May 24, 2005 23:49
(in response to Zach in the previous thread)
*smiles* Wow, I'm not so desperate that I would become a socialist!!!
Though anarchy aint half bad.
(whats next for Martyn)
I guess the thing is that there is time pressure PhD wise.
For those of you who perhaps don't know I've been invited back to the Drug and Alcohol Unit of the Princess Alexandra hospital in Brisbane to do some part time work and a PhD. This would be in the same sort of area that I was working in before, that is using non-linear (AI sort of) techniques to predict who successfully complete an alcohol rehab course.
The next step is trying to work out, on the individual level, why it is that the people we think won't succeed won't succeed and to try and compensate for those factors before the training course so that they will be able to be rehabilitated some time in the future.
The hospital can give me about 8 hours of work a week at this point, which would be my only income at the moment but hopefully I could pick up a little tutoring work on the side and I have quite a nice bit of savings to keep me going although it seems like a bit of a waste to spend them all on day to day living expenses.
A paper that I cowrote with the unit will be published soon in the journal "Substance Abuse and Misuse".
They have been keen to get this stuff off and running for the last 3 years or so and if I don't step up now they will be casting their nets further and wider to find someone else as I understand it and now is also the time to be there as this would be the first such application of these sorts of techniques to the prediction of complex human behaviours and certainly the first such real life application of this sort of tech in AUS for addiction and one of the first in the World.
That paragraph was one sentence. I cant be buggered going back and fixing it cause I'm cranky.
As Emma said, it prolly wont last long.