Final version of conference paper submitted

Dear Diary,

my conference paper was accepted for an oral presentation at the conference in Philadelphia in August. I got extremely positive reviewer comments and have until May 13th to submit the revised and final version. Because there wasn’t much to change, I already did all the necessary changes two weeks (or so) ago. Yesterday, I double-checked them all and then submitted the revised and final version of the paper.

So that’s off of my to-do list as well. I am looking forward to going to Philly in August. I’ll have to see whether I can manage to go a week earlier or stay a week longer (or both!) to make sure I can visit friends and do a bit of vacationing.

Getting the stone(s) rolling

Dear Diary,

this week, I was reasonably productive.

I finished up coding one experiment and the data collection started yesterday evening. My research assistant (RA) CS is doing the data collection. We won’t collect data next week because students are taking their resit exams.

My other RA is collecting data for another project. It’s a two-session experiment: the first session happened this week and the second will take place in four weeks. So things are on track but I don’t need to actively work on this yet.

Then I’ve been planning two more experiments. I have received confirmation from the ethics committee that I am allowed to run the experiments. That’s the first step. Then I met with a programmer yesterday who’ll help me write the code for the experiments. He’s very good and super nice and I should have the code early next week. Then I can test it during the week and then start data collection the week after that: on May 2.

That’ll be a short week because I’ll go to Germany on May 4 in the evening. The next morning, we’ll go to Sweden and I’ll be gone for the rest of the week and the week after that. Therefore, I want to make sure that everything’s up and running and I’ve tested everything. Because then my RAs can collect data while I am gone. If all goes well, I will be on vacation and when I get back, I’ll have data from three experiments!

And then I can dive into analyzing the data and writing stuff up! The plan sounds too good to be true so I’ll see how it actually works out. :D

On top of those projects, there is one more project that I’ve been working on this week. For that project, I’ll pre-register a study for the first time. The idea is that you write up your hypotheses before you start data collection and make them public. You also have to explain in detail how exactly you are going to analyze the data and all that stuff. I wrote a first draft of that “proposal” this week and sent it out to the people that are involved in the project. Based on their feedback, I hope I can finish up the pre-registration next week so that I can start data collection in the first week of May.

So, yeah. Lots of planning and organizing this week. But it’s going well. When I get back from Sweden, I’ll stop collecting data for a while and focus on analyzing and, most importantly, writing. I really need to make sure that I put all this stuff that I am doing at the moment on paper.

Work things

Dear Diary,

last week was pretty busy. I spend half a day with a master student that I am supervising. He finished data collection and I helped him with some programming basics to pre-process his data and do some basic steps. We basically checked to make sure that the manipulation worked and that we have the data in a format that is easy to work with for him.

He doesn’t really have much programming experience so I made sure to explain things to him and took my time doing things in a way that’s easy to understand (rather than quick to do). I could have done it in 90 minutes myself but instead we spent about four hours on it. But I think it was good: he learned a lot and now I know the data is a in a good format and he can focus on doing the analyses and then I can double-check his work.

Then, I also had two meetings regarding another project: I set up an experiment and organized the data collection for a project with my friend and colleague ES. I made some plots and pre-processed the data so that she could do the analyses more easily. She ran the analyses and the results are very, very interesting. We are the first to study this particular effect over a long time course. It’s a very boring task and we made people do it for an hour a day, four days in a row. We’re interest in how they adapt to the task and how the learn and how exactly they get better.

It’s interesting because the pattern of results changes quite a bit over time and no-one every has people do this task for more than an hour. So that’s pretty cool: we’re the first to show that the assumption that people won’t change their behavior is wrong. We met with ES’s supervisor to talk about how to write up the paper. I won’t be involved in that but will make the plots for the paper. So I don’t really have to do any work for it as of now. But I’ll be the second author on the paper. Which is pretty neat!

Then, for the paper I am writing with my supervisor, I am still waiting for him to send me the data so I can re-create his analyses and conduct two more. I sent him a draft of the Introduction and am waiting for his feedback. So there’s nothing I can do at this point.

On top of that, I am also planning two more experiments which I’ll focus on during the next week. One of them just needs to be programmed which is quite easy (I think…) and then my RA will collect the data. The other one, I want to pre-register. Which is a bit more work but also really cool because I’ve never done that before. Then the RA will collect the data.

For the other project, my other RA is starting another round of data collection tomorrow morning. Then we’ll have to wait for four weeks for people to get back and then we can analyze those data and think about how to write up the project.

