After the Break

So today is the Monday after spring break and there a couple of goals that need to be accomplished by the days end.

I teach tomorrow and I have not finished my lesson plan; I think halfway through the semester I am not a motivated to create great lectures for my class. I always start off the semester with new examples, homework problems and projects; towards the end I just recycle my old material.

I am supposed to give a five minute talk today to a visiting professor to highlight the work that I am doing in the department; this has turned out to be quite a challenge in and of itself. When I defended my prospectus, I have about 60 powerpoint slides since I had basically a whole hour to talk. Last month, I presented my work again a a conference in which I only had 15 minutes and so I had to chop off about 40 some slides and condense my talk to the mains themes. So now that I only have 5 minutes, I had a chop another 15 slides of of the condensed version; every slides seems very important at that point and I feel it has been chopped down so much it will no longer make sense.

I spent most of my day rederiving a couple of estimates for the model I have been working on; the equations make sense to me however I have very little confidence that my ultimate estimation goal will be feasible from the current direction I am pursuing. So what is it that I do exactly? Let me try to make up a simplest example I can think of:

Suppose you get paid every Friday and your pay this week is a certain percent increase from the amount you made last week. Now lets also suppose that you put a certain percentage of your paycheck in church every week. Now, suppose that I know the amount of money that you put in church every week last year; using only that information can I figure out how much you got paid every Friday last year, the percent increase in you paycheck every week, and what percent of you money you put in church?

These are the types of problems that I work on, and what I dissertation is about. Now I must get back to work