Back to work

Bodega was an awesome experience!  I am now back in flat and boring Arlington :-( oh well… I got to use some of what I learned the other day by giving a short talk on diagnosing MCMC runs.  It was really good for me to try and put some of that massive amount of info fed to me into coherent words. I set up some simple runs in MrBayes.  One was woefully under paramatized while the other was dramatically overparamatized.  I used these to produce log files that we analyzed in tracer.  I also discussed priors and how they aren’t as mysterious as they might feel at first.  Lots of FUN!

For the next 30 days I have to buckle down really hard though.  My qualifying exams are on the 30^th of April.  I may have mentioned before but in my department we have started a new format for comps that consists of receiving a set of questions from each committee member.  I have 3 weeks to compose written responses to these questions.  My 5 committee members then have a week to review my responses and then….. D-day.  The orals.  I am really not sure what to expect in orals whether the questions I am given ahead of time are indicative of the subject we will cover… We will see.  I’ve already got my first question… It requests for me to discuss all of the patterns that I am seeing in my preliminary data (4,000 karyotypes and a tree with 1000+ tips) and what this data set can say in respect to current models of sex chromosome and sex determination evolution.  I love the question… It is all stuff that I need to work out on paper it is all stuff that should form a portion of my dissertation.  However, wow what a huge question.  I feel like I could write a chapter or maybe a number of chapters about this.  Back to work……