Statistics at UTSA

The Drudge Report has an interesting link with the headline Vermont Top Tax: States Ranked by Total Taxes and Per Capita Amount… Linking to the page gives a Census Bureau table of total and per capita taxes by state, with no explanation, and no outbound links to summaries or drill-down data.  When I saw that Read more

Yet, it can’t be computer illiteracy. These students are highly computer literate. The educrats at my university have been ladling out this pernicious lie for years now. Like most other skills, computer literacy has been dumbed down to mean setting the Tivo, dialing a cell phone one-handed, pirating music off the Internet, hooking up with Read more

When people want me to tell them what workbooks they should use with a preschool aged child, my short answer is always "Don’t. Just let them play." This seems to work pretty well with older kids, too. I’m teaching a (college) freshman course in statistics for liberal arts majors. Rather than confuse them right off Read more

Mark Blumethal at the Mystery Pollster has an interesting discussion going about a recent poll conducted by the Military Times.  The best part is the tip that the raw polling data is freely available online!  This is going to be a great case study for Statistics 1993–the  SAS coding and statistical tests will be relatively Read more

In his one-line review of Brokeback Mountain, Gerard van der Leuen at American Digest shows me and the world that the folks at Box Office Mojo have some fascinating data, like the daily receipts.  There’s a great student project here, just waiting. Update (1 January):  I took a look at the latest (estimated) receipts for Read more

One surprising thing I’ve learned in the past five years of teaching undergraduate statistics is that comparatively few young people play traditional games of chance–cards or dominoes–any more.  This  conceptual "generation gap" shows up when I start teaching  basic probability, since I like to use a deck of cards as my universe for many examples Read more

We had a surprising discussion last week in one of my probability classes. Zach remarked that he had tried in vain to convince a friend that the Texas Lottery was not fair, since there is a "house advantage." The friend was unconvinced, arguing that the lottery must be fair, since everyone has the same chance Read more

I’ve mentioned the curious male-female imbalance in the UTSA statistics program, and I thought it was common knowledge that the current male-female ratio for undergrads in American universities is about 43-57.  Apparently I was one of the few illuminati. Suddenly it’s big news, here, there, aqui,  everywhere.  What’s interesting about this imbalance is that it Read more

I’ve always had jobs that required lots of writing.  In my impressionable youth, I was taught to use the general pronoun him to refer to some unnamed third person. In a recent letter to the UTSA Statistics Club, I felt compelled to ‘fess up: If I practiced Bayesian statistics in my writing, I’d always use Read more

This has been a pleasant week for my students in the summer semester.  One of our department’s old friends, Dr. Debasis Kundu, is visiting from India to do research, and he took some time out to give a colloquium talk.  We love big audiences, so the boss and I bribed students to attend the talk; Read more