Bluh.
I actually took a sick day today, because after feeling shitty every day this week, today I achieved the coveted ultra-shitty and wasn't going to realistically get anything done at work anyway.
I have no idea if I'm like, actually sick or if my allergies are just going berserk right now, but it doesn't make that much difference in terms of the shittiness. Bluh.
But at least I accomplished things at work this week prior to today! Actually I'm pretty pleased with myself, basically for the project I'm working on, the co-manager wanted me to help with converting a datafile into wide format. For reference, there are two ways to organize datafiles, long and wide. In a long file, instead of organizing by person you group by, in this case, event that we coded. You might also have files grouped by time point or other things. In a wide file, each row is a single participant. Most of the analyses we do require a wide file.
So I'm thinking about that, and then the project co-manager jabbered me (jabber is our inter-office chat and phone system) to say that she was still working on writing a script to get the data out of datavyu, the program we used to code it. And she said it was Ruby scripting, so I was like, I know Ruby a little so let me know if there's anything I can do. Basically like two years ago I taught myself a little Ruby on a whim and wrote a short program that reproduced the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of the Sky personality quiz. But anyway, long story short I ended up writing the entire script so that it just produces the wide file we need. Which saved us a lot of time, since Ruby is a lot more flexible and powerful than SPSS coding. So that worked out nicely. Although really, my knowledge of Ruby is beginner-level, this was useful and fun to work on but not as impressive as the co-manager seemed to think. But it was fun to work on, I love stuff like that.
On Monday I'll need to actually analyze the data since I wasn't in today and co-manager was apparently in meetings all day. Meetings take up so much time that could otherwise be productive, seriously.
I think some drama may actually have happened in a project meeting on Wednesday; I wasn't in the meeting but beforehand project manager was talking to another postdoc about telling the lab manager he needs to not constantly shout at her and stuff and about taking a lesser role and letting co-manager be in charge. Lab manager is, in fairness, kind of bonkers a lot of the time and does tend to rage at people when things don't go as planned. I think he may have gotten to dislike project manager during this project though. I...have mixed feelings I guess? Nobody deserves to be shouted at and made miserable but at the same time, project manager kind of annoys me as well and has screwed up a lot of things during this project that have led directly to the clusterfuck we now have to deal with. And she is kind of a dick at times. More like oblivious I guess? Like, the type to say rude things without seeming to realize they're being rude. So I am somewhat less sympathetic here than I would otherwise be.
However also in fairness, the lab manager is to blamed for all the problems as well, because he should never have agreed to take on this project with such a small staff (and a small budget for staff). It was a bad decision and it was obvious at the time to people other than him that it was a bad decision. Not that he's likely to ever realize that...so there's plenty of blame to go around here. But yeah things seemed pretty tense on Wednesday. Hopefully it'll all calm down and we can just finish the stupid project and move on to less terrible things.
Also I am kind of wondering what they were going to do if I didn't happen to know Ruby, since I don't know if we could have gotten the datafile into shape and analyzed by Tuesday if we had had to start from the raw long file...this entire project has had all these sudden deadlines with little warning. Well, part of that is that we have almost no staff on it now, since the summer temps are gone (and we don't really have the money to keep them on until they know what's going to happen with data collection). But yeah...I think they're presenting the results to the partner organization or something? Project manager and co-manager were going through the analyses I ran and trying to find a way to present the results as significant. Which...sigh, I really think this a bit unethical and it's terrible practice, because having run the analyses myself I can definitively say: we did not find anything. We found two significant interactions with no significant main effects (when this happens, you should not report the interactions, since essentially this sort of result means that none of the groups changed over time, but there is a difference in how the groups changed over time, which is nonsensical. probably there's a main effect that we can't detect due to low power), and the effects were trivial in size. That's the story. Trying to desperately spin this to say that probably their intervention causes change and we just can't detect it because of this and that is just kind of slimy, because we have no real reason to think that. The truthful summary of the results is that most of the participants are scoring really high at the start, so they don't really need the intervention. It's like if a bunch of kids have an A on a math test, and then you give them a special math tutoring program and test them again: their scores aren't going to improve because they all had As to start with. They can't get a higher score than what they already have. Same thing here: the coaches are starting out near the top of things we're measuring, so of course they aren't getting noticeably better. Basically the sorts of people who would need this intervention are the sorts of people who would not volunteer to do the intervention. This is a meaningful finding in and of itself, but it's not what the partner organization wants to hear of course.
