Everyone is confounded by confounding!

Abstract:
I had epi. I FINALLY got to talk to Ann-Maree! Times with Karemah. Date night. Ethics? What is that? Skype with parents.

I had epi this morning. I've missed epi. I love it. We were talking about confounding today. (For those not statistically inclined, confounding is when something is getting in the way of the relationship between the exposure, or potential risk factor, and the outcome/disease making it look like there is/isn't one when there really isn't/is one. An example is that the risk of getting heart disease in heavy coffee drinkers is 4 times higher than non/low coffee drinkers. The association goes away when you account for the fact that many heavy coffee drinkers are also smokers and really smoking is the risk factor. It's a lot more complex than that, but that's the gist of it.) I'm kind of sick of talking about confounding. We talked about it everyday last week in the biostats intensive, I read about it in the epi chapter for this week, and we're talking about it in outbreak tomorrow.

In the tutorial, we all got kind of confused with the questions being asked for the second study. We were still working on it, but we overheard someone else asking another tutor about confounding. Then someone in my tutorial said that confounding was confounding us. I thought it was funny.

After the tutorial, I finally got to meet with Ann-Maree. And I mean finally! I first sent her an email that I wanted to meet in the beginning of March. I knew that I wanted to do something in epi, but I had to talk to her about it. We set up appointments and then she cancelled them for various reasons. I think that happened three times, so I was glad when I went to check with her after class to make sure we were still meeting and she said she'd see me later.

Basically we talked through ways of getting a PhD in epi. I have a few options of how to do that, so I'll need to explore those. I just know that I definitely want to do a PhD because I either want to do research or I want to teach epi, or both since most lecturers do research also, but no matter what, I would need a PhD. So now I know what I want to do, I just need to figure out the details of how to get there and write up a proposal to apply.

When I got out of my meeting, I noticed that I had a missed call from Karemah. I called her back and she apparently was offended, well jokingly, that I didn't say hi to her after class. I told her that I had a meeting with Ann-Maree, so I couldn't wait. She was in union court, so I went over there and then we talked for a while. She wanted to know how my meeting went and we talked about Survivor for a while.

Nothing too exciting happened after that until date night. I met Rohan at the bus stop in the city centre and then we caught the bus to go to Pulp Kitchen. We changed date night this week because Pulp Kitchen isn't open on Mondays and I don't have to work this week or next because it's ACT school holidays. Dinner was good. I got a beef dish. Normally I always get the same thing that I had the last time, which in this case was at the Canberra centenary, but I didn't want to get the pork since I had pork all last week. Rohan wanted to get dessert, so he made me try it. He was obsessed with it but I thought that it was disgusting. If it wasn't rude to spit out food at a restaurant, I probably would have. I drank a lot of water trying to get the taste out of my mouth!

Rohan and I always have interesting conversations. On the way to dinner, we were talking about someone losing a cheek and then cauterizing the wound to see if that'd still be protective or if you'd need skin. I said it wasn't ethical to take someone's cheek off "for science" so he was talking about training a monkey to train a monkey to rip it off. I'm still pretty sure that it wouldn't pass ethics. Then on the way back, I was talking about nature v. nurture and how there's a problem with biological parents raising their children. We should just switch them all to see if nature or nurture has the bigger effect. Clearly we both missed something when we were learning about ethics.

We got back to the city and "magically" walked toward chatime. It's amazing how Rohan just magically walks toward bubble tea and/or gelato places. Chatime is just below one of the unilodges and it just opened recently. They're having a buy one get one free promotion at the moment, which I made the mistake of telling Rohan about. So we went there. I had to try bubble tea again. I got the strawberry green tea one, although I didn't get any of the little blobby things in it. It actually wasn't too bad, although Rohan tried it and said that it was because it had no tea taste to it. Then I was cold holding my drink outside, so we went and sat in the Davey lobby and talked a while before he went home.

Then my parents were online, so I talked to them about getting a PhD. I was too lazy to type it all, so we skyped via my mom's phone since her computer is currently broken. I don't think that my parents quite understand that I REALLY do not want to come back to America long term. I love Australia pretty much as much as epi. That's a lot of love. (Not to mention that Rohan's in Australia...) That was pretty much it for the night. I didn't talk to my parents long because it's the morning over there so they had to get ready for work. I think that my parents at least understand why I want to do a PhD even if they don't understand why I'm going to put myself in that much more debt. I just love epi!