the by-log

Moving to Wordpress

2008-10-01T21:16:00.002-05:00

I've made the jump to Wordpress, so now the new and improved bylog can be found here.

Istanbul, Briefly

2008-09-29T17:07:00.002-05:00

Amy and I recently went to Istanbul so I could present a paper at Privacy in Statistical Databases 2008. The following is a short summary of our trip.

Smoking, cats, and yellow taxis are ubiquitous in this city. Refrigeration, ipods, and trash cans are not. We would wake up in the morning exhausted, which I would like to attribute to jetlag. The food was good, though not great; I enjoyed most of what I tried, including the ice cream, pizza, and Kebap and excluding the cold seasoned-rice-in-a-mussel thing at the fancy dinner accompanying our cruise up and down the Bosphorus. The old churches and mosques made me shake my head in wonder, and some of the ancient artifacts in the archaeology museum still have me shaking my head. We explored the city and walked on two continents in weather that was by turns pleasant, blustery, and drizzly. They call the largest bazaar the Grand Bazaar, but the grandest in my opinion was the Spice Bazaar, the name of which evokes thoughts of exotic far eastern sights and smells. It lived up to its name. In addition, I managed to make my presentation without any results too disastrous and feel more informed for being at the conference.

The More You Know

2008-08-18T18:41:00.003-05:00

You just gotta love PhD Comics. They describe the truth of a graduate student's life so well.

I still haven't made a significant move to make my new blog. I'm paralyzed because I haven't quite decided if I want to buy my own domain or not.

2008-07-08T08:48:00.001-05:00

This intermittent posting is for the birds. By the end of August I hope to have a new home on the web for the bylog and a renewed commitment to blogging. There's no guarantee, but I can see it in my mind's eye.

I Will Really Be Here

2008-06-02T19:30:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow morning if you wake up and the sun does not appear,
I will be here.
If in the dark we lose sight of love, hold my hand and have no fear.
I will be here.

I will be here, and you can cry on my shoulder;
When the mirror tells us we're older I will hold you
And I will be here, to watch you grow in beauty
And tell you all the things you are to me
We'll be together.
'Cause I will be here.

Tomorrow morning if you wake up and the future is unclear,
I will be here.
As sure as seasons are made for change, our lifetimes are made for years.
I will be here.

I will be true to the promise I have made
To you and to the One Who gave you to me.
I will be here.

A little while ago, Amy and I sang a Steven Curtis Chapman song (the partial lyrics of which are above) at a wedding. It was fun, and the song says some really nice things about commitment between a man and a woman, doesn't it?

A little while later we sang it again, this time in the living room of a man and woman, the latter being just out of the hospital after brain surgery to remove a potentially deadly tumor. And this isn't just any man and woman; these are Amy's parents. Now the song isn't just nice; now it grips your heart and makes you really think about waking up to a sunless world, about crying on the shoulder of that one to whom you've committed your suddenly tenuous life.

I haven't much thought about music in this way since Tom went through a time of draining sickness, how that music put to words aren't just empty platitudes when someone is lying on a bed wasting away, not just another pretty melody when you woke up this morning beside your wife and the future was, actually, unclear.

People don't usually speak in poetry, and thus this is one of the great powers of music it seems, to say things that you might not otherwise say, and in a way that you never could.

I love you mom (both of you).

YouTube

2008-04-30T08:25:00.002-05:00

Just a couple of YouTube videos that I think are hilarious.

Laughing baby. This is the 10th most viewed video on YouTube all time.

Frozen Grand Central. People just stop moving on cue in the middle of Grand Central Station.

My First Citation

2008-04-25T18:00:00.002-05:00

I hope this isn't too self-aggrandizing, but I got my first citation!

Ok, so I wasn't the first author on this paper, and it was something I did as an undergrad which has little-to-nothing to do with what I do now, but it's still exciting.

Funny Thing for a Statistician to say to Statisticians

2008-04-24T18:21:00.003-05:00

In colloquium today, our speaker was hurrying through his presentation and in the process said:

"I don't want to bore you with the data."

Except we're statisticians; we're all about the data.

I will give him that what he really meant was that he had shown us his method but he didn't have time to show us how it applied to this dataset. Still, in my mind statistics is just math if there is no data. Off the top of my head I would say that data is probably the fundamental defining concept in statistics.

Presidential Hypothesis

2008-04-22T05:49:00.002-05:00

My hypothesis is that if the presidential election was decided tomorrow based on the number of signs for each candidate along the road, Ron Paul would have a good shot.

To attempt to gather data for this hypothesis, Amy and I counted the number of signs for each candidate on our way in to work this morning.

Hillary Clinton: 4
Ron Paul: 2
Barack Obama: 1
John McCain: 0

Random sample? No way, so I still can't be sure that my hypothesis is false!

