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
Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal has a nice article about the growth of statistics. The print version differs substantially from the online version in content, though not in message.
Missing from this message is the urgent need to have more teachers, at all levels, trained in statistics. I’m currently at a meeting of the joint committee on education of the American Statistical Association and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
I recently added a free application/service that analyzes my email called Gmail Meter. This service sends me a comprehensive weekly report full of summaries and plots that indicate how I use Gmail.
The first thing I learned is that Wednesdays are for emailing and I seem to respond in a timely manner, on average, to emails sent to me…when I actually respond (I have a 24.58% response rate. Yikes!) Wednesdays I only teach one class (at 4:40pm) this semester, but I have a morning meeting so I am on campus and generally have time to respond to emails that I may not have gotten to.
I got pretty excited about a new calendar app, in part because I love these productivity tools and in part because I really hate the calendar that comes with the iPhone. Tempo, as it is called, seemed nifty because it integrates data on your phone into the calendar so, for instance, you can get directions to your next meeting easily, alert people that you’re going to be late, have documents related to your appointment automatically opened, and other features that will either save lots of time and hassles or themselves become time-sinks and hassles.
I have been mourning the loss this week of my FitBit. No idea where it went. That’s the problem with small, portable data collection devices. The very feature that makes them useable makes them lose-able. Then I came across this possible solution
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/21/australian-firefighters-test-data-transmitting-pills/
which raises entirely new questions about edible lines of data collection devices.
My colleague Mark Hansen used to assign his class to keep a data diary. I decided to try it, to see what happened. I asked my Intro Stats class (about 180 students) to choose a day in the upcoming week, and during the day, keep track of every event that left a ‘data trail.’ (We had talked a bit in class about what that meant, and about what devices were storing data.
For various reasons, I decided to walk this weekend from my house to Venice Beach, a distance of about four and a half miles. The weather was beautiful, and I thought a walk would help clear my mind. I had recently heard a story on NPR in which it was reported that Thoreau kept data on when certain flowers opened, a record now used to help understand the effects of global warming.
