I’m writing this from the 公民館 (community centre) in Saga. I arrived this evening, because for the next 5 days, I’ll be helping out at the Saga International Balloon Fiesta as part of the Net Team!! So you can probably expect almost daily blogposts 😀

And unlike yesterday, I can finally give an update as to what I’ve been doing for my third year zemi paper (for the main zemi, at least).

As you may or may not know, the topic my partner and I chose was CSR. To be more specific, we’re investigating the link between foreign investors and the percentage of women in management positions, as well as the link between women and firm performance. For our data on women managers and number of women in the company, we used this:

My constant companion for about 3 weeks.

Apart from this, we took data from Nikkei NEEDS.

And then, there was the problem of how to go about analysing it. My teacher had very specific requirements, but none of the papers we looked at used this method. So we had to visit him a few times, try to propose an original idea, and get shot down. Finally, on Monday, he gave us the go-ahead to use the method we first proposed. PROGRESS.

I had planned to have finished the analysis by last night, but when we imported the final piece of data, we realised that it was in bits and pieces. So basically, we had to add total up the foreign investors for 306 companies, one by one. Hence the stressed and short post yesterday. Sorry ><

But, because I had Bekah, who is awesome with excel, we managed to split the work between three of us and finished around 2 in the morning.

Today, I spent the morning trying to figure out how to carry out multiple regression for 17 input variables in excel. Long story short, I can’t. I need to use R language, which I know next to nothing about. One afternoon of staring as youtube videos brought me as far as how to transfer data from excel to R.

And this is where coming to Saga comes in handy. I’m currently rooming with my classmates and seniors in the community centre, and one of my seniors is good with R. He did a little research, and within 15 minutes, found the formula I need. So in the end, I managed to analyse all 8 data sets in half an hour (well, prepping took some time too)

Looks like being volunteered for this was a good idea. I can start writing the essay tomorrow! For now, I need to sleep, because I need to wake up in about four and a half hours.

Saga station. I’m super excited for tomorrow!