.

There's always someone who'll do it

Nothing says "Sunday Evening in Provo" quite as well as shorts, dark dress socks and flip flops.

There is nearly always something extra to see at the botany (duck) pond.

Fixing what isn't broken

as i sat down to type up and edit a couple of blogs, i found a horrible fact.

!!!NERD ALERT!!!

for a solid fifteen years or so, i have been a regular user of some keyboard shortcuts using the ALT key and the number pad on the keyboard. it's a quick way to add symbols(¢£¥♂♀), or those handy diacritical marks when i would write stuff in spanish or french (éçêñ). but above all, it allowed for the quick use of "¿". i use "¿" so often, that when i write stuff for school or for my students i have to proofread to delete them all so i can appear more professional (or at least not so informal). it's just automatic to type these shortcut keys, and NOW...

the blog doesn't recognize all of these key strokes, and even interprets some of these key combinations as me trying to navigate away from the page i'm working on. i had to use Notepad to get the symbols that i put in this post, and even Notepad won't give me the degree symbol or the approximate sign (you know that wavy equals sign).

i use all these symbols all of the time, and if they don't work it's really going to wreak havoc on my typing skills if i have to slow down and remind myself to not hit those keys. the short cuts are so much easier than going through all of the mouseclicks and scrolling to insert a symbol. up until now practically everywhere you could type text accepted these shortcuts. somewhere someone is ruining a good thing.

¿who could i even complain to, to try and stop this horrible trend?