wickedqueen.net

As a graduate student, I am exposed to a lot of people hating on Wikipedia. It’s not like I don’t understand some of the pitfalls. Someone is always going to be quick to point out that
Swaziland (7 pages) is less thoroughly covered on Wikipedia than Gondor (9 pages)–although the latter is still beaten out by Bhutan (11 pages).

Although let’s be serious: the people who are editing the entry on Gondor almost certainly do NOT represent a drain on available resources for Swaziland. You really have to CARE about a subject to edit a wikipedia entry; noting a discrepancy between the information presented and your own personal knowledge (Cress & Kimmerle 2007: 159) is not sufficient, although I’m sure it’s a factor. Probably caring about a topic is correlated with noticing discrepancies; you know stuff about things you care about, and you’re motivated to ensure that other people know the Right stuff about them, too. This is why so far the only wikipedia entries I have ever edited are for Child ballads.

So anyway, you get bias, the way you get with any volunteer sample, but it’s unclear to me how different this is from the bias inherent in any information that someone cares about enough to teach you. Making everyone teach the thing they care about the least doesn’t seem like a workable solution to this problem. I think there’s also a barrier to entry into Wikipedia itself, though, separate from one’s personal knowledge and its fit or lack thereof with what the site presents. Cress & Kimmerle note that “sometimes people only add new information to an existing [Wikipedia] article, and sometimes people completely restructure an article” (2007: 158). I suspect that the people restructuring articles are experienced users who have developed a sense of themselves as Wikipedia-competent, separate from whatever expertise they may possess on a particular subject; new users may recognize their own lack of this kind of competence, and I think it presents a not-insignificant barrier to participation.

Overall, however, I still feel that Wikipedia is a useful resource. I refer to it frequently. Just recently Marc mentioned that it was to Wikipedia that he turned in his search for instructions for the preparation of spaghetti squash. This seems to represent one function of wikis, particularly smaller, less public ones: to build a database of relevant information to participants and make it easy to edit and access. One can easily imagine a recipe/cooking wiki devoted entirely to cooking instructions, and wikis seem to be a popular tool for teams involved in the development of particular products. It’s hard to pin down in these cases how a wiki differs from a very large, interactive FAQ.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, is often explicitly modeled after traditional encyclopedias, and many academics perceive it as some kind of informational Wild West, where anyone can say god knows what and nobody can be trusted to understand SCIENCE. It’s not peer-reviewed, after all.

In fact, as far as I know, neither are traditional encyclopedias. Most academics I know are all in a froth about the possibility of undergraduate students citing wikipedia in papers, but the real issue is that you don’t cite encyclopedias in scholarly research. Encyclopedias are by nature summaries, and you don’t cite summaries in scholarly research–you might, I suppose, cite a review article to support a claim about a particular broad trend in a particular field, but in most cases, you don’t want to be throwing around a bunch of review article citations, either. As I tell my students, you have to find the original source, because people do not trust your interpretation of Academic Telephone, especially if you are a freshman. That means no review articles and no encyclopedia entries, electronic or otherwise.

Maybe if more academics understood what a pain in the ass it is to actually contribute to something as huge and bureaucratic as Wikipedia, they’d have more respect for it, or at least stop acting like it’s run by third-graders with a strong commitment to homeopathy. Most likely we’ll just have to wait for a cohort of people to get old and retire–it is the most reliable mechanism for attitude change.

This past week for my collaborative learning course, we read three articles on activity theory, a theoretical perspective concerned with how actors work towards goals/objects from particular motives/passions, using certain tools to do so–based on the little triangular diagram that seems much beloved of activity theory, I would include “rules” within “tools,” which is of course very ethnomethodological of me.

That is to say, ethnomethodologists often argue that rules are never sufficient to account for people’s actions, no matter how frequently people claim that they did things “because of” rules. Rules are simply resources, another possible tool in the toolkit when people are accounting for action–and in fact, one often sees cases in which people justify a seeming violation of a rule by demonstrating how it was in fact following the “spirit” of the rule or something similar. I like to think of roles in a similar way, actually, although I would freely admit that some roles are harder to get out of or into than others, and of course accounts can fail in the sense that other participants do not accept them. But anyway. Activity theory.

