some of you may know that somehow or another, i managed to finagle a master's degree from a certain ivy league institution a few years back. more impressively, i managed to pull in an economics component into said degree. the degree of difficulty given my biological science background: off the charts.
anyhow, this spectre of economic thought rouses itself every so often, and usually in manners or places where it should not be welcome. for example, it's one thing to ponder how much money you have in the bank when you go to an atm. no matter how simple that neuro-moment, that was economics (finances at its most essential). that little cheer for a big balance or whinge from a zero before that decimal point is all you need to decide whether or not you're playing the economics game properly. but other times it becomes more difficult.
take, for example, my current plodding. supposedly, i'm designing a method that gives a quick overview to the health of a certain region's commercial fisheries utilizing very basic metrics. very similar to checking your balance at the the atm. i'm not, given my particular dataset (a publicly available data set that has more issues than i care to even worry too much about because it'd lead me to curling up in a fetal position with the shades pulled down and rocking and talking to myself about why i ever started this)... anyhoo, given my particular data set, i can't really do an in-depth analysis any more than you can look at your atm balance and make deep, incisive conclusions about the causes of your financial dire straits. it's either rich or poor. if it's rich, the idea is to say "don't waste your fishery like: *insert favorite over-fished region here* or *insert second favorite over-fished...* you get the idea. if it's poor, you can say, "look, you're wasting your resource. you need to spend some time like immediately to uncover the reasons. usually the reasons for over-exploitation are easy. you have your "we had no idea that we were catching all the fish!" excuse like the northern cod fishery in canada in the late 1980s. you have the "we can't possibly enforce our rules because the fisherman is my cousin/brother/uncle" that likes to play throughout any small island nation or territory. and of course you have the, "we really don't have a choice but to fish and feed our family and community" that is such a sad statement about global inequity as seen through much of the east coast of africa and parts of southeast asia (though to be sure, many fishermen in asia are merely getting paid slave wages to feed the machines that are the hong kong or tokyo markets. it's really poaching... but that's another story...)
anyhow, coming up with this metric has been difficult. relying on this one data set, i've gone through weeks of comparative statistical analyses. all of which left me wondering if i was just re-presenting the published data rather than providing any new input. which brings me to a pow-wow and a spilt margarita.
the summer semester in school has it's ebbs and flows. with most of campus (and the department) currently away, you can really decide your work day in a heart beat. the work remains in front of you, but with no classes to break up your day, you can spend days focusing in on one task or not focusing at all. and i was focused, if a bit depressed about the prospects of my seemingly endless and fruitless endeavors. so one of the bigger wigs in the department invites the students out to a happy hour to meet the new faculty and make the department look socially healthy and not all about research. so of course, i brought my graphs of northern cod with me.
now, there are few people who know how to adequately discuss the points of fishery research in my department (one of the bonuses of working in a geography department instead of say, a wildlife and fisheries department, which we do have...). but that doesn't prevent an exchange of ideas, especially when you are the djork who brings his research to happy hour to a bunch of intellectuals whose minds and mouths have been loosened by tequila and assorted beers. by the end of said happy hour, my graphs were soaked and my cell phone had seemingly been ruined by the copious amounts of alcohol and shaker sweat that covered the table. elbows were sticky and damp. voices that were polite just a moment before were now raging at the lack of foresight the silly canadian fishery ministry had and how they ruined an economy and 40,000 families who depended on cod. the travesty and pointlessness of emptying a sea of its most vital resources. and i think one individual attempted to link the cod fishery crash to the rise of mad cow disease. the incivility of the entire situation required both more margaritas and fresh print-outs. only one of which could occur that evening. but the next day, as i was about to print out my cod fish graph again, i accidentally punched up a list of all the various calculations excel could do to my spreadsheet (i transfer it from excel to the most excellent matlab program after a bit of cleaning). ever curious (one of my more prized character flaws), i spent a good hour just typing in each one to see what it would do.
now usually, my contempt for microsoft excel is high. i use it solely because 1) it's much more user friendly than similar software programs, and 2) i have yet to get my hands on said other software programs. the trick is to know it's limitations and usefulness. which was what i was doing when lo! and behold! it sat in front of me like sign from above! short-term growth! comparative statistics year to year! and so i calculated the geometric mean and the geometric standard deviation (something i don't recommend doing without professional guidance) and a few clicks later, i had revolutionized my analysis into something clearly new and (possibly) worthwhile! and i couldn't have done that without a spilt margarita and some keystroke combination that i still can't replicate.
this was not how they told me science advanced. not at all.
enjoy the u.s. open and the best month for fresh farm fruits!
--goose
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