You will probably be aware that getting myself to a conference tests my intelligence to the limit. Calculating how to coordinate the flights with the hire car and the hotel booking creates great consternation. The reverse process is just as challenging, particularly estimating when I will be handing in the car (usually best done before the departing flight takes off). The complexities of passports, currencies, tickets all conspire to confuse me, more so when different time zones come into play.
In contrast, staying in one’s home city and organising a conference should be easy. Language, currency and time zone are all set to one’s advantage. However, new tasks arise as an organiser, such as coordinating later arrivals with speaker’s timetables, organising the program so it looks as if it has a structure, and finding suitable eating and drinking venues for hard working, hard thinking colleagues, without bankrupting less well paid young researchers.
Hence, I have not be able to multi-task and attend to the blog whilst also making conference arrangements, so I will be quiet until the event starts, and then I will send you a few comments on each paper, together with the abstracts. Mind you, I am likely to get distracted by the papers themselves, and multi-tasking by blogging could be too much for me, so perhaps my silence will be even more prolonged.
Finally, given that the United Kingdom is having a general election tomorrow, I thought that I would use the opportunity to link that event to some aspect of intelligence. That has proved hard.
perhaps the difficulty is slightly compounded by - & i'm just guessing here, + using an old test manual - "fluid" ability as measured by (rule dependent!) matrices tasks is less whippy in our mid to late 50s - in fact, the average person in their mid to late 50s on matrix patterns performs the same as an average 9 & a half year old (& the latter can look forward to future years of steady increase, while those of us in our late 50s, well... have fun at the conference!) - heck, these norms might be bad, + these data are not even longitudinal - so forget 'em! plus, as far as matching block designs goes, average late 50s-ers score like an average 13-year old - so, there's that:) have fun there, like a 13-year old would!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your encouraging comments. I think longitudinal designs are best, as you say, and the Deary data is more encouraging as regards ageing. Still, all I have to do now is work out how to link my laptop to the projector system. And the microphones. I will tackle these problems like a 13 year old.
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