Right, late start again today - hubs is off on leave and its seriously delaying me - I usually get up and get the dog walked by 9 and at work, but he insists we sit around watching tv shows and then walk the dog :-s

Anyway, I was given my final submission date yesterday and I have to have the 1st draft in in 10 days. SO I MUST finish this discussion section for my last study today! I spent last night doing a padded out plan of it - which is 1000 words, so I'm hoping adding those bullet points with words to make sentences will have me done by the end of the day (probably not actually going to happen).

tbh, I reckon on having to buy a new laptop every 2 years really - to make sure its fast enough for me not to get too annoyed. I work out that if I spend about £300-£400 then it means I can buy 2-3 times more laptops (running windows) than macs in that same time.

I use dropbox and external hard drives to back up all my info. I am also sending all my final documents to my hotmail, just in case.

yeah I think voldemort was supposed to be much more powerful - and he kind of looked like a peed off grandad rather than an all powerful wizard. In the book harry just gets lucky really, and that wasn't really reflected in the film in my opinion.

I am the queen of researching puppy breeds. Make sure you get one from a registered breeder where you get to see mum (and also dad if possible). You want to see health checks etc as you'll regret it down the line if you don't. You also want to consider how much they'll grow, how much they eat and how long walks they will need, how high fences you'll need for a garden and potential health problems that may arise in each breed e.g. hip dysplasia. I have the perfect dog, so PM me if you want to know the breed :-)

Done my results :-) onto the horrid discussion bit bleugh! and then after that I have more discussion (for the entire thesis) I HATE discussions :-s

I thought HP was good, I'd only read that book once, so had forgotten loads but it was ok, much better than the last one, which I thought was mainly a long film about people faffing about in a tent. I think there should have been more action from the death eaters though. i.e. more helena bonham-carter and co.

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yes, ifyou have 50 variables (and you need 10-15 participants/organsiations per variable) then you need 750 participants/organisations.

But even then, have 50 variables in a regression isn't going to result in any decent findings - each variable takes up variance, so by adding in so many, you're going to find very little effect of any single variable.

Most regressions I run have about 5-7 variables in.

if you're not running them all at the same time, then that's ok. but you may still need a higher sample size. OR you're results aren't significant ;-)

Check for multicollinearity.

You should have 10-15 participants per variable, so maybe you need to reduce the number of variables.

Also - maybe your model just isn't predicting.

I have an ASUS laptop which has a intel core i5 according to the sticker on it :$ I think it was about £400 when I bought it and it has windows 7. It runs SPSS really well and I've been bootstrapping 10,000 samples and its yet to have any issues with that. I'm happy with it.

hubs took me to see harry potter last night so didn't get a chance to finish my results section. So that's the main priority today and then to start on the discussion.

yes do claim the benefits! You are seeking a job - that's what job seekers allowance is for :-)

Have you tried getting work in your uni department? - even if its just a few hours here and there? Dissertation marking may be coming up soon and they may need help with that and research work over the summer and would rather have someone reliable?

poor button! yes - we argue, often its actually because we haven't seen enough of each other and he goes into toddler mode at not getting enough attention. Also - he gets hungry and really really angry. I have to watch his eating like a hawk to make sure his blood sugar doesn't drop. Otherwise he goes crazy and starts shouting, eats and then 10 mins later comes back with tail between his legs apologising :p

I've just done the method :-) and I have the results all written up, so its just a matter of putting them into the doucment - although will need some editing I think as I wrote them up so I could understand them alter on! I also need to re-run one section of analysis to control for soething i've just realised may come up as an issue if I don't. :$

well I've spend most of the day running errands, but I've just read through my intro to the chapter and have only 1 thing to put in - why I've looked at a certain thing, but I can't really work out a good explanation :$ apart from 'well cos there's a relationship with x and y there might be with x and z which would be interesting' hehe - oh dear.

Am going to crack on with the method and results section and come back to it.

well I've finished my intro :-) bit blurry eyed now, so will give myself an hour in the morning to read through and make corrections/changes to it.

Then my main goal for tomorrow is to get the method and results written into the chapter.

nighty night :-)

I'm here :-)

I'd like to get my lit review done today if possible (for the chapter I'm working on).

check the normality within each group. Although if you have 6 variables you may want to consider a MANOVA, if they are all dependant variables, or at least make sure you make a boneferroni correction to your p value.

The K-S test is dodgy at the best of times, out of about 40 students, I get about 35 each year with sig K-S tests. I'd report it, but then say after you inspected histograms, skewness and kurtosis values were deemed to be acceptable (reference here) and therefore the data was treated using parametric analyses (if you actually think the histograms do look normal).