kareina

Over the weekend, while I was disciplined enough to stay home from the oh-so-tempting SCA event that was on offer, I wasn't disciplined enough to actually get chapter six finished. However, when I noticed that I wasn't accomplishing anything, rather than goofing off, I opted to return to tasks that need doing for other chapters. Therefore I managed to get most of my advisor's suggested corrections into chapter five and sent a copy off to ktmcg, who was wonderful enough to put her hand up when I asked if anyone has time to edit it for spelling/grammar/style, and I created some figures for Chapter 2 and did some edits there, and started trying to learn how to do a t-test (a statistics topic which either wasn't covered in my statistics class back in the dawn of time, or which I'd long since forgotten, no idea which), decided that while the mechanics of doing this in Excel are straightforward, I didn't understand enough about what and what it meant, so resolved to head in bright and early Monday to discuss it with my advisor. Therefore I went to bed *much* earlier on Sunday night than I have been--lights went out at 2:15. This morning I woke up early enough to go for a short jog up Mountain Road before breakfast (10 minutes round trip, more than half of it up hill, since down goes faster), then was ready to go to Uni before clovis_t was ready, so I put my stuff in the car and went for a 20 minute walk before he caught up with me.

As always meeting with my advisor was very inspiring and helpful. Not only does he answer the questions I had, he always provides me with much other information that is useful, and that I didn't even know I needed. My one and only complaint about going in to meet up with him is that the process of heading in uses up so much of my energy levels. (of course, the fact that I tend to get not much sleep before going in probably doesn't help!) As typical, once we got home I found myself needing to just go "splat" and read e-mail for a bit, and took several short naps, sort of doing bits of uni work in between, but not really accomplishing anything till evening rolled around. Since then things have come together a bit, and I've got the t-test working and can confirm that no, for the Collingwood River samples, there is no statistical basis to say that the range of variation in the elements Y, Sr, and the ratio of Sm/Gd has anything to do with the age of the monazite grain (which it could have done, since how much of each of those winds up in the monazite is largely dependant upon what other minerals are growing or breaking down and the same time, since the bigger minerals tend to hog the elements they like, by virtue of their size advantage--so if there were changing conditions during the time the monazite grew which resulted in a change of what other minerals were growing or breaking down, that could have accounted for the variation in the abundance of those elements in the monazite. Since we can't see an age-abundance of those elements correlation, then the other option, how close the monazite happened to be to the minerals which are either hogging or releasing those elements is more likely to be important for these samples, in this location. Now, aren't you glad you kept reading this paragraph? ;-) Now I just need to do the same test for the other regions, then say that, more eloquently, I hope, in the thesis, and then I can return to that chapter six in progress...