Posts on Citizen Statistician

That's what Nicola said

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For the last year, I’ve watched just about every COVID-19 briefing by the Scottish Government, most of which are delivered by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Earlier on in the pandemic these were daily updates, lately it seems like once a week. The more often they happen, the worse you know things are going… If I’ve chatted with you about COVID, you have probably heard me say that I am very impressed by the way she delivers these updates.

Open-source contribution as a student project

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

An opportunity to teach, an opportunity to give back… If you’ve seen one of my data science education talks or attended one of my workshops in the last few years, you’ve probably heard me talk about the unvotes package in R. This package provides the voting history of countries in the United Nations General Assembly, along with information such as date, description, and topics for each vote. I love using data from this package in my teaching, especially on day one of class, because the data are rich while being accessible.

TikTok, lockdown, and introduction to R

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend Maria Tackett and I gave an introduction to R workshop as part of the 2021 ENAR Fostering Diversity in Biostatistics Workshop for high school and undergraduate students. Our goal was to give them a taster for exploring and visualizing data with R and, hopefully, leave them wanting to learn more. We only had 75 minutes for the workshop and a totally beginner crowd. We knew that they would be a mix of undergraduate and high school students, but didn’t know much else about them as we prepared for the workshop.

In the beginning was R Markdown

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I attended the Toronto Workshop on Reproducibility where I had to the pleasure of giving one of the keynotes. When I was asked to give a keynote for this event on teaching, I had the idea of reflecting on almost 9 years of teaching with introductory statistics and data science through the lens of reproducibility. I would have said “teaching with R Markdown”, but looking back through my notes, this wasn’t true as the rmarkdown package has not been around for that long – turns out I started teaching with it when it was just knitr.

#TheMoment tweets

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On Sunday morning I came across a tweet by NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro morning asking people when they knew things were going to be different due to COVID. Whenever I read replies to a tweet like this I’m always tempted to scrape all the replies and take a look at the data to see if anything interesting emerges.

GitHub workflow for data science project proposals

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few years I’ve been working on moving from a mindset of end-of-semester project to semester-long project. Inevitably students end up doing lots of work as the deadline approaches at the end of the semester (and I can’t blame them, that’s how I work around deadlines too, and how just about anyone I know works), but creating opportunities for them to get started on their projects earlier in the semester is very important.

Data science tutorials with learnr and gradethis

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post was contributed by Lee Suddaby and Zeno Kujawa, second year students at the University of Edinburgh majoring in Mathematics and Data Science, respectively.

Over the university summer break, we (Zeno and Lee) were busy making preparations for moving more of our Introduction to Data Science course from being human-graded to computer-graded. We both took this course in the Fall of 2019, as part of our first-year studies at the University of Edinburgh, and this is where we first learned R.

Teaching statistics and data science online workshops

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Colin Rundel and I will be teaching a series of three virtual workshops in July 2020 on teaching statistics and data science online.

Preparing to Teach 2020: What did we learn?

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post was contributed by Sara Stoudt (@sastoudt). Thank you Sara!

On May 15th and 20th the third Preparing for Careers in Teaching Statistics and Data Science Workshop was held. 37 graduate students and recent PhDs gathered (remotely of course) to learn from Allan Rossman (Cal Poly), Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel (University of Edinburgh, Duke, RStudio), Jo Hardin (Pomona), Beth Chance (Cal Poly), Lucy D’Agostino McGowan (Wake Forest), and Ulrike Genschel (Iowa State).

Letter to the COPSS Executive Committee

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As recent, current, and future chairs of the American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Statistics and Data Science Education, we have sent the following letter to Ron Wasserstein (Executive Director of ASA) and Bhramar Mukherjee (COPSS Chair) and requested that they share it with the COPSS Executive Committee.

Dipping my toes in generative art, with my sister

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Story of my first attempt at learning how to make generative art in R.

Citizen Statistician is back!

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We haven’t written anything for a while because, well, I broke this website. Or maybe not me, but Hugo broke it. Or maybe blogdown did. They had disagreements about versions and didn’t want to play nicely with each other and I was too busy/tired/overwhelmed to play arbiter. Those adjectives still apply to how I’m feeling nowadays, but after updating R to version 4.0 and reinstalling all my packages, I decided now was the time to suck it up and fix things.

Sometimes you just want a project-less RStudio session

Fri, 16 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever been to an R workshop I gave, you probably heard me say “if the only thing you get out of this workshop is that RStudio projects are awesome and you should use them, this workshop was worth your time”. And I stand by this statement, they are awesome!1 But sometimes you just want a project-less RStudio! When, you ask? Imagine you have an RStudio project open where you’re writing course slides, or a blog post, or a package… And then imagine a student asks a coding question and you want to run their code quickly but don’t want to populate your environment with the objects that code creates.

Shiny for JSM 2019

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It took me all of 30 minutes from starting this mini-project to writing this post. This is not meant to be a brag, but instead an ode to reproducibility. Last year for JSM 2018 I made a Shiny app to browse the conference schedule. I personally found that app really useful, and I know a few others did as well. And I saved my code in a GitHub repo. Now that JSM 2019 is almost here, I thought I’d try my code again.

Exploring the gt package with the useR 2019 schedule

Sat, 06 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have been meaning to try out the gt package for a while now, but didn’t really have a great use case for it. However over the last few days I have been looking over the useR 2019 schedule and felt like I would have an easier time picking talks yo attend if the schedule was formatted in wide format (talks occurring at the same time in different rooms listed next to each other) as opposed to the long format.

RStudio Cloud in the classroom

Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Much has been written in statistics and data science education literature about pedagogical tools and approaches to provide a practical computational foundation for students. However a common friction point for getting students (and faculty) started with computing is installation and setup. If you’ve heard me talk about teaching R, you’ve probably heard me mention the following day one dilemma: Option 1 😰 Option 2 😎 1.