One of the articles, Wolff-Michael Roth’s* “Activity Theory and Education: An Introduction” (2004), discusses the early absence of activity theory from the discipline of education (the course I’m taking is in educational psychology, if you’ll recall). He attributes its rise in visibility in part to articles published in English by Engestrom and notes that you can trace this ascent by looking at the increasing attendance at activity theory-related sessions as the American Educational Research Association national meetings.

As pretty much all academics know, there are trends within academia. Certain topics or theoretical perspectives get hot and everyone wants to get in on the action. Sometimes these trends are Madonna; sometimes they are Britney Spears. In the case of activity theory, the main barrier to its having been promoted earlier seems to have been a lack of English publications; this is certainly a problem for non-English-speaking researchers in engaging in dialogue with a larger audience, but one that I think is often not considered much. I’m guilty myself of crossing off potential references without a second thought if they’re not in English–I’m a graduate student; I have papers to write and articles to submit and classes to teach; I just don’t have time to learn German. This is, however, a good example of how what we know, or think is important, is often shaped by forces that are mostly invisible to us. Even if we know they’re there, we mostly don’t think about them.

Language barriers are an obvious example, but in fact academics’ perspectives are typically a lot narrower than that. We get trained in certain disciplines, with bodies of literature behind them–some of them are older and more entrenched than others, but graduate education is pretty focused anyway. Interdisciplinary research seems to be getting more and more buzz, and it seems obvious that it’s a good approach when you have a particular topic established. I remember a couple of years ago talking to a guy at a party who was interested in autism diagnoses. He wasn’t a sociologist, and had no idea about the work within conversation analysis (narrower and narrower) that had been done on the topic. He was really interested in it when I told him about it. I suspect he probably never read it, or maybe read it and got frustrated and decided to stick with more sensible perspectives.

By which I mean, more sensible to him. Academic training is all about learning a paradigm and working in it. Interdisciplinary research and perspectives seem like a great idea, kind of like ending world hunger, but then they turn out to be really complicated and confusing and people keep referencing pet theorists and very few people actually want to quit being a sociologist or a psychologist or whatever, and there’s a tendency, I think, to get frustrated with people for not having had the same training as you. It’s probably worse when you’re all sort of in the same division, like social science–physicists are clearly alien; you don’t expect them to know anything about Marx. But when people know about Marx, and then turn out not to know what YOU know about Marx, it’s confusing–especially when you start out thinking you know the same things, because duh, why wouldn’t you?**

For example, one of the other articles, a piece on online community, includes a bit on sociability:

The important design point here is that designers shift their focus from simply supporting usability to supporting what Preece (2000) described as ’sociability.’ Barab, MaKinster, Moore, Cunningham, and The ILF Design Team (2001) described sociability as ‘those social policies and technical structures that support the community’s shared purpose and social interactions among group members’ (p. 83)” (Barab et al. 2004)

I realize that what is being termed “sociability” here actually diverges rather sharply from Simmel’s definition of sociability as non-instrumental, but it comes as quite a shock, to a sociologist, to see the word “sociability” and not even a breath of him. This may just be an exaggeration of a problem common to a lot of social scientific terms, which is that we tend to use words like “self” and “motive” that already have vernacular connotations that may not actually mean what we want them to mean.***

I don’t mean, actually, to be negative about interdisciplinary research–I think it’s a good idea, just like a bunch of other people do. I do think that when attempting it, participants needs to really think about their own differences in perspective, and try not to ever assume that two people using the same word mean the same thing. There are language barriers amongst English speakers.

—

*It is not often that I encounter another academic with an apparently English name as non-normative as mine.

***I was told once that Japanese academics, as part of their academic training, have to learn new sets of kanji (Chinese characters) for the technical terminology of their discipline. I wonder if their social sciences follow this convention as well, or if they, too, use words pinched from laypeople.

This semester I will be blogging weekly for my course on collaborative learning, because it is a requirement; I will be doing it here rather than on the course site because a) I have enough blogs to maintain already and b) there’s a precedent, if you’ll recall my many prelim-studying entries and those times I geeked out over the stuff we saw in Alice’s digital media literacy class; besides c) my audience is hella nerdy anyway.

