It’s a beautiful, sunny morning here in Rostock. There is a cool breeze and my thermometer says it is 34, but that is only because the morning sun hits it and it is completely useless. I guess it’s really around 20.
It took a while for summer to come to Rostock, it’s only been here a week or so and could end any moment, which for me, coming from the southern US, is very different. I was completely depressed in July when I still had to wear a jacket. I had to talk myself out of getting on a plane back almost daily.
Rainer is at a conference in Glasgow this week where he says it is gray and rainy. He’s come to the conclusion that he doesn’t like flying anymore. I told him in that case, he’s in the wrong profession (academia -> conferences) and he’s married the wrong woman (a foreigner from another continent). He’s got to fly to Ohio and Washington D.C. in October, and I suppose back to Washington for Christmas with my family, then Sydney next April.
We were in Italy last week. I was working at the University of Calabria on cleaning the database I’m analyzing. Rainer was along for vacation and keeps saying, “Now we’ve had our vacation for the year.” Hmmm… I don’t remember any vacation…
So, I’m the statistician working on the European Challenge for Healthy Living (ECHA), where I am trying to define a statistical model to determine the environmental and genetic factors involved with healthy aging. The data was collected from people 90+ years old and their siblings, children and their siblings children (when available) in France, Denmark and Italy. In preliminary exploratory analysis, it’s interesting to find that women tend to be more depressed and less functional than men at very old ages. The gerontologists tell me this is because very old men usually die as soon as they become less functional, while women can live a long time under these conditions.
Well, time for work, today I’ll be trying to find if any of the chemical variables (cholesterol, etc) are related to the functional variables (cognitive score).