KonMari your GitHub watchlist

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

First, if you don’t know what KonMari means, see here. My interpretation, based on having watched the Netflix series and not having read the books, is that you get rid of things that don’t give you joy. This is a huge oversimplification of Marie Kondo’s KonMari Method, but it’s the bit that’s relevant to this post. Now back to regular programming… As of two days ago I was watching over 2000 GitHub repositories!

Preparing to teach

Mon, 20 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited to announce that, with support from the National Science Foundation (pending final approval), the Section on Statistics and Data Science Education will host the 2nd annual Preparing for Careers in Teaching Statistics and Data Science Workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado, on July 27 (immediately prior to JSM 2019 in Denver, Colorado). The workshop is designed for graduate students and recent PhDs interested in careers in teaching statistics and data science.

Time zones are hard

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Citizen Statistician is back from a hiatus! I hope to post more regularly in the coming weeks, including writing a post on converting from WordPress to blogdown. I have recently been dealing with time zone changes. I’ll say a bit more about it shortly. But first, here is a picture of my 2 year old “dealing” with time zone changes. His schedule is completely thrown off, he doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he keeps moving around in his room in his sleep.

The birthday problem and voter fraud

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 17:03:31 +0000

I was traveling at the end of last week, which means I had some time to listen to podcasts while in transit. This American Life is always a hit for me, though sometimes I can’t listen to it in public because the stories can be too sad, and then I get all teary eyed in airports… This past week’s was both fun and informative though. I’m talking about Episode 630: Things I Mean to Know.

Hand Drawn Data Visualizations

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:50:50 +0000

Recently the blog Brain Pickings wrote about the set of hand-drawn visualizations that Civil Rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois commissioned for the1900 World’s Fair in Paris. (In a previous post, Rob wrote about an art exhibit he saw that featured artistic interpretations of these plots.) Every time I see these visualizations I am amazed—they are gorgeous and the detail (and penmanship) is amazing. The visualizations included bar charts, area plots, and maps—all hand-drawn!

Data Visualization Course for First-Year Students

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 15:26:51 +0000

A little over a year ago, we decided to propose a data visualization course at the first-year level. We had been thinking about this for awhile, but never had the time to teach it given the scheduling constraints we had. When one of the other departments on campus was shut down and the faculty merged in with other departments, we felt that the time was ripe to make this proposal.

Mapping Irma, but not really...

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 19:00:10 +0000

We’re discussing data visualization nowadays in my course, and today’s topic was supposed to be mapping. However late last night I realized I was going to run out of time and decided to table hands on mapping exercises till a bit later in the course (after we do some data manipulation as well, which I think will work better). That being said, talking about maps seemed timely, especially with Hurricane Irma developing.

Data Science Webinar Announcement

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 15:16:02 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that on Monday, September 11 , 9-11 am Pacific, I’ll be leading a Concord Consortium Data Science Education Webinar. Oddly, I forgot to give it a title, but it would be something like “Towards a Learning Trajectory for K-12 Data Science”. This webinar, like all Concord webinars, is intended to be highly interactive. Participants should have their favorite statistical software at the ready. A detailed abstract as well as registration information is here.

Envisioning Data Science Webinar Series and Call for Input

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 19:00:26 +0000

**Webinar Series: Data Science Undergraduate Education** Join the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for a webinar series on undergraduate data science education. Webinars will take place on Tuesdays from 3-4pm ET starting onSeptember 12 and ending on November 14. See below for the list of dates and themes for each webinar. This webinar series is part of an input-gathering initiative for a National Academies study on Envisioning the Data Science Discipline: The Undergraduate Perspective.

Revisiting that first day of class example

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 04:45:55 +0000

About a year ago I wrote this post: I wasn’t teaching that semester, so couldn’t take my own advice then, but thankfully (or the opposite of thankfully) Trump’s tweets still make timely discussion. I had two goals for presenting this example on the first day of my data science course (to an audience of all first-year undergraduates, with little to no background in computing and statistics): Give a data analysis example with a familiar context

Modernizing the Undergraduate Statistics Curriculum at #JSM2017

Sun, 06 Aug 2017 00:18:16 +0000

I’m a bit late in posting this, but travel delays post-JSM left me weary, so I’m just getting around to it. Better late than never? Wednesday at JSM featured an invited statistics education session on Modernizing the Undergraduate Statistics Curriculum. This session featured two types of speakers: those who are currently involved in undergraduate education and those who are on the receiving end of graduating majors. The speakers involved in undergraduate education presented on their recent efforts for modernizing the undergraduate statistics curriculum to provide the essential computational and problem solving skills expected from today’s modern statistician while also providing a firm grounding in theory and methods.

Novel Approaches to First Statistics / Data Science Course at #JSM2017

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 14:08:47 +0000

Tuesday morning, bright an early at 8:30am, was our session titled “Novel Approaches to First Statistics / Data Science Course”. For some students the first course in statistics may be the only quantitative reasoning course they take in college. For others, it is the first of many in a statistics major curriculum. The content of this course depends on which audience the course is aimed at as well as its place in the curriculum.

My JSM 2017 itinerary

Sat, 29 Jul 2017 02:27:30 +0000

JSM 2017 is almost here. I just landed in Maryland, and I finally managed to finish combing through the entire program. What a packed schedule! I like writing an itinerary post each year, mainly so I can come back to it during and after the event. I obviously won’t make it to all sessions listed for each time slot below, but my decision for which one(s) to attend during any time period will likely depend on proximity to previous session, and potentially also proximity to childcare area.

Structuring Data in Middle School

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 22:15:47 +0000

Of the many provocative and exciting discussions at this year’s Statistics Research Teaching and Learning conference in Rotarua, NZ, one that has stuck in my mind is from Lucia Zapata-Cardona, from the Universidad de Antioquia in Columbia. Lucia discussed data from her classroom observations of a teacher at a middle school (ages 12-13) in a “Northwest Columbian city”. The class was exciting for many reasons, but the reason that I want to write about it here is because of the fact that the teacher had the students structure and store their own data.

