PhD

Where've I been? I've been busy. Looking to start a PhD soon. The University I have my sights on read one of my papers, and off the strength of that seems to want to squeeze me in to the cohort starting in October (it would be a very late registration). Failing that, they'll let me in next year. Which is fine by me, because I need the time to prepare.

Aside from Thailand spent the spring learning statistics. Started with single variable and worked up to ANOVA and multiple regression. This summer I'll be doing Rasch Analysis and MANOVA and factor analysis courses online. So much for my vacation...I'll have to take my texts with me to Canada when I go back and do the readings during downtime.

Then, between this fall and next spring, I'll be learning data mining through more online courses (probably). The neural networks I was interested in have commercial applications for marketing researchers now (they feed the models reams of data about their customers and try to get the networks to figure out, say, how many of them would be likely to buy a sit-on lawn mower), which means there's lots of books out now to teach people without PhDs in mathematics how to do it, and relatively user-friendly software with graphical interfaces that don't involve command lines.

That isn't to say I don't need to have a firm handle on statistics to do it (logistic regression, multivariate stats, etc), but working with and understanding the models in a basic way has moved from something over my head to something that will be manageable with a lot of work. I think I can find some interesting applications for text and data mining in my own field, and perhaps even for my doctoral thesis eventually. You never know. But putting that aside, I'm interested in learning it for the sake of it.

About a year ago, I wrote about age and limitations, and about reaching that point in your life where you've gone as far as you can without hard work. To my surprise, I've been crossing that threshold and moving beyond what I thought was the peak of what I was capable of. It's been good, and I have a pretty good idea of how much further I can go, and what I need to do to get there.

But it takes up all my time.