I was surprised to find that the first week’s readings actually referenced conversation analysis (CA) quite a bit. Back when I was studying for my prelim on the subject, I read several chapters from an anthology on CA and cognition, so it’s not that I don’t think it’s appropriate for the subject under study, but it’s always interesting to see what people who were not actually trained in CA make of it. Usually something that would make the hardcore CA people cry, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, given the focus of the course and thus the readings on CMC (computer-mediated communication) in the service of collaborative learning, and particularly text-based quasi-synchronous CMC (e.g. chat), the data seem well-fitted to CA. If your concern as an analyst is that you have access to all resources that were available to participants at the time of interaction, chat logs are pretty comprehensive, especially if they’re time-stamped.

In some cases, though, lack of unique adequacy raised issues for me; “‘[u]nique adequacy’ is defined here as the researcher’s ability to analyse the encountered social world from practitioner research rather than from ‘classical social theorising’ (Cuff et al., 1992) perspectives” (Wakefield 2000). Stahl (2006) seems to suggest more difficulty with tracking parallel topics in chat than I believe most participants actually have, especially if they’ve been using chat for their own personal purposes for any length of time. The book was published in 2006, but I’m not entirely sure when the research he references using CMC for group work on math problems was conducted–certainly a major issue in research on the internet in any context is that today’s internet is a dramatically different place from the internet of even five years ago, and the average participant gets more and more savvy with the passing of time.

On the other hand, technologies and applications also change very quickly. As I’ve mentioned before, pretty much the only people MUDding now are the same people who were MUDding in 1992 when it was an exciting topic for academic research. MMOGs are certainly the virtual descendants of MUDs, but they’re not quite the same and they are occupied by mostly different people. Email lists, while not dead, definitely seem to me to be on the way out, although perhaps not in academia as in the general population–my main exposure to email lists outside of academia was in activism and fandom. I wanted to talk about sexuality and read Star Trek pornography, and for some time, those needs were mainly met by Usenet and listservs.

Now, however, there are websites, particularly hive communities like LiveJournal, and communities on Facebook. Almost all the undergraduates who I interviewed last semester about Facebook use remarked at some point or another that email was “formal” and not something they used for socialization or personal communication. This is probably not going to stop academics, because we are the kind of people who like spreadsheets and monographs and Being Important, but for everyone else, email seems to have become sort of stuffy and boring, like actual mail or something.

Even chat, which is to me so familiar that I tend not to distinguish in vernacular reports whether I was talking to someone face-to-face or virtually, may be on its way to obsolescence even as I type. Text messaging on mobile devices seems a bit different in character than chat, and now that everyone has a cell phone and everyone is also online, I think there are fewer extended interactions happening in chat, even if people do leave their AIM up as a kind of answering service, competing to have the deepest or wittiest away message in the dorm. Or, you know, I’ve always been weird; maybe it was always more random solicitations for cybersex than anything else. It’s not like my college chats were deep, but they were properly punctuated.

Really, I just wonder how long it will be before computer voice chat largely supplants text chat. Gamers already prefer it; they use third party applications to supplement the game interfaces that supply only text chat because it’s so clunky, especially when you’re trying to coordinate raids. I use Skype when I play City of Heroes, and I’ve also started using it to call my parents because my cell phone service is so shitty in my new place. As everyone’s systems catch up, I can easily see more and more people using voice chat in place of the phone, but also in place of “impersonal” text. Voice may kill the chat star. Maybe. On the other hand, there are advantages to not being totally present for the people to whom you’re talking, and sometimes I don’t want to devote that much attention.

Once again, I have to say simply that all I know about the internet in five years is that I probably can’t imagine it. Sure, I want that headjack as much as ever, but even if I get it, there’s no telling what comes with it. It makes it hard to keep your research current.

Isn’t it cute how I totally thought I’d be writing my dissertation by now?

To be fair, I do have a paper I wrote this spring that I plan to transform into a chapter, and I also didn’t realize when I made the post linked above that I would be spending Spring 2007 as a not-TECHNICALLY-enrolled visiting student at MIT rather than taking classes for actual credit back in Madison. I’d still only have a semester of coursework left, except that our required methods course is ONLY offered in the spring. It’s not so bad; I’m going to be TA’ing anyway, so a light course load is a good thing. And I HAVE passed both my prelim exams, which is probably difficult to appreciate if you don’t have any of your own to take, but believe me, it’s a relief (even if no one can figure out how I managed to finish prelims and still have classes left to take). Finishing up my coursework this spring, I should still be able to get out by Spring 2010, which puts my time in the program at the average for students entering without an MS (seven years*).

