2/23/2010

Another day of excruciatingly long lectures. We started out with a lecture on the theories behing managing the park. I think that a lot of it went over my head, mostly because I am not big on philosophy. Then we had a lecture on research in the park, as well as the joining of the Kruger park and the Limpopo park in Mozambique, and if this could spread into Zimbabwe as well. These lectures were long and hard to pay attention to, mostly because the speaker had an extremely quiet voice and a thick Afrikaans accent. Last lecture of the morning was Melissa talking about stats. THAT was a disaster, not to any fault of hers. We just were not getting it (me included), and we spent a half an hour trying to get all on the same page. Finally we just decided to go to lunch and try again later. I had ice cream for dessert 
After lunch, we had a returning lecturer come and talk to us about the different resources of the park, such as antelope and water relocation. She is a very interesting and engaging speaker, but she has SUCH a thick accent. Then it was back to stats. Hooray. We worked more with normal distributions, then moved onto the different types of tests. Alan talked a little about the differences between certain tests, and then released us for the day. We came back to camp, and then a bunch of us went to use the internet. It was there that I first found out about Gunnar. He’s going to be OK, and I won’t talk about it here, but to make a long story short, I know now how to rally people towards a sad person’s cause. I am now going to watch chicken run to make myself feel good. Word of the day: my friend = monamoamina.