Clear and Convincing Evidence

Little guys not being watched climbing trees in the park ;-)

In graduate school, we were taught lots and lots of things, but one of the most important was how to communicate the importance of your own work with an expert audience.  We were taught to communicate well in presentation (oral) and publication (written) format.  To underscore what your key findings are, you are to use strong language denoting the importance, as underline, boldface, italics are not used for emphasis in publications.

Strong language will help to communicate the subject at-hand to your audience.  This is easier to achieve in oral presentations, but what matters most in the end is what you have published in print.  The end.

To get across key points, often, we would use language like "The time-lapse movies (link) demonstrate clear and convincing evidence that FGF-4 is not only sufficient to stimulate directed migration of the neural plate, but it is also necessary."  Strong language shows a real fact that is important to the greater understanding of science as a whole.

That being said.  I have clear and convincing evidence that certain things make me feel emotionally very poorly.

Today, I am sad and tired.  Blah.

Valerie and I are getting involved with any community fundraiser we can so that we can better come up with the money needed to send her on her class trip to Florida.  Yesterday, after church, we went to a festival in Bridgewater.  We helped serve taco salad to many, many people.  We were there for 7 hours on our feet.  It was reallllly tiring.  I had a crumpled up dollar bill in my pocket and that is it.  Do you know how awful it is to have "fair" food all around you, be hungry and truly have no way to by food?  That was rough.

The kiddos manning the taco salad station.  Valerie is in the dress on the left with the pink sweater

Today, we are helping out again and it will be the same sort of thing (except without the crumpled-up dollar.   I got Valerie a cheeseburger at 11 pm last night because she was hungry).  So fun.

There are also other things that are making me sad, but I won't get into it.  It really doesn't matter that I have feelings anyway, so I will just pretend I am not bothered, besides, the level of hurt would take too long to describe.  If you are looking for gossip, it's not on my blog.