Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I'm near to giving up.

half the data I have collected could not be used.

people simply didn't care.

they just anyhow filled up the questionnaires, promptly collected $10 and ran off.

yet i spent hours keying in the data.

mostly useless.

There's a suitable term for this. that's GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out)

with such junk data, i could hardly squeeze out any results.

tried numerous ways to interpret the data till 4 am yesterday.

i remember who you are. yes, beware. you will always be in my heart.

Wikipedia Affiliate Button

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Untitled

the experiment is over.
10 hours. recruited 196 participants.
all sorts of people.
of course, you'd expect it to be quite crazy for a first-timer.
Every hour, i would recite instructions least 1-3 times to early comers, late comers and random walk-ins.
most came for the ten bucks, and honestly i would expect them to work for every buck by participating properly.
but as usual, that's the ideal.
someone told me before, "don't think these are university students, some are really idiots"
that stroke a chord with what I am thinking right now. spot on.
sometimes, i wonder why we can't have a jerk-free society.
as i now flipped through the completed questionnaires, there were people who obviously circled the same answers for every question.
I still remembered on the day the experiment took place, there was one guy who told me,"can you phrase your questions properly? I think it's not well-phrased."
well, i was appalled by how rude people can be.
"just who do you think you are? a professor?"
hot-tempered as i am, i controlled myself.
at the end of it all, i was totally exhausted. still i carried the whole stack of completed questionnaires back home.
only to realise many had simply anyhow filled up their questionnaires.
it was obvious.
i spent a lot of effort to prepare everything. creating the web pages for experiment, the questionnaires, the stapling, the coordination of time slots and the list goes on.
but still, i feel very much indebted to the phD student who helped me out. she woke up early on that day of experiment. and i was also aware that she had her own work as well.
thank you so much.
and thanks to another friend who sacrificed his time to conduct the experiment with me.
i really had my fair share of hard knocks this time.

Wikipedia Affiliate Button

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Untitled

drive is a thing so elusive, one moment it comes, the next moment it slips.

thankfully, i'm driven today. perhaps by fear?

tomorrow is the day i conduct my pilot test with eight people.

and the next week is the real thing.

without saying, today will a busy day for tomorrow's sake.

In school now. Just settled down.

there's not a single soul, except for the foreign students quietly hidden away in the labs.

tomorrow's is also the first day of school for the new semester.

can't help feeling the blues.

as always, there are two sides to the coin,

it's either the start of school or the last semester of undergrad studies.

i prefer to think the latter but tend towards the former.

let's hope the next two crucial weeks will be smooth sailing.

okay it's time to sign off. down to work.

Wikipedia Affiliate Button