Are computers needed to teach Data Science?

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 20:48:16 +0000

One of the many nice things about summer is the time and space it allows for blogging. And, after a very stimulating SRTL conference (Statistics Reasoning, Teaching and Learning) in Rotorua, New Zealand, there’s lots to blog about. Let’s begin with a provocative posting by fellow SRTL-er Tim Erickson at his excellent blog A Best Case Scenario. I’ve known Tim for quite awhile, and have enjoyed many interesting and challenging discussions.

StatPREP Workshops

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 16:31:00 +0000

This last weekend I helped Danny Kaplan and Kathryn Kozak (Coconino Community College) put on a StatPREP workshop. We were also joined by Amelia McNamara (Smith College) and Joe Roith (St. Catherine’s University). The idea behind StatPREP is to work directly with college-level instructors, through online and in community-based workshops, to develop the understanding and skills needed to work and teach with modern data. Danny Kaplan ponders at #StatPREP One of the most interesting aspects of these workshops were the tutorials and exercises that the participants worked on.

USCOTS 2017

Sat, 20 May 2017 12:58:26 +0000

Citizen Statistician’s very own Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel gave one of the keynote addresses at USCOTS 2017. The abstract for her talk, Teaching Data Science and Statistical Computation to Undergraduates, is given below. What draws students to statistics? For some, the answer is mathematics, and for those a course in probability theory might be an attractive entry point. For others, their first exposure to statistics might be an applied introductory statistics course that focuses on methodology.

Read elsewhere: Organizing DataFest the tidy way

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 16:40:33 +0000

Part of the reason why we have been somewhat silent at Citizen Statistician is that it’s DataFest season, and that means a few weeks (months?) of all consuming organization followed by a weekend of super fun data immersion and exhaustion… Each year that I organize DataFest I tell myself “next year, I’ll do [blah] to make my life easier”. This year I finally did it! Read about how I’ve been streamlining the process of registrations, registration confirmations, and dissemination of information prior to the event on my post titled “Organizing DataFest the tidy way” on the R Views blog.

Theaster Gates, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Statistical Graphics

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 21:14:11 +0000

After reading this review of a Theaster Gates show at Regan Projects, in L.A., I hurried to see the show before it closed. Inspired by sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, Gates created artistic interpretations of statistical graphics that Du Bois had produced for an exhibition in Paris in 1900. Coincidentally, I had just heard about these graphics the previous week at the Data Science Education Technology conference while evesdropping on a conversation Andy Zieffler was having with someone else.

Some Reading for the Winter Break

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 02:01:29 +0000

It has been a long while since I wrote anything for Citizen Statistician, so I thought I would scribe a post about three books that I will be reading over break. The first book is Cathy O’Neil’s book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy [link to Amazon]. I am currently in the midst of Chapter 3. I heard about this book on an episode of 538’s podcast, What’s the Point?

Measurement error in intro stats

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 00:52:27 +0000

I have recently been asked by my doctor to closely monitor my blood pressure, and report it if it’s above a certain cutoff. Sometimes I end up reporting it by calling a nurse line, sometimes directly to a doctor in person. The reactions I get vary from “oh, it happens sometimes, just take it again in a bit” to “OMG the end of the world is coming!!!” (ok, I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea).

Slack for managing course TAs

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 01:17:45 +0000

I meant to write this post last year when I was teaching a large course with lots of teaching assistants to manage, but, well, I was teaching a large course with lots of teaching assistants to manage, so I ran out of time… There is nothing all that revolutionary here. People have been using Slack to manage teams for a while now. I’ve even come across some articles / posts on using Slack as a course discussion forum, so use of Slack in an educational setting is not all that new either.

A timely first day of class example for Fall 2016: Trump Tweets

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 02:47:42 +0000

On the first day of an intro stats or intro data science course I enjoy giving some accessible real data examples, instead of spending the whole time going over the syllabus (which is necessary in my opinion, but somewhat boring nonetheless). One of my favorite examples is How to Tell Someone’s Age When All You Know Is Her Name from FiveThirtyEight. As an added bonus, you can use this example to get to know some students' names.

Michael Phelps' hickies

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 03:51:59 +0000

Ok, they’re not hickies, but NPR referred to them as such, so I’m going with it… I’m talking about the cupping marks. The NPR story can be heard (or read) here. There were two points made in this story that I think would be useful and fun to discuss in a stats course. The first is the placebo effect. Often times in intro stats courses the placebo effect is mentioned as something undesirable that must be controlled for.

JSM 2016 session on "Doing more with data"

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 00:45:54 +0000

The ASA’s most recent curriculum guidelines emphasize the increasing importance of data science, real applications, model diversity, and communication / teamwork in undergraduate education. In an effort to highlight recent efforts inspired by these guidelines, I organized a JSM session titled Doing more with data in and outside the undergraduate classroom. This session featured talks on recent curricular and extra-curricular efforts in this vein, with a particular emphasis on challenging students with real and complex data and data analysis.

JSM 2016 roundtable on open resources in statistics education

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 12:00:39 +0000

Monday morning at JSM 2016 Andrew Bray and I hosted a roundtable on integrating open access and open source statistics education materials. It was a fruitful discussion with participants from 2-year colleges, 4-year colleges, and industry. In preparation for the roundtable we put together a one-page handout listing a sampling of open access and open source statistics resources, with links to the resources. The handout is below for anyone who is interested (click on the image to get to the PDF with hyperlinks), and if you think of other resources that would be useful to list here, please comment below and I’ll periodically update list.

