Sunday, February 28, 2016

The pictures you've been waiting for

News on this end is sparse with nothing of real note to really talk about. The one new thing this week is the fact that we finally got pictures from the wedding.  So instead of me droning on about nothing, I thought I would share some of the photos everyone has been waiting to see. 







In front of the Mt. Timpanogos Temple

Le Jardine reception center




Her bouquet with her ring

The whole family :)


My children

The groom & groomsmen

 The wedding party


The bride & bridesmaids

Table decorations

 Toree caught the bouquet

Spencer caught the garter

Trayton carrying Naomi out through the bridge

I hope those were worth the wait. The couple is still happy and enjoying married life amongst all the fun of  being university students. Life is good.  It's better with family and friends.  Let the important people in your life know that you love them. 

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Bits and Bobbles

So I thought I would share some highlights from this week.  It's a little of this and some of that, bits and bobbles...

Monday evenings I have 2 hour choir rehearsals for the SuPhil choir.  March 5th we will be singing Opera choruses and should be a fun concert.  We have 6 different pieces 2 in Italian, 2 in French, 1 in German and 1 in Russian.  It becomes a mental workout to change between the different languages and try to remember the different pronunciations.  We have a gal in the choir from a Russian speaking country and she has been working with us on the Russian...... Lots of consonant sounds and vowel placements in parts of the mouth I've never tried to make a vowel sound with.... let alone sing it. One of my favorites was the woman in the choir who was helping with the French.  She told us to put your mouth in egg laying shape and then say 'e'.  Come again?  I've never laid an egg, and definitely not with my mouth.....

Grades came out this week.  My PAT (personal academic tutor) seems to think I should be able to get an 80 (high distinction) on my dissertation..... I just need to figure out what that will be exactly, by tomorrow, no pressure. 

I attended a paper lantern gala put on by the confusion center and the MA chinese students to celebrate Chinese New Year. (It's the year of the monkey) It was fun.  Learned about talents some of my classmates have that I didn't know.  :) 

The highlight of the week however was my son visiting me for a day and a half.  He is working in Zurich for 2 weeks so since he was this close, flew over for the weekend. Having limited time and wanting him to get a feel for England, we went up to Winchester (thanks to some lovely friends who offered to drive so we didn't have to spend hours on a bus...) and walked the lower city by the river, the castle ruins however were closed :( but we took in Winchester Cathedral and the Castle Winchester where King Arthur's round table is.  It is real. It dates back to 1252, was painted in 1590.  It hangs on the wall where it has been since about then.  It has only been on public display for about 30 years, the hall has been used as a court and many other things.  It was really cool.  

We went from there for a country drive up to Chawton so that he could see English countryside.  We walked to the manor house and admired the thatch roof cottages.  Then had a lovely dinner in the Greyfriar pub.  I also took him to walk the Southampton walls, down to the docks, and back up to the bargate as well as my Uni.  My friends also fed him a lovely British roast lamb dinner.  I hated to put him back on the bus, it was so nice to share with family a small piece of my life here. 

So nothing big this week just random things in the everyday life of a Uni student. Just a few bits and bobbles. 

Here are random things from my journeyings this week: 






King Arthur's round table. :)



Sunday, February 14, 2016

Fire Drills

After having taught for many years, the art of fire drills and being conditioned to bells (thanks Pavlov) is engrained in my very being.  I've had to adjust slightly, but it is still there.  I bring this up because the British take health and safety very seriously.  It is a government dept. in fact.  So for example the light switch for the bathroom is always on the outside of the door.  There are no electrical plugs in the bathroom either.  The light has to be a certain distance from the shower as well. All of the electrical outlets have an on/off switch on them, so when you plug in something you have to turn on the outlet as well. This is all in accordance with Health and Safety.  

So because I live in the halls of residence the rules are very strict.  When cooking you must open the window and keep the kitchen door shut.  All of the doors are fire doors and are labeled as such.  These are not allowed to be propped open. Windows in the bedroom should be opened regularly so as to keep the mold down. They also came and installed locks on all of the windows so that you can't open them from the side, they only open about 4 inches at the top, so that you sorta get a hint of a breeze through them, but you can't do something stupid.  No open flames or fairy lights allowed in the bedrooms, or hot plates for cooking.  This is understandable since most of the 1100 people living in my halls are between the ages of 18 - 25, and this is their first time away from home.  

Even with all of the precautions, the fire alarms go off on a regular basis.  Daily, or pretty close, you hear the fire alarm sound in one of the three buildings somewhere.  What you don't want is for it to go off in your flat or your room.  When it does you wait to see if it will stop, when it doesn't then you vacate.  I've only had to vacate twice.  The first time was a planned drill back in about October.  I was working and focused and I heard it start on another floor.  Then it sounded in my room.  Pretty sure I scraped myself off of the ceiling, put on my shoes and coat and headed out.  I joined the rank and file in the stairwell and we wound down 12 flights of stairs out through the the courtyard down the street and to a car park halfway down the block.  Here we were herded in like cattle and waited for instructions.
If it had been the states I think they would have started the speech with "this is only a drill, if it had been an actual emergency...." instead they droned on about why and where and eventually they let us go back to our flats... up the 12 flights of stairs as cattle herded back in. 