Crazy idea

2008-04-21T07:38:00.003-05:00

Saturday, while Amy worked at the hospital, I worked on campus on a variety of things, one of which was a homework assignment that went terribly. Thus, I hatched a crazy idea that should really only work if you are an unmarried computer science undergrad, and even then they wouldn't do it like I planned.

Yesterday (Sunday), I took roughly a 4.5 hour nap while Amy was again working at the hospital. We went to bed at a decent hour, and after about 3 more hours of sleep, I got up. Amy was sweet enough to get up with me and drive me to school (we only have one car at the moment), so I arrived on campus somewhere around 3 a.m. I actually can't remember exactly; the chronology is a little muddled for me right now.

But here I am, six hours later, feeling pretty decent. The homework assignment that went so terribly Saturday? Well, it went about as bad for awhile, but I seem to have broken through.

By the way, I turned in one homework assignment Friday, so I'm down to five left. Today I'll turn one in, and Wednesday another.

Homework Countdown

2008-04-10T18:39:00.001-05:00

6 more homework assignments this semester.

Two due next Friday.

Tired of Homework

2008-04-07T08:37:00.003-05:00

The last possible thing I feel like doing right now is the homework sitting next to me on the desk. I'm really, really tired of homework. I've had graduate-level statistics homework for going on three academic years and I have had enough. I'm counting down the assignments and longing for the end of classes this semester which will signal a shift in my academic life: Little to no classwork and lots of research. Oh, the glory!

But alas, I have an assignment due Wednesday, and so somehow I must push through, face the estimating equations, and derive asymptotic distributions. Or at least try my best to derive the asymptotic distributions.

Which reminds me of something funny that happened in my nonlinear programming course. The professor was asking the class to identify a certain function he had drawn on the blackboard. Someone said, "It's not a concave function!" and most everyone laughed because it was obvious that this was indeed not a concave function. After the period was over, one of my classmates smirked to his buddies, "You know you have a bunch of geeks when someone says "It's not a concave function!" and everyone laughs." One of his friends then tried to claim that he hadn't laughed, but wasn't very convincing.

AIO

2008-04-05T16:52:00.002-05:00

I still listen to Adventures in Odyssey. There was a period in my life where I sort of lost touch with that part of my childhoo ... errr... life, but sometime during the last few years I picked it up again. If you are like me and can't catch it every week on the radio, you can listen to it on the internet.

2008-04-04T13:13:00.002-05:00

Today I'm wearing some fairly ragged khaki cargos with a blue t-shirt and my nike running-type shoes. From where I'm looking, I like the ensemble. But if I think about looking at me or someone wearing something like this, I'm afraid I may be committing some sort of fashion faux pas, what with the tennis shoes and khakis. My mom always preached against that, but I figure they're ragged cargo pants so maybe it's ok. And besides, Amy didn't say anything.

2008-02-15T13:36:00.002-05:00

A logical conclusion to the acceptance of homosexuality as a cultural norm is either unisex public restrooms or no public restrooms at all.

Think about it.

Yet I still don't think it is a societal movement necessarily worth opposing. No, if a Christian wants to make an impact on the homosexual community, he/she should seek some out and get to know and love them.

Water Street

2008-02-09T12:30:00.000-05:00

There's this sign on the way from church back to our house that tells us that Water Street is like 26 miles away. I have a couple questions: If it's a street, why do they have a sign for it? If it's a town, why have I never heard of it?

Well what do you know? Wikipedia show that it's a small, unincorporated village.

Yelling

2007-12-29T15:53:00.000-05:00

I'm a yeller. There's this story of me being at a friend's house and having their dad tell me to be quiet, because I was just being loud. And in more recent years I have these memories of being shushed in restaurants.

It usually happens when I'm talking about something that I'm intent on or passionate about. Perhaps it's a subconcious effort to be noticed or to feel important, but invariably the decibels increase and afterward I'm like, "Man, I was yelling." Then I'll ask Amy if I was yelling and she'll say, "Yep, I could hear you across the church during Sunday School." Usually people are polite and don't mention anything while I'm yelling.

So if I've yelled at you in the course of any past personal conversation, I'm sorry. Lyle, I'm sorry. Dr. Slavkovic, sorry. While being passionate is something I want, I don't think it's particularly necessary to yell all the time to express myself as such.

Semester Five

2007-12-23T17:36:00.000-05:00

By way of an update, my fifth semester of graduate school is in the books. This one started out all nice - allowing me to keep regular hours with my wife - and ended not very nice with early mornings and late nights and lots of stress. But, just as all other semesters have done, this one somehow ended without disaster and I live to face another academic day. But even with all that, this was my favorite semester so far. And I expect it to get even better over the next two-and-a-half years.

