New Year 2008

Dear friends and mentors

Hope you are all doing well; my year 2007 is now finishing at xxxx, a Democratic polling firm based on Washington DC. It was a summer of 2005 when I first came to DC; naïve and inexperienced -- I never had a real job before and was not used to this repetition of leaving home everyday at 8:30 am promptly since I left high school 10 years ago (after 2 year and a half of repetition, I rarely arrive at the office prior to 10 am anymore though)

Nowadays, I began to love my work a lot; it is fun, exciting and quite a crazy life. My first job at the xxxx was to schedule a date of focus group and create handouts for the participants, I -- who has 2 masters degrees in social psychology and survey methodology who was writing a program for EM algorithm till last week have to prepare a map – cut & pasting from the Google map!! I could have done it when I was in high school, and wondered what my 8 years of tertiary educations were for. It took me a while to convince my colleagues that despite lack of fluent English, I was indeed more trained than most of them and know what I am doing. Maybe because I can now distinguish “L” from “R”, and can accurately tell people I am an expert of an election research and not an erection research.

These days, I am focusing on analysis of complex survey data for the survey design, creating simulation models for the cost modeling of the surveys, and also delegating a new operation called micro targeting. Micro targeting, in short is an effort to conduct political campaign more efficiently by utilizing some sort of statistical models predicting individuals behaviors. It happened to be one of ideal fields where survey methodologists can apply their knowledge of survey design, measurement theory and a common sense. My team has done some serious contributions on this field this year, and I wish we can continue to do so in the coming year. So this business is going well.

This year, I have traveled Norway by mountain biking with friends in October; it was quite a nice get away and truly beautiful place (the only issue is US dollar is crap these days, and each beer cost $10), I did not schedule any skiing trips this December, however I plan to go couple of skiing in January and February of 2008!

I also have done a AAPOR presentation in May, (though I missed the proposal submission deadline for the 2008), published a co-authored book with Prof. Ikeda, finished a manuscript of a book of survey design with former colleagues at the University of Tokyo (to be published sometimes in 2008.) Japanese say Perseverance leads to success, and I plan to kick my butt to force myself to do researches, few topics of choices for next year are Bayesian statistics, analysis of open ended responses from the survey, application of linear programming in political campaign, and effective sample resolution procedures in telephone political researches.

Hope you all will have nice holiday and next year.

Sincerely;

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最終更新日： 日曜日, 5月 25 2008 @ 08:16 午後 PDT; 436 閲覧件数