I still want a dining room table. And possibly another cat,** because I have not done enough damage to my marital prospects with all this graduate education.

I’ll be back in Madison in a week.*** It’s a little weird to consider, having spent a year away in places with TRAINS and many sources of Indian food, but at least they got a Trader Joe’s, and I miss my friends there. I’m feeling more positive about it this week than I have pretty much since last September, which I suppose could be a last-ditch self-preservation trick of my subconscious, but you know, whatever, I’m willing to just think I’m content if necessary. I’m looking forward to the farmers’ market, and having my cats again (and a vet who I trust at the UW vet school), and half-price cocktails at the Opus (the Cha Cha Cha matches my hair, and as we have recently learned, is a vital source of antioxidants by virtue of containing berries in its alcohol). I’m looking forward to classes (yes, finishing them especially) and being a TA.

I’m also looking forward to buying a commuter-road bike. Any recommendations on where to buy a new bike in Madison? Preferred retailers, etc.? I sold my 10-year-old mountain bike on craigslist this weekend,**** so this week I am riding my absent housemate’s commuter-road bike. I feel as if I have gone from a comfortable, well-bred mule to a high-strung Arabian warhorse, but this is probably largely due to the bicycle frame being too big for me, even with the seat all the way down. I still don’t want another mountain bike; even the good ones are too heavy for my needs. I do, however, anticipate that I will probably have to paint the new bike myself if I want it to suit me.

—

*Mention this figure to a student in the hard sciences and watch them recoil in horror, but I sort of like the symbolism of it–v. folkloric. About the length of time you’d expect to spend, say, in the thrall of an evil witch+ or asleep inside a pearl at the bottom of an ocean of dragon spit.

+Not to imply anything about my advisors. No! Really! Please let me graduate.

So last night I was on the phone with a good friend from high school with whom I tend to touch base three or four times a year, which means that this was the first he’d heard about my career-ending mud wrestling injury. I mentioned that there were photos of the match online, and he immediately plugged my name into a Google image search, although if I’d realized he was at his machine I could have just sent him my Flickr link–but if I had, we might never have made this amazing discovery.

A few minutes after he found the relevant photos, there was a long silence on his end. I prodded him verbally.

“Uh, Cabell, are these your boobs?”
“Excuse me?”
“Over this PS3?”
“WHAT?”
“I did a google image search on your name, and there is a headless bust over a PS3.”
“Well, it’s definitely not me; I don’t even HAVE a PS3–where IS this?”
“Google image!”

So I google image searched myself, and sure enough:

I would like to reiterate here that this photo is NOT ME. I know how sometimes people miss these things, like when I went to that strip club on amateur night purely out of sociological curiosity and NOT AS A PARTICIPANT, DAD, but apparently wasn’t clear enough on that point in the initial blog entry.

So, yeah. That photo up there? Not me. It is, however, in the top row of results when you put “cabell gathman” (although not actually with the quotation marks in the search term) into Google image search. The rest of the row consists of the side-by-side of me and Andromeda Sparks (my main CoH avatar), my Flickr user icon, a graphic from January’s winning IAP Games Competition entry (the team for which I was on), and two different photos from Truman State University’s newsletter that do not include me but do seem to be part of coverage of events in which I was involved.

So what’s with the PS3 boobs, you ask? Well, the graphic was originally embedded in an entry of the Electric SistaHood blog’s review section, and ESH once linked to a column I wrote on female gamers for Strange Horizons. As far as I can tell, the particular page in which the actual photo was embedded contained no reference to my name, though, so it seems odd that it comes up so high on the results, except that maybe there are a lot of people google image searching me all the time and that’s their favorite photo?* IT’S NOT ME.

As a researcher of social networking sites, I naturally hear a lot about context and context collision and people who didn’t realize that their parents/professors/employers were going to see that picture of them doing body shots at a party, but I hadn’t really considered the growing possibility of cases like this, where your identifying information may end up linked to bizarre things that have nothing to do with you because you are both connected to some random OTHER thing. Confounding factors!

