Thursday 9 April 2015

DD309 : Doing economics: people, markets and policy: Doing TMA05 and thinking about the EMA

I have not been blogging recently as I have found the whole DD309 experience since getting TMA04 back extremely frustrating.

So much so, that I did at one point consider jacking in the entire course and effectively this degree. I have been doing this for fun and out of my own interest and it has gotten to the point of being neither fun nor interesting, but I think I have come through that just in time.

The problem was that my first EMA proposal which I would have been really interested in did not quite pass muster with the course team. They sort of said I could do it but would be unlikely to get a good mark as it was interesting but as far as theory went fairly light.

My second proposal met with some disagreement regarding the stance I was going to take regarding unskilled labour, in that some of the course team seem to think having a media studies degree constitutes therefore having a skill - of course I make this comment fairly tongue in cheek, the situation was way more complicated than that.

My third proposal fell at the fact it was specific and there was no readily available dataset the OU could provide. The two professional bodies who could provide the data have decided that they won't.

My fourth proposal, not hugely different from my third, but involving a professional body that I am a member of and pay a significant amount of money a year for the privilege have not provided any answer on whether they will or won't provide the data. There has been email communication but none of a suitably significant nature and it seems nobody is able to make a decision, either yes or no, ever, and so this has been kicked well into the long grass.

My current fifth and I'm not changing this again, is a far more mainstream and arguably less interesting project for which I am assured there is data.

The first dataset I examined looked really hopeful, and after the best part of two days refining the categories to what I  require, it became obvious that of the 10s of thousands of entries that there were, very few, and I mean very few, entries had all questions asked which meant that this dataset was useless and I'd wasted a further two days of frustration.

Finally, I found a useful dataset.

Looked at it in GRTL, and exported it as a CSV file. opened it in Microsoft EXCEL and started the process of removing unnecessary categories. In order to track changes I documented each change and started a new EXCEL tab with each iteration of the data. I felt quite p[leased with this idea - fully trackable and accountable record of how the data was refined. Took an entire evening.

The next day I opened the Excel file and all the Tabs have gone except the first one. I assumed that I had not saved it properly, or saved an old file with the name name over the new one, so I spent the next evening doing exactly the same, and was very careful to save the file with a new name and even a backup name. It was very late by now and I went to bed.

The next day I opened the Excel file and all the Tabs have gone except the first one. You can only imagine how I felt. I then realised that because I'd opened the file as a CSV and then tried to save it as a CSV, apparently a CSV file does support tabs when saved - who knew - obviously not me.

I spent another evening, replicating what i had done the previous two evening, but by now I was getting faster doing it )after all practice makes perfect) and I have saved the file as a XLS and even tested I could re-open it. I could :-)

So, I think I have the skeleton of an EMA question, the pressing problem now is TMA05.

Again, I have not helped myself by (on advice from the course forum) updating GRTL. The new version looks very different to the one I have used in the past, so I think I will have to uninstall the new one and go back ton the old one for the TMA.

Am I enjoying myself....... not just now, no I am not..... but hopefully there is some light ahead.

But if you take anything away from this, please remember........

IF YOU OPEN A CSV FILE IN MICROSOFT EXCEL AND CREATE EXTRA WORKSHEETS OR TABS YOU CANNOT SAVE THIS WORK AS A CSV FILE, YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE SAVED FILE EXTENSION.


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