Election Day

Election Day is pretty exciting this year. Lots of drama with many different races:

- McCain vs Obama (here in PA; also in OH, IN, VA, NC, and FL)
- US House (PA): Hart vs Altmire and Murtha vs Russel
- PA House: Dermody vs Davidek (Highlands and PSU Graduate)

The national media is predicting big gains for the democrats, but they were saying similar things in 2004. We'll see what happens. I hope that the mess with the economy gets worked out soon, though.

BOUS Statistical Analysis
Also, because of election day, the kiddies weren't in school today as we had an in-service day. I spent the day looking at math technology. In the morning session, we were looking at a statistical software package called "Fathom." One neat thing about it was that you could go to a website and drag it in and fathom was pretty smart at converting it into a table like you would see in Microsoft Excel. You had to fix some headings, but it was pretty easy (and a lot less typing).

We were able to look at any data from anywhere and play with it, so I uploaded the BOUS women's results from Beth's race a few weekends ago. I looked at the correlation between the overall finishing place vs the three disciplines (swim, bike, run) to see which was the most/least connected.

To probably nobody's surprise, the swim was the least connected (r^2 value of 0.17). The bike was the best predictor (0.82), and running was okay(0.66). For non-math people, those numbers are kind of like a grade, the closer to 100% or 1.00, the better. Since the swim was shorter than usual and this was a non-drafting race, no big surprise. I was surprised at how much more significant the bike was than the run. But, I guess the bike is a longer time portion of the race (and the bike was long by a few miles on top of that).

Beth and I agreed that we'll have to check out the 70.3 world championships and run the same analysis and see what happens.

Facebook
Okay, enough math to bore for one night. In other news, I've joined the facebook bandwagon. The best thing about it is reconnecting with college and high school friends. I can see how it can become very time consuming if you're not careful.

XC Playoff Beard Gone
Pictures to come, but I'm back to being a clean-shaven man. No more scruffy/harry look.

Swim Workout at School
At school this morning, Six of us (among some other masters from the community) swam at the High School's pool. That was neat to be a part of a group and I'm looking forward to training with them this winter. Today, since it was the first time a lot of us had swam in a while, we took it kind of easy. We only ended up with 1600 yds with a 5x100 yd set in there. I'm sure we'll be upping the yardage as we get back into the swing of things.