therandomtexan
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Weekly geekery
My buddy Jaime is always reminding me of cool stuff I see on the web, but forget to pass on. I’m trying to improve. Everyday math Fibonacci sequences — you do the math. (Tip from CBS News). How algorithms shape our world (Tip from The Endeavour). The powers of ten, as applied to the national Read more
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Time to panic?
One of the Instapundit’s readers has a frightening question about the current debt ceiling negotiations: And so maybe, just maybe, Republican strategy (what little there is of it) has badly misread the opposition. Obama tried to add 400 billion in taxes to a deal he had already agreed with Boehner at the last minute. Boehner Read more
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Michelle Obama does Sysiphus
The CDC reports that Federal anti-obesity programs aren’t working. Therefore, we need a bigger program! But here’s the money quote: The fattest states also tend to be poorer southern states, where there’s also relatively little stigma against fat. The thinnest states tend to be wealthier, and to include more university-educated Americans who choose to exercise Read more
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Survival modeling on the job
I often joke that some bureaucracies are so tight that you can’t get hired unless one of their employees dies. For a lot of the feds, it ain’t a joke. The good news for grads in math, stats, and management science is that the staffs in Carter Administration outfits like the Department of Energy were Read more
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Statistics for Experimental Biologists
The Endeavor’s John Cook just tweeted @StatFact about four kinds of statistics, which led me to this wonderful site, Statistics for Experimental Biologists. What a fabulous resource for my Statistics 1403 course! Read more
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Got your Flight Plan yet?
Frank Serafine, the son of a old friend and colleague, is looking for backing via KickStarter for a new album. Check him out. Update (19 July). Frank made his goal! Now he owes me a song. Read more
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Bump charts get renamed as SLOPEGRAPHS
Charlie Park has a nice post describing Tufte’s slopegraphs (old chart, new name). Kaiser Fung likes these a lot; he’s been calling them Bump charts. I introduce these to my undergrads when we discuss the paired t test. Tip from kottke.org. Update (16 July). James Kierstead publishes an R implementation. Read more
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I gotta have one of THESE!
The Instapundit stumbles onto the brilliant idea of a strategic bacon reserve. After all, if it’s good enough for China… Read more
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Reproducible research
Great article in the NY Times about Keith Baggerly’s push for open data and reproducible analysis of results. Curiously enough, one of my students hit upon a tiny example of the problem this semester: …I decided to run my own descriptive statistics on their data sets to make sure their reports were all represented in Read more
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You kids get off my lawn!
I bet this whiner was born a fuddy-duddy. And from his comments, he’s not alone. He should post his picture here. Read more
The Random Texan 