Several times they have been testing the system and the alarm goes off in my room, I wait the allotted 20 secs and it stops and I go on about my business.  One day the alarm sounded in Block C and and went on for quite a while.  The fire truck actually showed up once, though, as far as I could tell, there wasn't a fire to put out, but they put someone on a stretcher... I've watched students file out in various attire as either they had just showered, or gone to bed, or gotten up... I've listened to it sounding in other parts of my building and can hear doors shutting at regular intervals, haven't figured out quite what that is all about yet.

So when I heard the all too familiar two tone alarm last night I continued on with my work.  Within a couple of minutes however it sounded in my room.  After jumping out of my skin, I waited...... sigh, not going to shut off.  So I pulled on my shoes, grabbed my coat and key and went out.  The fire door halfway down the flat hall had closed, no sign of any of my flatmates,  I went out the flat door and a guy was standing in the doorway of the flat across the hall.  He looks at me and asks if I was going down.  Yes, of course I was. He hadn't decided.... I turned and opened the door to the stairwell to find everyone flooding out of the building.  This time though we congregated in the courtyard.  It was raining.... I looked up and could see one of my flatmates in our kitchen, I guess she decided it wasn't important.... 
I couldn't really hear what the residence team gal was saying, something about the rain and not sending us down the street, sorry for the inconvenience and they would have us back in the building shortly.  I decided it was an unplanned entire building evacuation.  

It brought back memories of teaching high school.  Sometimes the alarm went off and they would tell us to ignore it.  Sometimes we went out and then later they said it will count for one of the planned ones.  When the alarms sounded at school and we were not advised of a drill, I always took them seriously.  In the years of working at the high school we had three lock down emergencies where we turned out the lights, locked the doors and stuffed 40 students in the farthest corner of the room and tried not to breathe.... Two of those were because of threats nearby to the school.  However whenever I hear a fire alarm, unplanned, my thoughts go back to the day of the bomb threat at the school.  It was before classes, the alarm sounded, no one said ignore it so we vacated.  4 hours later after the bomb squad and the dogs had combed through the school, we were allowed back in. 

Am I going down?  Yes.  I won't question.  I won't stay in.  It might be an inconvenience and as much as sometimes the rules seem a bit over the top, in a real emergency it's good that they exist.  So I put up with trying to do my hair with the mirror in my wardrobe, opening my window daily, cooking with the noisy fan and kitchen door closed.  I'll switch on my outlets and turn them back off again when not in use. I'll leave when the alarm sounds in my room.  Past experience has told me it is important. As much as we grumble about regulations, the government protecting us from ourselves etc, honestly it is good to know that someone cares and that there is a plan in place. you never know when it won't be a drill.  


This sign is posted by the main doors as you come into the block. 

The lock on my window....

The elevator notice....
The notice above the box by the stairwell. I guess
 "the appliance" is in the box.....



  

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Linguistics of statistics

I know what you are thinking.  Why? Right!? So the idea of mixing math (or maths as the British say) with language is heresy. However, math is a language albeit one most people would rather not have to learn.  And fascinatingly understanding the linguistics of it is an understanding of the subject, in this case statistics. Like all languages if you understand the definitions of the words and the concepts behind them, then the application becomes much easier.  And this holds true for any mathematics. 

So being a budding linguist the challenge of statistics has become a language learning process and not a 'math thing'.  I like math anyway, so it's not like it's a killer idea for me.  But from a research perspective viewing statistics linguistically has merit.  If you understand the meaning of what your are looking at and what you are looking to do with it then the task doesn't seem as daunting.  It's about communicating data and ideas.  Translating data into understandable terms and finding meaning in what has been collected.  Sounds like a linguistics thing to me. 

So like any language we start by understand some basic vocabulary words.  I like the idea that it is descriptive as well as analytical, I can cope with both of those ideas.  It deals with population samples and variables.  See, not so bad, right?  Variables can be nominal (categorical), ordinal which are categories that are ordered, or scale which are continuous and the numbers mean something like age.  Scales can be interval (degrees C or F) or ratio (weight). These determine the statistical technique that can be used to analyse the data set. 

Slightly harder to process are the ideas of mean(average), median(middle), mode(most frequent), standard deviation (how far from the mean), skewed (probably like my view of this concept), histograms, bar charts, pie charts, box plots, scatterplots, normal distribution(you know, the bell curve), z scores (no not worse than failing...), outliers (yes those that are out of the group and causing you trouble), confidence interval (how confident you are that your data falls within the norms), standard error..... 

 See, vocabulary. The vocabulary is then reduced to symbols and the symbols placed in equations (sentences) that you then find the numbers that they represent and manipulate to find answers. You get things like the answer to life the universe and everything which is, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42.  However they didn't give the confidence interval or the standard deviation... nor did they report if they used linear regression or a chi square test. Not sure how statistically significant that number actually is....

So I will work hard to learn the linguistics of statistics so that I can use statistics to analyze linguistics.  I don't know about you, but I'm excited.  Care to join me?