Statistics at UTSA

One of my several innovations this semester in the Applied Statistics course is the incorporation of a significant writing component.  The statistics faculty has long complained about students producing ghastly, unreadable project reports, but they seem to treat it as some sort of natural phenomenon, like the weather.  Since Applied Statistics is the first upper-division Read more

Yesterday was the first meeting of UTSA’s Statistical Consulting class, and the instructor, Dr Stephanie Cano, had plenty of projects–with anxious clients attached–to assign.  Since I’m her sidekick in the university’s Statistical Consulting Center, I had the pleasure of presenting two of the project statements to the class, since I conducted the initial interviews with Read more

My biostatistics students just completed their first case study: a survey of handwashing behavior at UTSA, finding that students wash their hands only about 76% of the time before leaving the restroom.  And look what gets published by the American Society for Microbiology: their 2007 Survey of Handwashing Behavior.  They show a big difference between Read more

Some lesser-known law schools are increasing their visibility with web logs: Any widely disseminated positive information can increase awareness of an institution among the small number of people who fill out the survey. This may occur through the introduction of innovative programs, the sponsoring of widely noted and attended conferences, and other similar developments. But Read more

Michael Stastny illustrates why an average doesn’t tell the whole story about a random variable.  Plus, a link to Jensen’s Inequality, and the "bottom line" (but not the solution) to a homework problem I’ll be assigning in January. Read more

Last night my wife and I attended an outstanding lecture* in the UTHSC-SA/UTSA Bioinformatics and Proteomics Series by Dr Keith Baggerly, Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, talking about the statistical analysis of mass spectrometry data for proteomics. One topic that came up after the talk was false discovery rate, which Read more

Cathy Seipp has an absolutely charming article in NRO about college girls: "…with all the “outreach” going on, it’s unlikely college girls are discouraged from careers in math and science…" There’s an understatement. Our Engineering School may still be a male bastion, but women far outnumber men among the statistics majors.  C’mon guys, you’re not Read more

More classic papers — this time a set of classics in biostatistics, the famous British Doctors Survey: R. Doll and A.B. Hill, "The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits: a preliminary report,", British Medical Journal, 1954:ii;1451-5. four more articles in BMJ, 1956, 1964, 1976, and 1994 (full text is not yet online Read more

Last night in Advanced Inference, Dr. Kannan digressed slightly from the syllabus to discuss the Edgeworth Expansion for approximating density functions. One of the key ingredients in the expansion is the set of Hermite polynomials; I wondered "Who was Hermite?" Now I know:  in my department, we’d call him Mr Orthogonality. Read more

Wow!  what a timely find.  I’m preparing to give a lecture on Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio today in my quantitative literacy course (STA1043), and Paul over at Geek Press links to an article on designer fractions, which generate….Fibonacci numbers!  The students will love it. Read more