JSM 2016 session on Reproducibility in Statistics and Data Science

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 21:00:37 +0000

Ten years after Ioannidis alleged that most scientific findings are false, reproducibility – or lack thereof – has become a full-blown crisis in science. Flagship journals like Nature and Science have published hand-wringing editorials and revised their policies in the hopes of heightening standards of reproducibility. In the statistical and data sciences, the barriers towards reproducibility are far lower, given that our analysis can usually be digitally encoded (e.g., scripts, algorithms, data files, etc.

My JSM 2016 itinerary

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 03:35:21 +0000

JSM 2016 is almost here. I just spent an hour going through the (very) lengthy program. I think that was time well spent, though some might argue I should have been working on my talk instead… Here is what my itinerary looks like as of today. If you know of a session that you think I might be interested in that I missed, please let me know! And if you go to any one of these sessions and not see me there, it means I got distracted by something else (or something close by).

Statistics with R on Coursera

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 21:56:40 +0000

I held off on posting about this until we had all the courses ready, and we still have a bit more work to do on the last component, but I’m proud to announce that the specialization called Statistics with R is now on Coursera! Some of you might know that I’ve had a course on Coursera for a while now (whatever “a while” means on MOOC-land), but it was time to refresh things a bit to align the course with other Coursera offerings – shorter, modular, etc.

Project TIER

Sat, 25 Jun 2016 17:00:51 +0000

Last year I was awarded a Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research) fellowship, and last week my work on the fellowship wrapped up with a meeting with the project leads, other fellows from last year, as well as new fellows for the next year. In a nutshell Project TIER focuses on reproducibility. Here is a brief summary of the project’s focus from their website: For a number of years, we have been developing a protocol for comprehensively documenting all the steps of data management and analysis that go into an empirical research paper.

How do Readers Perceive the Results of a Data Analysis?

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 16:38:58 +0000

As a statistician who often needs to explain methods and results of analyses to non-statisticians, I have been receptive to the influx of literature related to the use of storytelling or a data narrative. (I am also aware of the backlash related to use of the word “storytelling” in regards to scientific analysis, although I am less concerned about this than, say, these scholars.) As a teacher of data analysis, the use of narrative is especially poignant in that it ties the analyses performed intrinsically to the data context—or at the very least, to a logical flow of methods used.

Tools for Managing Your Inbox

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:59:14 +0000

First of all, happy new year to all of our readers. As my first contribution in 2016, I thought I would share a couple tools that have helped tame my email inbox with you. In my continued resolution to finally achieve Inbox Zero, I have made a major dent in the last month. This is thanks to two tools: Unroll Me and Google Mail’s “Save & Archive” button. Unroll Me The first tool I would like to share with you is an app called Unroll Me.

Teaching computation as an argument for simulation based inference

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 05:47:25 +0000

Check out my guest post on the Simulation-based statistical inference blog: Teaching computation as an argument for simulation-based inference If you are interested in teaching simulation-based methods, or if you just want to find out more why others are, I highly recommend the posts on this blog. The page also hosts many other useful resources as well as information on upcoming workshops as well.

A two-hour introduction to data analysis in R

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 12:16:43 +0000

A few weeks ago I gave a two-hour Introduction to R workshop for the Master of Engineering Management students at Duke. The session was organized by the student-led Career Development and Alumni Relations committee within this program. The slides for the workshop can be found here and the source code is available on GitHub. Why might this be of interest to you? The materials can give you a sense of what’s feasible to teach in two hours to an audience that is not scared of programming but is new to R.

Fruit Plot: Plotting Using Multiple PNGs

Fri, 30 Oct 2015 22:51:34 +0000

In one of our previous posts (Halloween: An Excuse for Plotting with Icons), we gave a quick tutorial on how to plot using icons using ggplot. A reader, Dr. D. K. Samuel asked in a comment how to use multiple icons. His comment read, ...can you make a blog post on using multiple icons for such data year, crop,yield 1995,Tomato,250 1995,Apple,300 1995,Orange,500 2000, Tomato,600 2000,Apple, 800 2000,Orange,900 it will be nice to use icons for each data point.

Halloween: An Excuse for Plotting with Icons

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 13:39:47 +0000

In my course on the GLM, we are discussing residual plots this week. Given that it is also Halloween this Saturday, it seems like a perfect time to code up a residual plot made of ghosts. The process I used to create this plot is as follows: Find an icon that you want to use in place of the points on your scatterplot (or dot plot). I used a ghost icon (created by Andrea Mazzini) obtained from The Noun Project.

The African Data Initiative

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 16:31:10 +0000

Are you looking for a way to celebrate World Statistics Day? I know you are. And I can’t think of a better way than supporting the African Data Initiative (ADI). I’m proud to have met some of the statisticians, statisticis educators and researchers who are leading this initative at an International Association of Statistics Educators Roundtable workshop in Cebu, The Phillipines, in 2012. You can read about Roger and David’s Stern’s projects in Kenya here in the journal Technology Innovations in Statistics Education.

Research Hack: Obtaining an RSS Feed for Websites without RSS Feeds

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 12:26:05 +0000

In one of our older posts, I wrote about using feedreaders and aggregators to keep up-to-date on blogs, journals, etc. These work great when the site you want to read have an RSS feed. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is simply a format that retrieves updated content from a webpage. A feedreader (or aggregator) grabs the “feed” and displays the updated content for you to read. No more having to visit the website daily to see if something changed or was updated.

TIL what happens if you use %>% instead of + in ggplot2

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 04:42:53 +0000

This post is about ggplot2 and dplyr packages, so let’s start with loading them: library(ggplot2) library(dplyr) I can’t be the first person to make the following mistake: ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg)) %>% geom_point() Can you spot the mistake in the code above? Look closely at the end of the first line. The operator should be the + used in ggplot2 for layering, not the %>% operator used in dplyr for piping, like this:

Data News: Fitbit + iHealth, and Open Justice data

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 17:48:23 +0000

The LA Times reported today, along with several other sources, that the California Department of Justice has initiated a new “open justice” data initiative. On their portal, the “Justice Dashboard”, you can view Arrest Rates, Deaths in Custody, or Law Enforcement Officers Killed or Assaulted. I chose, for my first visit, to look at Deaths in Custody. At first, I was disappointed with the quality of the data provided. Instead of data, you see some nice graphical displays, mostly univariate but a few with two variables, addressing issues and questions that are probably on many people’s minds.