I'm not really sure why project manager is so fixated on finding a way to suggest we found an effect of the intervention...she's complained a few times about this, and said things like that our jobs on all of the lab's projects are to just say the partner organizations' programs work, but I question whether that is really true. In the other projects I've been around for, they actually FOUND changes. Not that there's no spin--such is research in general I guess--but it's not like everyone is running around lying about our results. Also I don't think lab manager has ever suggested that we should do such a thing so I have no idea why she's convinced that she 'has' to spin this. Unless she just wants to find a result but I guess doesn't want to acknowledge that and is thus projecting it onto everyone else? Or something? I really have no idea what her deal is. I'm not involved in any of the actual reporting of the results (well, I report my analyses to the project manager, but I have no contact with the partner organization and I'm not part of any of the meetings), so I don't really know what all is going on with that.
The sad thing is, using the interview data we might well be able to make a case that although coaches' attitudes (measured by the survey) aren't changing, they are changing their coaching practices. Basically a lot of the interviewees said that they already believed all the stuff in the workshop (like about sportsmanship and focusing more on giving kids a positive experience and personal growth than on who wins Little League baseball), but the workshop helped them learn new ways to actually convey these ideas to the kids they coach and put it into practice. Which makes sense: coaches might have a lot of positive ideas (like wanting to help kids develop character and whatnot) but be unsure how best to talk with kids, give feedback, etc. Teaching is a specialized skill and someone might not have ever done any mentoring or teaching before becoming a Little League coach. So I think there's some interesting things in that data, yet project manager remains fixated on forcing the survey data to say something it doesn't say (I have mentioned these alternate explanations to project manager, but in one ear out the other I guess...).
From my own interactions with her and also from hearing the meetings she holds in our shared office, I kind of get the feeling that she's not good at listening to people. Like she'll hear what someone says and agree with it, and then carry on thinking/doing the same thing as before. She tends to hear what she wants to hear I guess? Or not even WANTS to hear, I guess more what she expects to hear.
So that's the ongoing saga of the Project That Would Not End. At least working with the data is fun, even if I go into it knowing that my actual conclusions will be largely ignored in favor of trying to make it look like we found something. I assume we'll be collecting data again at some point but I have no idea what the plans are for that. This is another thing actually: although I was officially on a different project for most of this, I've been helping with this project since almost the start, yet I have never been actually told what is going on with it. Everything I know is from overhearing project manager talking about it. Even when I was going on data collections, times would be changed at the last minute and they would forget to tell me because I wasn't on the main data collection email list (what with being full-time staff rather than a videographer, and also what with not being on the project). And now STILL, it's like project manager just keeps forgetting I am actually on this project, so I never know what's going on. She and co-manager just show up with stuff they need me to do. It makes for a surreal experience since I just hear random bits and pieces of what's going on. It's like all this shit is going down, but it doesn't directly affect me, I just hear about it later. Not that I really WANT to be more deeply involved here, considering that everyone involved with the project seems miserable so much of the time...those are not meetings one wants to be invited to, really. I wouldn't mind having at least some idea what we're going to be doing in the next few months, though.
But whatever we are actually going to be doing on this project in the future, I'm sure we'll get it all done...and next week we'll have all the summer data analyzed! Why are we analyzing only the summer data and not the pile of spring data we already had? I have no idea, because no one has told me. But that's the data they want analyzed, so that's what I'll do.
Aside from work...I've caught a lot of Pokemon in Pokemon Go? It's actually a good motivation to go out and take walks. I ended up walking for an hour on Saturday morning when I really only meant to pop out for a quick stroll lol. But yeah not too much going on. I've been pretty lazy of late...