It was such an academically interesting semester - though somewhat tempered by the late dash to the finish line - because I got to work on real projects with real data, because I got to read up on possible dissertation areas and because at least one of my classes was conceptually fascinating.

Unfortunately, next semester I'll have to take three classes, so my time will unavoidably be consumed with coursework, which while interesting will likely be rather tiresome. But come this summer, I can get down to the business of dissertation research. Between now and then I'll have to assemble a dissertation committee and dissertation proposal and then probably at the end of the summer I'll take my comprehensive exam.

Living Biblically

2007-11-01T17:31:00.000-05:00

Awhile back Amy and I were listening to Fresh Air, and TerryGross had featured A.J. Jacobs who recently wrote a book called "The Year of Living Biblically." This guy is an agnostic Jew but he decided to follow all the laws of the Bible as literally as possible for a whole year.

Although it was a little hard to tell whether mockery was hidden beneath the surface, it wasn't obvious listening to him that he was outright mocking the sacred. He talked about how living by Biblical commandments changed his life for the better. For instance he determined not to lie, which evidently he did to his child periodically (everybody does it, right?). He acknowledged that it was probably better for him and his child in the long run.

Interestingly, he also attempted to follow the letter of laws like the one to stone adulterers. He carried around some small pebbles with him for this purpose. So when he happened to meet an adulterer in a park somewhere, he threw the stones at him.It made the dude angry. He also attempted not to sit anywhere that his wife had during her period, which made his wife mad.

I wish they would have talked about the New Testament, but I think Terry Gross was more interesting at highlighting the humorous and archaic (and thus sort of ridiculous in oursociety) OT laws than actually the commands of Jesus. I want to know, did he repent of his sins? Ask Jesus into his heart? I guess I'll have to read the book.

Latest Music I'm Into

2007-10-24T13:09:00.000-05:00

So Penn State has an agreement with Ruckus, a Napster-like, legal media download service and consequently I can download music for free onto my computer. It doesn't have all the music that I'd like, but it has quite a bit.

Some of the music that I've downloaded that I'm currently liking:

The Isaacs. They're about the most fantastic thing in southern/country/bluegrass Gospel that I've heard since the Gaither Vocal Band. I can't think of how to tell you about them, you just have to hear them. Oh, and their material is far, far superior than standard Southern Gospel fare. I wish Ruckus had more albums of theirs.

Rascal Flatts. I feel a little guilty for liking/listening to this, as it's a country band, but this guys is just a great singer. He is the type of singer that I really go for: high and vocally flexible. And I must say that his material is of a thicker moral fiber than that of your typical country act. He comes at things from a Judeo-Christian ethic.

What Ruckus doesn't have: much Gaither Vocal Band, much choral, much barbershop.

They do have Take 6, some Glad, Chanticleer.

So if anyone has any ideas of music that you think I should try, please let me know. I'd like to try it.

2007-10-24T10:51:00.000-05:00

As I said a little while ago, school has never been more interesting. It is not without its stress, though. The first month and a half were relatively smooth, but things have ramped up since then.

One thing I've noticed is that in the matter of a day my perspective on the doability of school can radically change. When I have numerous deadlines looming - say homework form my Inference course and a client at the consulting center that wants analysis ASAP - it's easy to stress about it all. But after those deadlines pass, boom, I'm good to go again and things seem nice.

Shaking Hands

2007-09-26T13:59:00.000-05:00

You know how guys shake hands sometimes these days? The simple version is clasping hands and then bumping horizontal fists. Today I was walking to class and there was a guy and girl talking and when they parted they did that clasp and bump sort of a handshake.

2007-09-11T16:02:00.000-05:00

I really would have quite a lot to say, but time is scarce. However, I will say that my life is forever changed for the better as a result of my marriage (I love it) and school is more interesting than ever.

Theorem 1

2007-07-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

I proved a theorem! Ok, so it's not deep and probably not hard and no one else has seen it to show me that I just proved something so trivial as to be laughable, but it's still pretty cool to think I proved something.

Fifteen short days until we're married. I'm so excited. I might just be completely giddy in the few days before the wedding.

The Book Meme

2007-07-17T16:35:00.000-05:00

I got tagged by Hans to do the following:

1. Grab the book closest to you
2. Open it to page 161
3. Find the fifth full sentence
4. Post the text of the sentence to your blog
5. Don’t search around for the coolest book you have, use the one that is really next to you.
6. Tag five people to do this meme.

Well, the last few weeks I've been sitting at a desk beside my desk because this desk has some computing resources that I need for my Thesis work. So the book that's actually close to me is not my own but an old Instructor's Guide to a textbook called Introduction to the Practice of Statistics. The fifth full sentence on p. 161 is: "The strongest relationship is between CO and HC." I think it's talking about two variables in a Regression context.

I'll be a spoil sport and not tag anyone.