PDF and Citation Management

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 20:46:03 +0000

A new academic year looms. This means a new crop of graduate students will begin their academic training. PDF management is a critical tool that all graduate students need to use and the sooner the better. Often these tools go hand-in-hand with a citation management system, which is also critical for graduate students. Using a citation management software makes scholarly work easier and more effective. First and foremost, these tools allow you to automatically cite references for a paper in a wide range of bibliographic styles.

Very brief first day of class activity in R

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 14:57:22 +0000

New academic year has started for most of us. I try to do a range of activities on the first day of my introductory statistics course, and one of them is an incredibly brief activity to just show students what R is and what the RStudio window looks like. Here it is: Generate a random number between 1 and 5, and introduce yourself to that many people sitting around you:

R packages for undergraduate stat ed

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 13:31:08 +0000

The other day on the isostat mailing list Doug Andrews asked the following question: Which R packages do you consider the most helpful and essential for undergrad stat ed? I ask in great part because it would help my local IT guru set up the way our network makes software available in our computer classrooms, but also just from curiosity. Doug asked for a top 10 list, and a few people have already chimed in with great suggestions.

"Mail merge" with RMarkdown

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 08:14:23 +0000

The term “mail merge” might not be familiar to those who have not worked in an office setting, but here is the Wikipedia definition: **Mail merge** is a software operation describing the production of multiple (and potentially large numbers of) documents from a single template form and a structured data source. The letter may be sent out to many "recipients" with small changes, such as a change of address or a change in the greeting line.

Reproducibility breakout session at USCOTS

Sun, 31 May 2015 03:25:17 +0000

Somehow almost an entire academic year went by without a blog post, I must have been busy… It’s time to get back in the saddle! (I’m using the classical definition of this idiom here, “doing something you stopped doing for a period of time”, not the urban dictionary definition, “when you are back to doing what you do best”, as I really don’t think writing blog posts are what I do best…)

Willful Ignorance [Book Review]

Thu, 28 May 2015 11:48:02 +0000

I just finished reading Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty by Herbert Weisberg. I gave this book five stars (out of five) on Goodreads. According to Weisberg, the text can be "regarded as two books in one. On one hand it is a history of a big idea: how we have come to _think_ about uncertainty. On the other, it is a prescription for change, especially with regard to how we perform research in the biomedical and social sciences"

Quantitatively Thinking

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 16:02:11 +0000

John Oliver said it best: April 15 combines Americans two most-hated things: taxes and math. I’ve been thinking about the latter recently after hearing a fascinating talk last weekend about quantitative literacy. QL is meant to describe our ability to think with, and about, numbers. QL doesn’t include high-level math skills, but usually is meant to describe our ability to understand percentages and proportions and basic mathematical operations.This is a really important type of literacy, of course, but I fear that the QL movement could benefit from merging QL with SL–Statistical Literacy.

Interpreting Cause and Effect

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 22:03:44 +0000

One big challenge we all face is understanding what’s good and what’s bad for us. And it’s harder when published research studies conflict. And so thanks to Roger Peng for posting on his Facebook page an article that led me to this article by Emily Oster: Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer, from the good folks at the 538 blog. I think this article would make a great classroom discussion, particularly if, before showing your students the article, they themselves brainstormed several possible experimental designs and discussed strengths and weaknesses of the designs.

Fitbit Revisited

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 19:40:41 +0000

Many moons ago we wrote about a bit of a kludge to get data from a Fitbit (see here). Now it looks as though there is a much better way. Cory Nissen has written an R package to scrape Fitbit data and posted it on GitHub. He also wrote a blog post on his blog Stats and Things announcing the package and demonstrating its use. While I haven’t tried it yet, it looks pretty straight-forward and much easier than anything else i have seen to date.

Government data suggests Groundhog's predictive ability is over-rated

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 16:34:13 +0000

Yup. You read it here first. The National Climatic Data Center has a nice overview that compares climate data to Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions. The data aren’t quite (yet) upload-ready, but some links on the page to more raw data might be entertaining.

PD follow-up

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 17:21:46 +0000

Last Saturday the Mobilize project hosted a day-long professional development meeting for about 10 high school math teachers and 10 high school science teachers. As always, it was very impressive how dedicated the teachers were, but I was particularly impressed by their creativity as, again and again, they demonstrated that they were able to take our lessons and add dimension to them that I, at least, didn’t initially see. One important component of Mobilize is to teach the teachers statistical reasoning.

Model Eliciting Activity: Prologue

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 02:03:59 +0000

I’m very excited/curious about tomorrow: I’m going to lead about 40 math and science teachers in a data-analysis activities, using one of the Model Eliciting Activities from the University of Minnesota Catalysts for Change Project. (One of our bloggers, Andy, was part of this project.) Specifically, we’re giving them the arrival-delay times for five different airlines into Chicago O’Hare. A random sample of 10 from each airline, and asking them to come up with rules for ranking the airlines from best to worst.

Annual Review of Reading

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:42:56 +0000

It is that time of year…time to review the previous year; make top 10 lists; and resolve to be a better person in 2015. I will tackle the first, but only of my reading habits. In 2014 I read 46 books for a grand total of 17,480 pages. (Note: I do not count academic books for work in this list, only books I read for recreation.) This is a yearly high, at least since I have been tracking this data on GoodReads (since late 2010).