Which is funny in itself, since this very domain is still inaccessible from many locations that employ internet filtering software because there was a time period during which it was in the hands of pornographers, and so it’s still on a lot of outdated block lists. You’d think I’d have thought about the way that spurious connections might arise out of the vast sea of data that is the internets.** It seems like I am actually LESS likely than most to fall victim to this, because I have a weird freaking name, but on the other hand, when your name is a truly unique identifier, people are probably much more likely to assume that okay, yes, those must actually be your PS3 boobs. (THEY’RE NOT, DAD.)

Probably having publicly admitted to mud wrestling doesn’t help, either, but you know, I’m sorry, that is just how I roll. But I do not now nor have I ever owned a PS3.

(And yes, I know this post is just going to make this search result about a billion times more robust, but at least there’s a chance that people will then click on it and see this blog entry, right? …Yeah, like I believe anyone but me checks the source page.)

—

*If you or someone you know spends a lot of time google image searching me, a) don’t tell me, and b) Matt is going to be totally unsurprised, as he once claimed that I would have the most self-portraits available online of anyone in the world if it weren’t for cam girls.

**John: It’s not just a big truck you can just DUMP stuff in, you know. IT IS A SERIES OF TUBES.

I know it’s because a lot of the early literature focuses on them, which makes sense because they were actually a new and vibrant online community when the early research was being done, but at this point I don’t think they’re terribly relevant unless you’re trying to explain the difference between hard core internet geezers and everyone else, which hardly anyone ever is.

So anyway, I got back from ASA and I’m tired because my internal clock thinks it’s midnight and the margaritas from happy hour at Compadres to celebrate my triumphant return have worn off.**

I met a lot of cool people doing interesting work, and I thought that our presentation on third places in virtual worlds went quite well, especially when you consider that it took place at 8:30 in the morning on the first full day of the conference. A more substantive post may or may not follow in the next few days; please recall that I now have 10 days to pack all my shit and move back to Wisconsin. And there’s a poster presentation at PARC in there somewhere, too.

—

*Year chosen because that’s the year I started playing MUDs, but I was sort of late. And they didn’t really take off at my junior high, although I did inspire a few fellow orc slayers.

**After the conference, I felt it was best to gradually reduce the alcohol consumption rather than abruptly cutting it off.

It happened in Madison, too, although the victim is not a sociologist.

In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Lipscomb said he has had some lingering headaches and a stiff neck.

“All things considered, that’s about as good as it can get,” he said.

Despite the close call, he said, he has to focus on school because his qualifying exam for the Ph.D. program is next week.

“I think it will probably hit me when I’m done with exams,” Lipscomb said.

Lipscomb does plan to ride again, he just prefers to wait until after exams are over.

All I ever did while studying for prelims was go on a diet, and a lot of people were pretty amazed that I was willing to do THAT.

Of course, as a helmet proponent of many years, I find the story interesting for its clear demonstration of their value, but man. I think you have to have spent a month buried in your office reading the Social Psychology Handbook, coming home at midnight only to watch episodes of Cold Case in your darkened living room and WEEP, to really understand why this guy does not currently have the emotional energy to process having had HIS HEAD RUN OVER BY A TRUCK.

Yes, every morning when I wake up, right before I start worrying about my dissertation, I experience a little shock of bliss that I am DONE WITH PRELIMS. And also I am grateful not to have been run over by any trucks thus far.

I am sitting in the lobby area of the Z Center athletic facility, conducting interviews about Facebook use via instant messenger before my workout. It occurred to me this morning, as I was trying to figure out the logistics of all the interviews I had scheduled and my desire to go to the gym, that I didn’t actually have to go in to the office as I’d been planning–the wireless is just as good at the Z Center and either way I’d be on my laptop.

And this way I shave off about 20 minutes of walking around campus, which is kind of important because I have like six interviews scheduled today. I’ll do two interviews here at the gym, work out, mail birthday presents at the campus post office, and bus it home so that I can be there by 3:15 for my next round of interviews (I have to be back at home for them because one of them is a phone interview that I’ll be recording with Skype, and it doesn’t run well on my laptop, plus my headset is at home, plus I realized this morning while getting dressed that I need to do some laundry because I am currently wearing my second-to-last set of gym clothes).

