Blessed by the Potato

Well, these are interesting times.

On the work/school front I got a bunch of MRI time for the hospital for my project on the weekends, so I’ve been scanning like crazy. Assuming that I don’t have to go back and increase my sample size for statistical purposes and that not too many people stand me up, I should be finished the scanning part next week for this phase of the study. That’ll give me a month and a half or so of data analysis to do; hopefully I’ll be ready to start the next phase within a month or so so that there will be a bit of overlap and we’ll get things done a bit sooner.

Unfortunately, I’ve also been hit with a bunch of other work (abstracts, papers, committee meetings, phase 3 prep, etc) that all sort of came together this month in the perfect storm. The last day off I had was January 24th, and I was hoping to take this Tuesday off to give my brain a break, but I just found out I’m going to have some MRI training all week (I was told only “it starts monday at 9am” and assumed it would be one day, until I got the schedule on friday), and then more scans for my project on the weekend… so by the time I do get a break I’ll have gone 27 consecutive days. I’m pretty sure that’s against the labour code (actually, I looked it up, it is… but grad students don’t count). Ah well, science does always seem to go in fits and bursts… hopefully this craziness will clear my plate enough that I can have a few extra relaxing days on the patio when the weather turns nice.

Plus they’re not necessarily short days. Yesterday I was here in the MRI for 15 hours… and I couldn’t even leave; I had so much food in my bag I swore I was going to rip it open, and even then I ran out by 5 pm and my stomach was just growling by 2am when I finally got to leave. Speaking of yesterday, it was not a good day. Ok, good in the fact that hey, I scanned 5 people (almost 6!) in one go, which is a decent dent to my project (and another 5 today in just 13 hours). However, it started off with me waking up to the sound of water dripping into the back room. The weird thing is that the water was coming in through the frame of the window, and it’s not exactly like the snow was pressed up against it on the other side, so it’s leaking through the walls somewhere and then coming out the window. With the scans I just didn’t have the time to deal with it so I just threw some towels down and hoped for the best. I was having visions of the whole back wall of the house melting away while I was at work, but not much more water came in through the day than was there when I woke up. The glacier on top of the house also seems to have cleared up. As much of a pain as that was, I’m really glad we finally had a bit of a spring thaw: that snow has been building up since before xmas, refreezing harder and harder each night after we had a sunny day.

I had one subject just not show up for her MRI. No email or call to let me know, just stood me up. And the sad thing is that that’s not uncommon. WTF? Have some common courtesy. Other than that the day went fairly well up until my last subject at midnight. Just as we were getting set up the power went out and the scanner put up all kinds of error codes (ok, just the one, but it was bad), so I sent him home to be on the safe side, but still ended up staying until 2am just trying to reset the system and make sure everything was still working. As far as I can tell I haven’t been making any mistakes (aside from grammatical) with the sleep deprivation and the “always-on-ness”, but I’m definitely starting to feel my age. I’m also really glad I’m essentially just running a computer (3 actually, but same difference) and not performing surgery on somebody.

In the world at large the economic news has not been good. So far through all of this mess I’ve been stupidly optimistic: I figured it was a crisis of confidence, a liquidity problem, an issue of essentially worthless mortgages and commercial paper that would lead to some losses around the board, but that the economy as a whole would survive, and that there would be bargains to be found in the stock market to throw money at… and that the housing market would turn around at its own glacial pace and come back to earth. As time has wore on I became convinced that we were going into a recession (and are now in one), but again, that things would come around.

Then the unemployment numbers for January came out and I nearly shit my pants. Check out the picture at the Big Picture. That’s for the US, which lost ~600k jobs in January; Canada lost ~100k, more proportionately than we should have by population alone. The recession is catching up to us, big time.

Look above: I’m getting some crazy MRIs in; my project is actually making progress, which means at some point (probably early 2010 if all continues to go according to plan) I’m going to leave grad school and need a real job. This is scary stuff, and isn’t likely to be over in 6 months to a year.

At least it’s finally warm out.

The peer review process is one of the most important parts of sharing scientific findings: before a paper is published, 2-3 (or more) scientists are contacted by the journal to anonymously tear the article to shreds. This process is what helps ensure that references to peer-reviewed publications are respected more than references to newspaper articles, websites, self-published books, and Wikipedia. As a scientist I’ve had the opportunity to be on both sides of the peer review process now, and while it can be a bit of a pain as an author if a reviewer is very nit-picky or worse yet, doesn’t understand something and wants to make drastic changes from the wrong point-of-view, it can help fix some common errors that can be very misleading down the road. There have been some truly terrible papers come across my desk — so bad that I often have to wonder why they weren’t stopped by an editor before even getting to peer review — but anonymity and letting mistakes that do get corrected slide is a vital part of the process. So instead I’ll just talk about a few generalities:

