teaching
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Seven Pillars
Wisdom hath built her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars. –Proverbs 9:1 I just finished Stephen Stigler’s The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom, and I’m daunted–and embarrassed that I waited so long to read it. Stigler gives us a structure and taxonomy to statistical thinking* that gives us the “big picture” of statistics. Read more
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UTSA ‘fesses up
My university’s dirty little secret about graduation rates isn’t secret any more. One thing that will need changing is getting a stronger GRIP. Treating our incoming freshman like trauma victims doesn’t seem to be working. Read more
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Some Hard Stats about University Teaching
Thinking about becoming a university professor? Read Kevin Birmingham’s “The Great Shame of Our Profession” before making definite plans. A 2014 congressional report suggests that 89 percent of adjuncts work at more than one institution; 13 percent work at four or more. The need for several appointments becomes obvious when we realize how little any Read more
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Multiple Comparisons, Made Easy
Adrian Colyer at the morning paper, takes a stab at explaining the problem with p-values and multiple comparisons. He shoots! He scores! The crowd* goes wild! Tip from an O’Reilly Daily Newsletter, which I found languishing in Clutter purgatory. *OK, the crowd of two or three statistics lecturers who struggle to explain the multiple comparison Read more
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An end run around an impossible integral
Ever-insightful polymath John Cook shows how to integrate the Gaussian PDF, in less time than it takes to make breakfast. The trick? Coordinate transformations and the Jacobian are your friends. A suitably-embellished version of Cook’s post will appear in my lecture notes in the Spring semester. Thanks, J.C. Read more
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The Beginning of the End for 5%
My students repeatedly ask about setting the critical values or interpreting p-values in statistical hypothesis testing. My stock answer is they should do their tests at the 5% level, since this is the most common and accepted practice in the biomedical community (my translation: it’s what all the KooL KiDz do.) But now some upstart Read more
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Simpson’s Paradox, revisited
Check out this cool new webpage explaining Simpson’s Paradox. Tip from Flowing Data. Read more
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Death of an Adjunct
We’re going to see a lot more of THIS as colleges and universities cut back on adjunct hours to dodge the Affordable Care Act. But, of course, the humane and sensitive tenured faculty will certainly rush to breach to help out, no? Tip from the Instapundit. Read more
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Collegiality…
…is one of those flexible terms academicians use to describe fellow faculty who “do what I like” or “do the committee work I abhor” or “don’t vote for Republicans” or something of that sort. But I’ve come up with a simpler, more objective, and operationally measurable definition: A fellow faculty member is collegial if he Read more
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New Tricks for this Old Dog
Udacity is offering an introductory statistics course this summer, beginning June 25th. I’ve enrolled, to see how the Big Boys do it. This is going to put a lot of pressure on traditional universities–especially here in Texas, where we’re busily hammering out the $10,000 Bachelor’s degree. I figure if I don’t get up with the Read more
The Random Texan 