So, yeah: there’s plenty to do. :) It’s quite fun but I also feel like I am reaching the limit of how much I can maintain in my brain at the same time…

Conference paper accepted; abstract submitted

Dear Diary,

on Monday I got an e-mail notifying me that my conference paper was accepted for the conference in Philly. On Tuesday I submitted another abstract for a poster presentation at a conference in Penn State.

The two conference are right after each other and pretty close to each other. Which means that I’ll spend some time in the north-eastern US in early August. Really looking forward to it!

For the conference paper, I need to response to the reviewer comments. They were very constructive and overall extremely positive. Which made me very, very happy. :)

Revised paper submitted

Dear Diary,

today, I got the okay from all my co-authors. I submitted the paper that I have been working on for years (literally) again today.

I got an e-mail on March 13 that the paper was “accepted with minor revisions”. I’ve been working on those “minor revisions” since then and now they were all implemented and ready to be sent off again.

I hope that I don’t have to look at this paper again and it’ll all be fine. I really don’t want to spend any more time thinking about it…

A bit of a strange week

Dear Diary,

on Tuesday, I had a horribly unproductive day. I just couldn’t really focus. Eventually I gave up and just went home. Five minutes later, NB arrived and felt exactly the same. We decided to just draw the curtains and watch a movie. We googled a bit to find one we might want to see and checked out multiple lists of “Best movies of 2015”. There were a couple of movies that were on almost all lists and most of those we had already seen. Apart from Inside Out. It looks like a kid’s movie with an interesting setting:

The reason we ended up watching it was that it was, to date, the highest rated Pixar movie on imdb. Which is pretty amazing to me. Pixar made a bunch of great movies that are also appealing to adults (Up and Wall-E, just two name two) and this one had higher ratings than those?

And I have to admit: it was pretty great. It was a simple enough story but the way it was told was great. Many, many jokes and references in their that were definitely put in for the parents, not the kids. Overall, very enjoyable movie for the whole family.

The rest of the week until now (Thursday night) was a bit better: I was more focused and worked more but I was kind of stuck on the things that I needed to work on. I worked on analyzing two datasets. In one of the, the experimental manipulation just didn’t work and I have no idea why. We had 47 people study a set of words and tested them later and manipulated a set of the words in a way that should make those words harder to learn than the others. But there was no effect at all. I looked at various aspects of the data and can’t quite figure out why it didn’t work. One of the things I know is that it was just way too easy. But even if I look at only the data from the first couple of minutes, I see no effect. Strange.

The other issue is a data analysis for a conference paper that I want to write. I made some plots and started writing the paper. Based on the plots, I assumed the two groups that we assigned people to to differ in performance. But when I actually did the statistical analysis, it turned out they weren’t. There is quite a bit of variation between participants (not all participants learn equally well, of course) and also between items (not all items are equally difficult) and the analysis I did does not take that variation into account. So now I am working on a more complex analysis using linear mixed effects logistic regression to see to which extent I can account for that variance. And, more importantly, if there is a significant difference between the groups if I factor out the differences that I am not interested in (i.e., between participants and items).

I wasn’t able to do it properly yet. I think. It’s pretty complicated.

The problem is that I don’t know how to proceed writing the paper if there is no difference between those two groups. The way I need to tell the story kind of depends on that. So that’s a bit frustrating. Especially because the deadline for the paper is next Friday. Now I am a bit worried that there is no paper to write if there is no difference between those two groups even though we expected there to be one. My supervisor was sick today so I couldn’t really talk to him about it. I hope he’s back tomorrow or we can skype or something. I need to figure how what to write because there isn’t much time left…

Lots of new data!

Dear Diary,

while I was in Heidelberg, the data collection for two projects was completed. One was done by the research master student that I am supervising and the other by my RA.

I have things that are higher on my list of priorities but it takes me a lot of self-control to not go and look at the data. Exciting!

For the research master student, I’ll try to not do too much. I find it kind of hard because I can do in 2-3 hours what he’ll work on all week. He’s now starting to teach himself basic programming skills so for him it’ll be quite a bit of work. But it’ll also be a very good learning experience. So I’ll probably try to find time next week or the week after to sit down with him for four to five hours and walk him through the basics and help him get the data in a format that he can more easily work with. From there, I’ll let him do the work himself and then check up on what he did to make sure it’s correct.

The other dataset I’ll analyze myself. The RA doesn’t have any programming skills and is also not interested in learning it, I think. I’ll ask her again whether she wants to learn the basics or not in which case I’d invite her to the session with the master student. It’s not something that would be part of the job we’re paying her for but she might be interested in learning it to expand her skill set.