Yikes...It's Been Awile

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 22:42:46 +0000

Apparently our last blog post was in August. Dang. Where did five months go? Blog guilt would be killing me, but I swear it was just yesterday that Mine posted. I will give a bit of review of some of the books that I read this semester related to statistics. Most recently, I finished Hands-On Matrix Algebra Using R: Active and Motivated Learning with Applications. This was a fairly readable book for those looking to understand a bit of matrix algebra.

Notes and thoughts from JSM 2014: Student projects utilizing student-generated data

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 14:56:46 +0000

Another August, another JSM… This time we’re in Boston, in yet another huge and cold conference center. Even on the first (half) day the conference schedule was packed, and I found myself running between sessions to make the most of it all. This post is on the first session I caught, The statistical classroom: student projects utilizing student-generated data, where I listened to the first three talks before heading off to catch the tail end of another session (I’ll talk about that in another post).

Pie Charts. Are they worth the Fight?

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 18:10:29 +0000

Like Rob, I recently got back from ICOTS. What a great conference. Kudos to everyone who worked hard to organize and pull it off. In one of the sessions I was at, Amelia McNamara (@AmeliaMN) gave a nice presentation about how they were using data and computer science in high schools as a part of the Mobilize Project. At one point in the presentation she had a slide that showed a screenshot of the dashboard used in one of their apps.

Is Data Science Real?

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 04:26:52 +0000

Just came back from the International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS) in Flagstaff, AZ filled with ideas. There were many thought-provoking talks, but what was even better were the thought-provoking conversations. One theme, at least for me, is just what is this thing called Data Science? One esteemed colleague suggested it was simply a re-branding. Other speakers used it somewhat perjoratively, in reference to outsiders (i.e. computer scientists). Here are some answers from panelists at a discussion on the future of technology in statistics education.

Fathom Returns

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 17:05:11 +0000

The other shoe has fallen. Last week (or so) Tinkerplots returned to the market, and now Fathom Version 2.2 (which is the foundation on which Tinkerplots is built) is available for a free download. Details are available on Bill Finzer’s website. Fathom is one of my favorite softwares…the first commercially available package to be based on learning theory, Fathom’s primary goal is to teach statistics. After a one-minute introduction, beginning students can quickly discuss ‘findings’ across several variables.

Tinkerplots Available Again

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 20:01:03 +0000

Very exciting news for Tinkerplots users (and for those who should be Tinkerplots users). Tinkerplots is highly visual dynamic software that lets students design and implement simulation machines, and includes many very cool data analysis tools. To quote from TP developer Cliff Konold: Today we are releasing Version 2.2 of TinkerPlots. This is a special, free version, which will expire in a year — August 31, 2015. To start the downloading process

Lively R

Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:22:09 +0000

Next week, the UseR conference comes to UCLA. And in anticipation, I thought a little foreshadowing would be nice. Amelia McNamara, UCLA Stats grad student and rising stats ed star, shared with me a new tool that has the potential to do some wonderful things.LivelyR is a work-in-progress that is, in the words of its creators, a “mashup of R with packages of Rstudio.” The result is a highly interactive. I was particularly struck by and intrigued by the ‘sweeping’ function, which visually smears graphics across several parameter values.

DataFest featured on 538

Sat, 03 May 2014 15:15:25 +0000

You can read about DataFest, which is quickly going national, at the fivethiryeight blog: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-students-most-likely-to-take-our-jobs/

Data Privacy (L.A. Times)

Fri, 02 May 2014 21:49:14 +0000

The L.A. Times ran an article on data privacy today, which, I think it’s fair to say, puts “Big Data” in approximately the same category as fire. In the right hands, it can do good. But… http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-white-house-big-data-privacy-report-20140501,0,5624003.story

Waller Winner

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 21:51:30 +0000

Citizen statistician is very pleased to announce that one of its own, Andy Zieffler, is this year’s recipient of the American Statistical Association’s Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award. Congrats, Andy!

Increasing the Numbers of Females in STEM

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 15:46:49 +0000

I just read a wonderful piece written about how the Harvey Mudd increased the ratio of females declaring a major in Computer Science from 10% to 40% since 2006. That is awesome! One of the things that they attribute this success to is changing the name of their introductory course. They renamed the course from Introduction to programming in Java to Creative Approaches to Problem Solving in Science and Engineering using Python.

An Open Letter to the TinkerPlots Community

Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:23:00 +0000

I received the following from Cliff Konold: We have just release the following to answer questions many have asked us about when TinkerPlots will be available for sale again. Unfortunately, we do not have a list of current users to send this to, so please distribute this to others you think would be interested. March 21, 2014 As you may have discovered by now, you can no longer purchase TinkerPlots.

Blog Guilt and a Categorical Data Course

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:30:24 +0000

I read a blog post entitled On Not Writing and it felt a little close to home. The author, an academic who is in a non-tenure position, writes, If you have the luxury to have time to write, do you write scholarship with the hope of forwarding an academic career, or do you write something you might find more fun, and hope to publish it another way?* The footnote read, “Of course, all of this writing presupposes that the stacks of papers get graded.

Data Analysis and Statistical Inference starts tomorrow on Coursera

Sun, 16 Feb 2014 19:21:05 +0000

It has been (and still is) lots of work putting this course together, but I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity to teach (and learn from) the masses! Course starts tomorrow (Feb 17, 2014) at noon EST. A huge thanks also goes out to my student collaborators who helped develop, review, and revise much of the course materials (and who will be taking the role of Community TAs on the course discussion forums) and to Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology who pretty much runs the show.

JMM 2014

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 15:01:03 +0000

Two weeks ago I traveled to Baltimore to the Joint Mathematics Meetings. These meetings are very much like the Joint Statistics Meetings except for mathematicians. “Now, um, usually I don’t do this but uh….Go head' on and break em off wit a lil' preview of the remix….” (Kelly, 2003). The JMM are a great place to educate and work with mathematics teachers at the collegiate level who are teaching introductory statistics courses.

