Abalone

I feel like I am at the end of an exhausting week, although it is the beginning.  But I have at least one funny thing to write about.

For my statistics class, I have to write a 6-8 page paper using quantitative analysis.  We were given several datasets to chose from, covering topics such as forest fires in Portugal, world data from 1998, and wine.  Unlike my colleagues, who have chosen to write on topics such as the relationship between GDP and cell phone usage in oil-producing countries or inflation and economic indicators in developing countries, I have chosen to write about the abalone, a mollusk also known as the ear-shell, sea ear, or muttonfish.  My paper will explore whether the abalone's physical characteristics (such as length and weight) are useful in predicting its age.  This is relevant because the current method used to predict an abalone's age is to cut it open and count the rings in its shell, or something like that, described by the author of the data-set as a "boring and time-consuming task."  So, in sum, my findings might be life-saving for the abalone.

Despite how interesting all of this may sound, in class on Saturday morning, I started to wonder why I had chosen this dataset.  My rationale had been that this data would allow me to run a certain type of test that I am interested in learning how to run.  I won't go into great detail about that, but being able to use this particular statistical tool will very likely be useful for me in the future.  Beyond that, the abalone data is also pretty straightforward and easy to work with.  But when all of my classmates were discussing their reasonable, international-related topics, and I was thinking about how I might be able to use this paper to get a job with a wildlife-related organization in Tazmania, I started to doubt my rationale.  However, my group, with the help of my professor came up with a title for my paper: "Save the Mollusk: New Approaches to Age Determination," which was somewhat encouraging.  It got a bit ridiculous...one of my classmates suggested that I read the Declaration of Human Rights as a preface to my paper presentation, and we had a few laughs.  But, encouragingly, my professor also told me that she thought my rationale for choosing the abalone dataset made perfect sense (and that she liked my jacket).  So that's that...while I write my education paper on peace education in refugee camps in Kenya, I will also be working on a paper on abalone age determination.  It's probably good to mix things up occasionally...