Statistics and their misuse are the number one weakness that otherwise good papers have. Usually it’s minor things, like saying p = x.xx instead of p < a. That's just a distinction that you typically threshold your statistics, so you choose to accept that two populations are separate when the chance of their means being that different is greater than 5% (or some other percentage, but 5% is the most common)... you don't typically say that the chance that two samples having mean differences that large coming from the same population is 4.5% or 5.1% or what have you (no matter how close to your 5% threshold 5.1% is, there are other ways to report that). Often parametric ("regular") statistical tests are run on measures that should be tested with non-parametric ("fancy but less powerful") methods. This is a pretty fine distinction as well, and we try to not usually get our heads up our asses about it (especially since many readers are only familiar with the "normal" statistical tests, so reporting those makes it easier for them to grasp... we just like to see the non-par tests done as well when it's appropriate). But there have been a few doozies, where the authors apparently learned how to do stats from the excel help files. Things like running hundreds of t-tests: roughly speaking, if you're looking for differences that have less than a 5% chance of occurring by random chance alone, and then test 100 differences, you should find about 5 "significant" results by chance alone. One paper in particular tried this trick, then had the balls to cite a (non-peer-reviewed) book justifying the move. I showed it to the statistician here, and when he got to that part he threw his keys across the room. "What the fuck!" was all he could manage to say until he calmed down. I suppose you'd have to be a statistician to feel that strongly about it. Anyway. Sometimes papers are well-written, with good references and stats, but are doomed from the start because the experiment just wasn't done very well. This happens a lot with "let's just see what this does" type studies, where no control group is included. It can also happen when systematic errors or artifacts creep in, in cases where what you're doing something (testing a drug or whatever) that affects the thing you're trying to measure directly, rather than through the mechanism it's hypothesized to. Unfortunately if someone is set on deceit it's very difficult to root out scientific fraud when all you're given is a manuscript, so the peer review process is not good at anti-fraud (and it wasn't really designed to do that, despite the burden some would like to put on it). Sometimes I'd like to see the peer review process encompass things like visiting a lab in person, and better yet to have independent replications arranged for nearly every paper published. Unfortunately the realities are that it's difficult enough for an impassioned scientist to get funding to do their project once, so it's pure fantasy to think that funding would appear to do studies twice over for replications to be done as a matter of course.

I haven’t talked much about individual stocks lately, largely because I’ve been proven to be pretty terrible at evaluating them (or at least, no better than just buying the market as a whole, as I’ve been dragged down with it). However Yellow Pages (YLO.UN) took another 10% hit yesterday, and is down 20% on the month, and I just can’t wrap my head around why. There’s been very little news lately, though apparently BMO released a research report putting it as an “underperform” with a $4.50 price target. I don’t have access to it, so I can’t see the reasoning, but that sounds downright crazy. TD also released a report today, rating it an “action list buy” with a target of $9 (it closed at $5.25).

I find I agree with TD’s report, though of course YLO is my biggest single holding so I’m bullish on it to begin with (and have been buying all the way down). Basically, things are going to be a little rough in the autotrader, etc., segment, but the basic Yellow Pages business should roll along just fine and generate enough cash to cover the payouts, which is what really matters to most investors in these things. Very roughly speaking, the payout ratio is around 80%, and the “vertical media” part makes up <20% of revenues, so as long as the core business stays steady, the payout should be fine until 2011. Of course, investors these days will sell at the drop of a hat, any hat. So a negative report from BMO as well as news that “recession-proof” companies like Kraft can still manage to find huge losses can tank a stock (though the market as a whole didn’t seem too concerned by Kraft’s earnings).

These low prices are tempting me to do something stupid, like borrow money to buy more (20% return when it only costs 5 – 5.5% to borrow??), or sell something else to concentrate on YLO (hasta la vista, BCE), but I’m already a little uncomfortable with how much YLO I own — if I’ve made a mistake in my reasoning (something that’s happened an unfortunate number of times over the last year) and it tanks (moreso than it already has) then that could start going from unfortunate to catastrophic. I think I’m going to sit around and do nothing (ok, maybe I’ll fantasize about loading up at $5 and then raking in the cash when it inevitably goes back above $7).

This is another of my irregular Potato Wedges guest post series over at The MoneyGardener, originally posted there.

Energy costs are crashing, and we’re probably going to be due for a credit/adjustment from Union Gas before the winter is out – but for the moment, we’re paying through the nose for our heat. Roughly 30% more than last year. So conservation is big in our minds at the Potato homestead, for both financial and environmental reasons.

Making changes to your home to make it more efficient are great steps to take. Since we’re renting here there’s a certain limit to what we can do: we’ve put plastic wrap over the windows and caulked the cracks we could find, and we have opened and closed registers so that most of the heat is flowing in to the kitchen and the bedrooms (where we spend most of our time).

The next step, and one that is sometimes overlooked, is to bundle up. Heat yourself, not the house… that actually reminds me of an amusing anecdote often shared at conferences: at one point shortly after the miracle of microwaves was discovered (and apparently more recently, too), it was proposed to use them to heat people. Yes, people — a microwave/millimeter beam would heat you up in your own living room, because as long as you were warm it wouldn’t matter how cold the room was. But I’m not here to talk about the mad science of the 1930’s.

As much fun as it is to run around the house in a T-shirt like I do at work (oh, they waste so much heat at work), I can turn the heat down a few degrees by just throwing on a sweater. Of course, even more important than a sweater are slippers. Keeping your feet warm is key to staying comfortable in what is otherwise a frigid house. Not just because they’re the furthest part of your body from your heart so they go numb and cold quickly, but also because they make direct physical contact with the cold floor.

The slippers I have right now are really crazy warm. They’re Darth Vader slippers, and his mighty head is pretty much solid stuffing which is just oh so toasty warm. Of course, I don’t know if it’s the fact that I tend to drag my feet when I’m wearing slippers or what, but they freak the hell out of the cat. Ah well, a small price to pay for energy savings (and though the cat doesn’t have slippers, she’s fluffy and doesn’t seem to mind the cold).

The next step for me is going to be hats and gloves. So far I’ve held off because I want the house to be warm enough that I can type without gloves, since I spend so much time on the computer, but a hat makes perfect sense. I mean, ok, it does seem kind of goofy to run around the house in a toque, but they do always say that a large part of your heat loss is through the head…

Rick Mercer had a great segment on how Canada works this week, explaining how the coalition was not a treasonous separatist plot, and how exactly it came to be that Michelle Jean had the power to put up the gone fishin’ sign on parliament…

And of course, the Chalk River tritium giveaway days.