But those are the haps! Mainly just work stuff.
I have no idea if I'm like, actually sick or if my allergies are just going berserk right now, but it doesn't make that much difference in terms of the shittiness. Bluh.
But at least I accomplished things at work this week prior to today! Actually I'm pretty pleased with myself, basically for the project I'm working on, the co-manager wanted me to help with converting a datafile into wide format. For reference, there are two ways to organize datafiles, long and wide. In a long file, instead of organizing by person you group by, in this case, event that we coded. You might also have files grouped by time point or other things. In a wide file, each row is a single participant. Most of the analyses we do require a wide file.
So I'm thinking about that, and then the project co-manager jabbered me (jabber is our inter-office chat and phone system) to say that she was still working on writing a script to get the data out of datavyu, the program we used to code it. And she said it was Ruby scripting, so I was like, I know Ruby a little so let me know if there's anything I can do. Basically like two years ago I taught myself a little Ruby on a whim and wrote a short program that reproduced the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of the Sky personality quiz. But anyway, long story short I ended up writing the entire script so that it just produces the wide file we need. Which saved us a lot of time, since Ruby is a lot more flexible and powerful than SPSS coding. So that worked out nicely. Although really, my knowledge of Ruby is beginner-level, this was useful and fun to work on but not as impressive as the co-manager seemed to think. But it was fun to work on, I love stuff like that.
On Monday I'll need to actually analyze the data since I wasn't in today and co-manager was apparently in meetings all day. Meetings take up so much time that could otherwise be productive, seriously.
I think some drama may actually have happened in a project meeting on Wednesday; I wasn't in the meeting but beforehand project manager was talking to another postdoc about telling the lab manager he needs to not constantly shout at her and stuff and about taking a lesser role and letting co-manager be in charge. Lab manager is, in fairness, kind of bonkers a lot of the time and does tend to rage at people when things don't go as planned. I think he may have gotten to dislike project manager during this project though. I...have mixed feelings I guess? Nobody deserves to be shouted at and made miserable but at the same time, project manager kind of annoys me as well and has screwed up a lot of things during this project that have led directly to the clusterfuck we now have to deal with. And she is kind of a dick at times. More like oblivious I guess? Like, the type to say rude things without seeming to realize they're being rude. So I am somewhat less sympathetic here than I would otherwise be.
However also in fairness, the lab manager is to blamed for all the problems as well, because he should never have agreed to take on this project with such a small staff (and a small budget for staff). It was a bad decision and it was obvious at the time to people other than him that it was a bad decision. Not that he's likely to ever realize that...so there's plenty of blame to go around here. But yeah things seemed pretty tense on Wednesday. Hopefully it'll all calm down and we can just finish the stupid project and move on to less terrible things.
Also I am kind of wondering what they were going to do if I didn't happen to know Ruby, since I don't know if we could have gotten the datafile into shape and analyzed by Tuesday if we had had to start from the raw long file...this entire project has had all these sudden deadlines with little warning. Well, part of that is that we have almost no staff on it now, since the summer temps are gone (and we don't really have the money to keep them on until they know what's going to happen with data collection). But yeah...I think they're presenting the results to the partner organization or something? Project manager and co-manager were going through the analyses I ran and trying to find a way to present the results as significant. Which...sigh, I really think this a bit unethical and it's terrible practice, because having run the analyses myself I can definitively say: we did not find anything. We found two significant interactions with no significant main effects (when this happens, you should not report the interactions, since essentially this sort of result means that none of the groups changed over time, but there is a difference in how the groups changed over time, which is nonsensical. probably there's a main effect that we can't detect due to low power), and the effects were trivial in size. That's the story. Trying to desperately spin this to say that probably their intervention causes change and we just can't detect it because of this and that is just kind of slimy, because we have no real reason to think that. The truthful summary of the results is that most of the participants are scoring really high at the start, so they don't really need the intervention. It's like if a bunch of kids have an A on a math test, and then you give them a special math tutoring program and test them again: their scores aren't going to improve because they all had As to start with. They can't get a higher score than what they already have. Same thing here: the coaches are starting out near the top of things we're measuring, so of course they aren't getting noticeably better. Basically the sorts of people who would need this intervention are the sorts of people who would not volunteer to do the intervention. This is a meaningful finding in and of itself, but it's not what the partner organization wants to hear of course.