Conditional probabilities and kitties

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 15:22:04 +0000

I was at the vet yesterday, and just like with any doctor’s visit experience, there was a bit of waiting around – time for re-reading all the posters in the room. And this is what caught my eye on the information sheet about feline heartworm (I’ll spare you the images): The question asks: _“My cat is indoor only. Is it still at risk?” _ The way I read it, this question is asking about the risk of an indoor only cat being heartworm positive.

R Syntax for Ranked Choice Voting

Sat, 30 Nov 2013 22:55:21 +0000

I have gotten several requests for the R syntax I used to analyze the ranked-choice voting data and create the animated GIF. Rather than just posting the syntax, I thought I might write a detailed post describing the process. Reading in the Data The data is available on the Twin Cities R User Group’s GitHub page. The file we are interested in is 2013-mayor-cvr.csv. Clicking this link gets you the “Display” version of the data.

Ranked Choice Voting

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 14:10:21 +0000

The city of Minneapolis recently elected a new mayor. This is not newsworthy in and of itself, however the method they used was—ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is a method of voting allowing voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference. In the Minneapolis mayoral election, voters ranked up to three candidates. The interesting part of this whole thing was that it took over two days for the election officials to declare a winner.

Personal Data Apps

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 04:43:42 +0000

Fitbit, you know I love you and you’ll always have a special place in my pocket. But now I have to make room for the Moves app to play a special role in my capture-the-moment-with-data existence. Moves is an ios7 app that is free. It eats up some extra battery power and in exchange records your location and merges this with various databases and syncs it up to other databases and produces some very nice “story lines” that remind you about the day you had and, as a bonus, can motivate you to improved your activity levels.

The Future of Inference

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 17:08:06 +0000

We had an interesting departmental seminar last week, thanks to our post-doc Joakim Ekstrom, that I thought would be fun to share. The topic was The Future of Statistics discussed by a panel of three statisticians. From left to right in the room: Songchun Zhu (UCLA Statistics), Susan Paddock (RAND), and Jan DeLeeuw (UCLA Statistics). The panel was asked about the future of inference: waxing or waning. The answers spanned the spectrum from “More” to “Less” and did so, interestingly enough, as one moved left to right in order of seating.

Should Programming Count as a "Foreign Language"?

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 14:07:00 +0000

I re-hashed this blog post title from the Edutopia article, Should Coding be the “New Foreign Language” Requirement? Texas legislators just answered this question with “Yes”. I hope Minnesota doesn’t follow suit. Now, in all fairness, I need to disclose that when I taught high school, the Math department played a practical joke on the Languages department by faking a document that claimed that mathematics would be accepted as a foreign language requirement and then conveniently dropping the document outside the classroom door of the Spanish teacher.

City Hall and Data Hunting

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 04:55:31 +0000

The L.A. Times had a nice editorial on Thursday (Oct 30) encouraging City Hall to make its data available to the public. As you know, fellow Citizens, we’re all in favor of making data public, particularly if the public has already picked up the bill and if no individual’s dignity will be compromised. For me this editorial comes at a time when I’ve been feeling particularly down about the quality of public data.

Warning: Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks and R Don't Play Nicely

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 20:46:50 +0000

For some reason I was compelled to update my Mac’s OS and R on the same day. (I know…) It didn’t go well on several accounts and I mostly blame Apple. Here are the details. I updated R to version 3.0.2 “Frisbee Sailing” I updated my OS to 10.9 “Mavericks” When I went to use R things were going fine until I mistyped a command.

Community Colleges and the ASA

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 21:56:45 +0000

Rob will be be participating in this event, organized by Nicholas Horton: CONNECTION WITH COMMUNITY COLLEGES: second in the guidelines for undergraduate statistics programs webinar series The American Statistical Association endorses the value of undergraduate programs in statistical science, both for statistical science majors and for students in other majors seeking a minor or concentration. Guidelines for such programs were promulgated in 2000, and a new workgroup is working to update them.

Crime data and bad graphics

Thu, 10 Oct 2013 01:26:32 +0000

I’m working on the 2nd edition of our textbook, Gould & Ryan, and was looking for some examples of bad statistical graphics. Last time, I used FBI data and created a good and bad graphic from the data. This time, I was pleased to see that the FBI provided its own bad graphic. This shows a dramatic decrease in crime over the last 5 years. (Not sure why 2012 data aren’t yet available.

Statistics, the government shutdown, and causality.

Mon, 07 Oct 2013 15:27:47 +0000

There’s a statistical meme that is making its way into pundits' discussions (as we might politely call them) that is of interest to statistics educators. There are several variations, but the basic theme is this: because of the government shutdown, people are unable to benefit from the new drugs they receive by participating in clinical trials. The L.A Times went so far as to publish an editorial from a gentleman who claimed that he was cured by his participation in a clinical trial.

My first Shiny experience - CLT applet

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 18:32:11 +0000

When introducing the Central Limit Theorem for the first time in class, I used to use applets like the SOCR Sampling Distribution Applet or the OnlineStatBook Sampling Distribution Applet. If you are reading this post on Google Chrome, chances are those previous links did not work for you. If on another browser, they may have, but you may have also seen warnings like this one: Last year when I tried using one of these applets in class and had students pull it up on their own computers as well, it was a chaos.

Book Organization

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 12:16:26 +0000

How do you organize the books in your office?

Apt Author Names for Stats Books

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 13:57:33 +0000

Thinking with technology

Sun, 01 Sep 2013 05:47:39 +0000

Just finished a stimulating, thought-provoking week at SRTL —Statistics Research Teaching and Learning conference–this year held in Two Harbors Minnesota, right on Lake Superior. SRTL gathers statistics education researchers, most of whom come with cognitive or educational psychology credentials, every two years. It’s more of a forum for thinking and collaborating than it is a platform for presenting findings, and this means there’s much lively, constructive discussion about works in progress.