And THEN, I just got a message from City of Heroes that Issue 9 has gone live, which means that there is some serious new content up. I just made level 45 on Monday night, so I’m excited to try out my newly beefed up ice armor,* but I also want to see how the new invention system works. I never bothered to look at it on the test server, so it’ll all be new to me. I just hope nothing is severely broken.

Also, thanks to craigslist, it looks like I’m set up for housing in California. This is a relief, although of course I haven’t even BEGUN packing. I’m having a party next week to give away stuff that I don’t want to move, and have decided that I am getting rid of my bedspread because I hate it. This is a recurring problem for me. Some of you may recall that my current bedspread was the object of a long and arduous search for a reversible pink and green comforter. Which it is, but you know, they’re kind of UGLY pink and green. Not the shades I had envisioned, and over time, they have become more and more objectionable in my eyes, especially since my friend Matt bragged to me about the awesome zebra print bedspread he found for super cheap in Australia.** And of course moving pretty much makes ALL your possessions less attractive.

Probably I should stop buying bedspreads online. The future is great, but given that I keep hating bedspreads that looked pretty good on Amazon Marketplace, it might be best to return to my old-fashioned shopping roots for the next one.

—

*For the two or three readers who might possibly care: when I hit 41, I initially took Electricity Mastery as my epic power pool, since Andromeda Sparks is an electric/electric blaster. Unfortunately, it really sucked, so I respec’d to Cold Mastery instead. So far I’ve got an area of effect sleep power and this ice armor, which is pretty cool–it takes both defense AND damage resistance enhancements, and I’ve now got two of each on it, so I expect noticeably improved performance.

+This is not slighting Travis, because Travis has video blogged.

Conferences are really the academic equivalent of summer camp, with the sudden fast friendships and too many scheduled activities, except that sometimes there’s free booze and after an hour of that–during which you have perhaps been availing of yourself of the open bar like someone who knows it is only open for an hour–you can convince people to go to Allston for karaoke.

For the second time, I was the only person in the room (not including people who are related to me) who had EVER HEARD “Goodbye Earl.” I guess the Dixie Chicks really aren’t big on the East Coast. Or Australia.

Elizabeth took pictures, which she says are no good because the flash destroys the blacklight effect, but dude, I just want to see the hilarious karaoke faces. She will also find that there’s at least one self-shot close-up of my adorable pink head in there somewhere,* but I probably have enough of those already.

Martyn** insisted the entire way there that he was not going to sing any karaoke, but would suffer through the rest of us making fools of ourselves. Within an hour he was standing up singing “Closer” with me,*** although neither of us believe it actually ends like that.****

And Nathan sang “Fuck and Run” with me,***** for which I was very grateful, because as I KNEW from singing it at WisCon karaoke last year, it’s actually too low for me. Having a guy sing along, I can sort of pretend I’m, um, harmonizing?

And I finally got Laura (who lives here) to karaoke! We opened the night together with a rousing rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” without which, frankly, no karaoke session is truly complete.****** It was totally awesome and no one spilled anything on my phone. A fantastic karaoke evening.

Not that this means I’m not going to try to do another one before I leave town, don’t you worry. There is no such thing as too much karaoke. Some time before the 18th, we are hitting Do Re Mi again.

—

*This tends to happen with me after happy hours and similar events. At least I don’t take off my clothes anymore.

******I’m sorry, Aaron, but it’s true.

So I’m sitting in an auditorium listening to the second-to-last plenary of the Media in Transition conference, and from my position about 2/3 of the way back, I can see two different people logged into Twitter. Elizabeth, who is sitting next to me, surfed to my blog when she saw me open it.

Unfortunately, my laptop battery is almost dead. A few days ago it started notifying me that while it is “charging normally, it is reaching the end of its lifespan.” At first I thought I’d just wait until I got to PARC and started pulling in a bigger paycheck, but then I realized that would mean I’d be doing all my traveling in the next week with a death-rattling battery. Not ideal. I’ve ordered one from Amazon MarketPlace for like $60 less than Dell wanted, but it won’t be here probably until the end of the week. Man.

This has been a good conference. I didn’t have a paper in because I didn’t actually know about it until like two weeks ago when Henry emailed me and asked me to moderate a session, but it’s been really interesting. I really like MIT. I’m looking forward to a summer in Palo Alto–especially since the housing situation is now looking a little more promising–but I’ve really liked being here, too. I hope I can come back.