Just like being back in school

The biostatistics class is relatively lightweight, but I'm being good and getting ahead on the readings and assignments. Since the software we use for class only runs on Windows machines, I'm doing it on my lunch hours plus a little time after work. Eventually I hope we'll get past elementary descriptive statistics and get to fun stuff like, "If a daily QC test has suffered random catastrophic failures at a rate of 6 per year, after being addressed by corrective action, how long a period with no failures is sufficient to demonstrate effectiveness to a given confidence level?"

As noted in xrian's journal, it's the time of year when abstracts for Kalamazoo are due. Just to whet people's appetites, here's mine:

The Medieval Shepherd's Purse: Artifact or Artistic Motif?

Images of shepherds in western European art of the medieval and Renaissance eras often show them accompanied by certain characteristic objects such as a specialized type of staff or bagpipes (and, of course, sheep). Another object that is strongly associated with shepherds and appears to be almost exclusive to that profession is a style of pouch or purse worn closely around the waist and characterized by a tapering cylindrical shape. On closer examination of a large set of data from manuscripts, paintings, and tapestries, this is not a single uniform style of purse, but a cluster of items of different construction that present a similar overall "look and feel". This paper explores the range of depictions of "shepherds' purses" through time and space to address the question of whether this motif is more likely to be an iconographic marker of "shepherdhood" or is likely to be a reflection of an actual style of artifact that, for some functional reason was associated nearly uniquely with the profession of shepherd. The answer seems to be a little of both. The range of constructions (often depicted in enough realistic detail that functional reproductions could be created) that cluster around certain key design features argue for a concrete reality behind the artistic motif driven by a set of functional needs peculiar to the nature of the profession. But equally detailed representations of non-functional developments in the same style-group, as well as the ubiquity of vague generalizations of the form, argue that it developed into an artistic signifier that may have significantly outlasted and spread further than use of the concrete artifact.