I'm not really sure why project manager is so fixated on finding a way to suggest we found an effect of the intervention...she's complained a few times about this, and said things like that our jobs on all of the lab's projects are to just say the partner organizations' programs work, but I question whether that is really true. In the other projects I've been around for, they actually FOUND changes. Not that there's no spin--such is research in general I guess--but it's not like everyone is running around lying about our results. Also I don't think lab manager has ever suggested that we should do such a thing so I have no idea why she's convinced that she 'has' to spin this. Unless she just wants to find a result but I guess doesn't want to acknowledge that and is thus projecting it onto everyone else? Or something? I really have no idea what her deal is. I'm not involved in any of the actual reporting of the results (well, I report my analyses to the project manager, but I have no contact with the partner organization and I'm not part of any of the meetings), so I don't really know what all is going on with that.
The sad thing is, using the interview data we might well be able to make a case that although coaches' attitudes (measured by the survey) aren't changing, they are changing their coaching practices. Basically a lot of the interviewees said that they already believed all the stuff in the workshop (like about sportsmanship and focusing more on giving kids a positive experience and personal growth than on who wins Little League baseball), but the workshop helped them learn new ways to actually convey these ideas to the kids they coach and put it into practice. Which makes sense: coaches might have a lot of positive ideas (like wanting to help kids develop character and whatnot) but be unsure how best to talk with kids, give feedback, etc. Teaching is a specialized skill and someone might not have ever done any mentoring or teaching before becoming a Little League coach. So I think there's some interesting things in that data, yet project manager remains fixated on forcing the survey data to say something it doesn't say (I have mentioned these alternate explanations to project manager, but in one ear out the other I guess...).
From my own interactions with her and also from hearing the meetings she holds in our shared office, I kind of get the feeling that she's not good at listening to people. Like she'll hear what someone says and agree with it, and then carry on thinking/doing the same thing as before. She tends to hear what she wants to hear I guess? Or not even WANTS to hear, I guess more what she expects to hear.
So that's the ongoing saga of the Project That Would Not End. At least working with the data is fun, even if I go into it knowing that my actual conclusions will be largely ignored in favor of trying to make it look like we found something. I assume we'll be collecting data again at some point but I have no idea what the plans are for that. This is another thing actually: although I was officially on a different project for most of this, I've been helping with this project since almost the start, yet I have never been actually told what is going on with it. Everything I know is from overhearing project manager talking about it. Even when I was going on data collections, times would be changed at the last minute and they would forget to tell me because I wasn't on the main data collection email list (what with being full-time staff rather than a videographer, and also what with not being on the project). And now STILL, it's like project manager just keeps forgetting I am actually on this project, so I never know what's going on. She and co-manager just show up with stuff they need me to do. It makes for a surreal experience since I just hear random bits and pieces of what's going on. It's like all this shit is going down, but it doesn't directly affect me, I just hear about it later. Not that I really WANT to be more deeply involved here, considering that everyone involved with the project seems miserable so much of the time...those are not meetings one wants to be invited to, really. I wouldn't mind having at least some idea what we're going to be doing in the next few months, though.
But whatever we are actually going to be doing on this project in the future, I'm sure we'll get it all done...and next week we'll have all the summer data analyzed! Why are we analyzing only the summer data and not the pile of spring data we already had? I have no idea, because no one has told me. But that's the data they want analyzed, so that's what I'll do.
Aside from work...I've caught a lot of Pokemon in Pokemon Go? It's actually a good motivation to go out and take walks. I ended up walking for an hour on Saturday morning when I really only meant to pop out for a quick stroll lol. But yeah not too much going on. I've been pretty lazy of late...
But those are the haps! Mainly just work stuff.