Mmm, Icecream

Sorry for the irregular posts! Life is very busy all of a sudden. Long gone are the happy days spent in a carefree strawberry patch, or writing long, meandering blogs about energy issues. One week from tomorrow is the Howard Hughes Poster Session - where all us Howard Hughes interns gather to share our data (or lack of data) with each other and the professors. I have been learning how to use a couple of programs to analyze the first set of data we got this summer, on seedlings. Of course, due to our earlier problems with seed age effects, we cannot use the old seeds. Thus, we cannot analyze whether plasticity has evolved over time in any of our populations. However, if we analyze simply the new seeds, we can determine the treatment, population and interaction effects of our experiment. Ultimately, my poster will ask the question: are certain populations more plastic than others? The logical follow-up question is, "and how does this increased plasticity relate to fitness?" A likely hypothesis is that more plastic populations of Cespitosum have higher fitness in stressed environments than less plastic populations. We do not yet have the fitness data to evaluate the second half of this claim.

I like statistics, which is surprising since math has never been my best subject. I was so bad at math in 5th grade that my teacher, Mrs. Barksdale, would make me stay in during recess and clean desks. But statistics are fun, I like the idea of making a model to explain the sources of variation in data. Unfortunately, looking at the data so far, it seems as though there is very little treatment by population interaction effect. This means that although the treatment and population each separately effect variation, the effect of population within treatment does not (generally speaking). This means that we cannot look at whether certain populations are more plastic than others.

Today was a long day - I analyzed data, learned how to run a two-way ANOVA, and then worked out for a good hour and a half at the gym. Working out helps to justify my excess eating habits. Plus right now I am enjoying a delicious banana and chocolate icecream sundae. You know, Haagen Daas (sp?) icecream is now less expensive than Ben and Jerry's?? Time for some sci-fi reading.