Tuesday was a slightly shorter day for me in terms of talks as I had a couple meetings to attend. The first talk I attended was my colleague Kari Lock Morgan’s talk titled “Teaching PhD Students How to Teach” (in the “Teaching Outside the Box, Ever So Slightly (# 358)” session). The talk was about a class on teaching that she took as a grad student and now teaches at Duke.
My Monday at JSM started with the “The Profession of Statistics and Its Impact on the Media (#102)” session. The first speaker in the session, Mark Hansen, was a professor of mine at UCLA, so it was nice to see a familiar face (or more like hear a familiar voice - the room was so jam packed that I couldn’t really “see” him) and catch up on what he has been working on at his new position at Columbia University as a Professor of Journalism and the Director of David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
Bonjour de Montréal!
I’m at JSM 2013, and thought it might be nice to give a brief summary of highlights of each day. Given the size of the event, any session that I attend means I’m missing at least ten others. So this is in no way an exhaustive overview of the day at the conference, more tidbits from my day here. I’ll make a public commitment to post daily throughout the conference, hoping that the guilt of not living up to my promise helps me not lose steam after a couple days.
DataFest is growing larger and larger. This year, we hosted an event at Duke (Mine organized this) with teams from NCSU and UNC, and at UCLA (Rob organized) with teams from Pomona College, Cal State Long Beach, University of Southern California, and UC Riverside. We are very grateful to Vaclav Petricek at eHarmony for providing us with the data, which consisted of roughly one million “user-candidate” pairs, and a couple of hundred variables including “words friends would use to describe you”, ideal characteristics in a partner, the importance of those characteristics, and the all-important ‘did she email him’ and ‘did he email her’ variables.
I was looking to find an add-on Google Calendar that included important days in the history of statistics. They have one for seemingly everything under the sun, except this. So I created one and made it public in honor of the International Year of Statistics. I will continually add to it as I find time.
Feel free to add it. As always, it is available in the following formats
HTML
NCTM has finally published books on statistics in its EU series. This is a rather traditional approach to statistics, given the context of this blog. But, since I’m a co-author (along with Roxy Peck and Stephen Miller), why not point you to it?
http://www.nctm.org/catalog/product.aspx?ID=13804
And while the book is not computational in theme, it does address a central issue of this blog: universal statistical knowledge.
A grades 6-9 version is due out any moment.
http://flowingdata.com/2013/01/22/data-points-first-look/
Nathan Yau has a new book coming out, this about working with data. Pre-order now!
