A friendly what?

In a Past Life...

You Were: A Friendly Mathematician. Where You Lived: New Guinea. How You Died: Dysentery.

Who Were You In a Past Life?

Who, me? A friendly mathematician? Hahahaha. Yeah right. I might be friendly (to some) but a mathematician? I know I'm not that dumb in Math, but for me to be a mathematician by profession is like telling Mount Mayon is a greeny and sleepy hill in Bicol. I mean, I like math, but I never saw myself giving full-time devotion to cosines, logarithmic functions, and integral calculus. The dysentery part could have been truer.

Coincidentally, earlier, Prof. Elena Pernia was giving a short refresher course on content analysis to the staff. Initially, I thought Ma'am Pernia was only giving some general concepts but, surprise!, we were given an exercise to actually try some of the things we learned from her 2-hour lecture. Using the articles in the "Chronicle" section of the PJR Reports, we are to measure the diversity of the articles. By that I mean the degree of diversity of sources and their number, and the position of the reports. The analysis would include the use of statistical methods, like the strangely-named Simpson's D and D2 formulas (and I'm not kidding here). The formulas, especially the D2 version, would basically say the probability of two articles belonging to one category. For example, if you're doing a content analysis of articles based on geographical location, say Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, and you get .8923 for Luzon-based articles, you have an 89.23 percent probability that two randomly-picked articles would be on Luzon. At least that's what I understand from the session. Oh, and there's more. Simpson's D is the sum of the squared proportions and subract from 1 while D2 could be solved by dividing the sum of the squared proportions by (1-1/k) before subtracting from 1. Talk about "mental ambush."

Surprisingly, I enjoyed the lecture in general. I guess a little math dose would kick my ass not to stop learning.

Including the new world of blogging. Hello, sunshine.