this morning i've made the decision to apologize since dan advised me to do so, and her acceptance to my apology highly indicates that my actions yesterday deserves an apology. the apology was necessary. and it was caused by no other than communicative friction.
there are two gaps that i currently have. i arrived at a bench with only a statistical framework. that the "inherent variability" was unexposed to me until the imaging work actually started, and they started showing up one by one, sequential or parallel to me.
it is one thing to flag/note the issue with her. it is another (as i said before) to talk back in forth uselessly that negatively gauges her patience.
her patience will wane if i don't change my way of communication. it is also clear that she still frames this as something she is acting out of charity, and acting as an extension of her existing, busy work. this leads to the same old conclusion that only neutral and positive news during this data collection period, and positive endpoint results (the modeling) could reweigh the equation and give me any leverage, significant or insignificant, to even negotiate (note: this is when never split the difference could be helpful, but it's downstream).
OK. enough said about yesterday and her response. this is perhaps the last time i would reiterate that the model's performance speaks for itself. so in the meanwhile, by my own take out of this situation and her suggestion, two actionable things beside the technical works:
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the need to thoroughly read, or at least get the gist of chip heath's made to stick through any means necessary (podcast, audiobooks, etc) is crucial. this book should provide a very clear and general framework in effective communication.
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directly from b: "reading some papers on errors in benchwork and how to account for that with statistical tests," which for that she will send some starters that best target our specific domain gaps. this part requires me to again, read, but more domain specific so she could understand me without misinterpreting things that could result in bigger problems like the failure of this collaboration not from empirical results but from bad rapport/chemistry.
it's time to pack my things and start day 8 of imaging.