The analyses should be relatively straightforward. I’ll probably need an hour or two of preprocessing and maybe two or three hours to analyze the data and create some plots. Then the results should be relatively clear and we can talk about how to write them up. But I won’t have time to think about that before the second week of April. Should be a fun project, though, and I can’t wait to see the data!

Paper accepted! Fuck yeah!

Dear Diary,

yesterday morning, I got an e-mail informing me that a paper I submitted has been accepted. The three reviewers were generally very positive but each made a list of comments that we’ll need to respond to. The editor asked us to please submit the final version of the paper within the next 30 days.

This is the paper about the stuff that I did for the first year of my PhD. The first draft of which I wrote in August/September 2013. The one I submitted last year but it got rejected because it was too methods-oriented.

Going through the reviewers’ comments and responding to them will probably be a day or two of work. I hope to be able to do that after Easter. I really, really don’t want to spend any more time on this paper. But now, at least, I know that if I do sit down and finish this stuff and send it off, it’ll be done: the paper will be published and I won’t ever have to work on it anymore.

I’ve just spent too much time writing and re-writing this paper and can’t stand looking at it anymore. I also haven’t properly worked in that field for three years so I am not at all in touch with the necessary literature and am not familiar with the technical details anymore.

Therefore, I’ll have to sit down in the next couple of days and make a list of the things that need to be done. Then I need to pick the things that I can do myself without too much trouble. And then delegate the other things to my co-authors. And hope that they do them.

Two more experiments ready to run

Dear Diary,

I spent quite some time last week getting two more experiments up and running. Data collection is going to start tomorrow for one and on Tuesday for the other. Exciting stuff. The data collection will be done by students – I will just supervise the first sessions and then they’ll do the rest.

I am excited to get in more data. But I think I’ll have to sit together with my supervisor and talk about the data I already have and how to use it for papers. I feel like I should stop collecting data towards the end of April. Because I already have a bunch of data that I haven’t written about. And for my thesis, only papers count – not the number of data sets I still have on my computer. So I think my focus should shift a bit in the next couple of weeks and I should go into full-on writing mode.

I am actually looking forward to that. The weather is going to become nicer – I’ll spend part of the day reading papers, and then writing up my own work. Working with the data and putting my work out there. I feel like I spent the last 18 months or so collecting a lot of data. And I looked at the data myself but haven’t had the time to write stuff up and share it with the world.

If the projects I have running now all work out more or less and I can write up most of the stuff I have in mind, I think my thesis is going to be pretty good!

Work has me again

Dear Diary,

I am fully recovered and am back to work. And there’s lots and lots to do!

I have taken a look at the data that my RA collected. She collected data from 20 participants so we can take a look at the effects. This required me to write quite some code to manage and merge the data and create a whole range of visualizations. It’s a complicated project with a very complex data set.

What we’ve learned from the data of the 20 people is: (a) one week is not enough for people to forget how to do CPR in any meaningful way (not a big surprise) and (b) we need more data.

Therefore, she’ll collect data from 20 more participants. But that won’t happen until the beginning of April. So the project is “on hold” until then. Which is not a problem because I’ll have plenty of other things to do. My initial hope was that there’s enough in this data to say a bit more so that I can write a short conference paper about it. The deadline for that paper is on April 8. So I won’t have the data for this project in time. But that’s not a problem because I have data from another project that I can write about. I put a rough outline of my ideas on paper today and will refine it in the next couple of days.

I am setting up another project with another RA that’ll collect data for me for a study in which we want to look at interference effects in fact learning. That is, we want to take a closer look at the effect that the words in set of facts that you study have on each other. I had to organize a few things but everything should work out: data collection will start next week.

Then, there’s a research master student that looks into the effects that the time of day (and your “chronotype”) has on studying factual knowledge. I am co-supervising the student. I spend about 5 hours in total this week on his project and we will finish everything tomorrow. He’ll start data collection on Tuesday.

Thus, until the end of the month, there are two new projects for which I’ll have data to work on. The timing is quite nice: I made sure that both those projects are on track and that data collection for both starts next week. Because I’ll still be in Groningen then and can supervise the process and fix things if necessary. The week after that, I’ll be in Heidelberg, presenting my work at a conference. Ideally – if all goes according to schedule – a lot of new data will wait for me after Easter. The reason I wanted to get this going now is because otherwise I’d have needed to wait until after Easter to start the data collection.

Now the RA and the student will collect data and I’ll be working on preparing my presentation and writing the conference paper. Then, once the presentation is given and the paper is submitted (i.e., in early April), I can focus on analyzing the new data.

But that’s why this week is a bit hectic: I need to get this stuff done so that data collection can start next week. But it seems to work out. :) It feels good to be productive again.