My schoolwork has invaded my dreams. Several mornings this week, I found myself struggling not to wake from my dreams when the alarm went off - I was trying to finish my to-do list before waking up. If only it worked that way! As it is, I think I’m keeping on top of things reasonably well. Not as well as I’d like, but I have high expectations.
School still agrees with me; I am enjoying it despite the 14 to 15 hour days. It’s challenging and interesting, and that makes me happy. My research practicum is particularly gratifying at the moment, because I’m working on implementing some ideas that I had in the Winter 2006 semester about dynamic edge weighting in networks. The basic idea is that in a network of social interactions over time, the more recent interactions have greater salience than older interactions, so we would like to consider the strength of a tie as a function of recency rather than just frequency. To this end, I spent some time thinking about an edge weight decay function that could be applied when processing raw data. There’s another aspect to this kind of interaction dynamic that we can decay as well, so I might be able to follow this through to creating an e measure, which is a really cool little function from information retrieval.
Just this week, I’ve been working with James, a fellow PhD student, to implement the edge weight decay function on an event database. I really enjoy it; this afternoon was spent manually verifying the code translation of the function. I’ve been working on the math and James has been writing the code, but I’m also working on learning Ruby on Rails so that I can do more of the work myself. It’s frustrating but fun, because I like problem-solving and there are inevitably problems to solve with this kind of work.
The point is, I get to do the kind of work that I really love, and I don’t mind the long days when I’m pursuing my dreams (trite as that sounds). I do wish I could stop working in my dreams, though.