Paint and Patch

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 13:34:43 +0000

The other day I was painting the trim on our house and it got me reminiscing. The year was 2005. The conference was JSM. The location was Minneapolis. I had just finished my third year of graduate school and was slotted to present in a Topic Contributed session at my first JSM. The topic was Implementing the GAISE Guidelines in College Statistics Courses. My presentation was entitled, Using GAISE to Create a Better Introductory Statistics Course.

Free Book—Statistical Thinking: A Simulation Approach to Modeling Uncertainty

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 13:12:36 +0000

Catalyst Press has just released the second edition of the book Statistical Thinking: A Simulation Approach to Modeling Uncertainty. The material in the book is based on work related to the NSF-funded CATALST Project (DUE-0814433). It makes exclusive use of simulation to carry out inferential analyses. The material also builds on best practices and materials developed in statistics education, research and theory from cognitive science, as well as materials and methods that are successfully achieving parallel goals in other disciplines (e.

JSM 2013 - Days 4 and 4.5

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:17:56 +0000

I started off my Wednesday with the “The New Face of Statistics Education (#480)” session. Erin Blackenship from UNL talked about their second course in statistics, a math/stat course where students don’t just learn how to calculate sufficient statistics and unbiased estimators but also learn what the values they’re calculating mean in context of the data. The goal of the course is to bring together the kind of reasoning emphasized in intro stat courses with the mathematical rigor of a traditional math/stat course.

JSM 2013 - Day 3

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 05:02:34 +0000

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.

JSM 2013 - Day 2

Tue, 06 Aug 2013 15:26:12 +0000

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.

JSM 2013 - Day 1

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 05:21:35 +0000

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.

TISE Special Edition: 2012 IASE Roundtable

Sun, 04 Aug 2013 00:23:47 +0000

Every couple of years, the International Association of Statistics Education hosts a Roundtable discussion, wherein researchers, statisticians, and curriculum developers are gather from around the world to share ideas. The 2012 Roundtable, held in Cebu City, the Philippines, focused on the role of Technology in Statistics Education, and so, after a very long time editing (for me and Jennifer Kaplan) and re-writing (for our authors), we are now ready to present the Roundtable Special Edition.

Lifehacker and Statistical Misconceptions

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 15:32:24 +0000

[](http://lifehacker.com/) The website Lifehacker recently had an article about some common statistical misconceptions. I thought they did a great job explaining things like the base-rate fallacy and Simpson’s Paradox for a lay audience. I also really liked the extrapolation cartoon they picked. [Read the whole article here.]

What is Rigor?

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 12:56:30 +0000

Two years ago, my department created a new two-course, doctoral-level sequence primarily aimed at our quantitative methods students. This sequence, aside from our students, also attracts students from other departments (primarily in the social sciences) that plan to pursue more advanced methodological coursework (e.g., Hierarchical Linear Modeling). One of the primary characteristics that differentiates this new sequence of courses from the other doctoral sequence of methodology courses that we teach is that it is “more rigorous”.

Here's Looking At You!

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 16:06:34 +0000

What do we fear more? Losing data privacy to our government, or to corporate entities? On the one hand, we (still) have oversight over our government. On the other hand, the government is (still) more powerful than most corporate entities, and so perhaps better situated to frighten. In these times of Snowden and the NSA, the L.A. Times ran an interesting story about just what tracking various internet companies perform. And it’s alarming.

Tinkerplots and Student Work

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 23:51:02 +0000

Technology Innovations in Statistics Education has published a paper by Noleine Fitzallen that I think many readers of this blog will find interesting. She examines a group of young students to see the ways that they use Tinkerplots to analyze data. Here’s the abstract and link: Characterising Students' Interaction with TinkerPlots Exploration of the way in which students interacted with the software package, TinkerPlots Dynamic Data Exploration, to answer questions about a data set using different forms of graphical representations, revealed that the students used three dominant strategies – Snatch and Grab, Proceed and Falter, and Explore and Complete.

No Content Found

Sat, 22 Jun 2013 04:40:39 +0000

It just seems to me that this is what data science was meant to do: give us fun toys. This particular “toy”, called Every Noise at Once, lets you explore the musical universe. Ours may be the last blog to comment on it–I think I stumbled upon this too late. But it provides a great example for our students about the power of data analysis. The data come from the company EchoNest, and the visualization (although that’s a weak word for this—its visual and aural, maybe “visauralization”?

Dance Your Ph.D.

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:05:08 +0000

You can win $1000 for turning your Ph.D. thesis into an interpretive dance. More importantly, you will also receive a call-out from _Science _and get to perform your dance at TEDX in Belgium. This contest is not only open to more recent Ph.D.s, but anyone who got a Ph.D. (in the sciences) and also to students working on a Ph.D. Gonzolabs has tips and examples over on their website. So put on your dancing shoes, grad your Ph.

TISE Network

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:19:36 +0000

Ever since we wrote an article in which we analyzed the articles which were been published in the Statistics Education Research Journal (Zieffler et al., 2011), I have been thinking about the relationships within the network of literature published on statistics education. What are the pivotal articles? Which are foundational? How inter-connected are the articles? This spring I started documenting those relationships by putting together a social network of articles published in Technology Innovations in Statistics Education and the articles they referenced.

An Accidental Statistician

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:41:52 +0000

I just finished reading An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box. The book reads like he is recounting his memories (it is aptly named) rather than as a biography. I enjoyed the stories and vignettes of his work and his intersections with other statisticians. The book also included pictures of many famous statisticians (George’s friends and family—Fisher was his father-in-law for a bit) in social situations.

Research Hack: Paper and Reference Management

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:46:56 +0000

Research Hacks are a series of blog posts about some of the tools, applications, and computer programs that I use in my workflow. Some of these I began using when I was a graduate student, and others I have picked up more recently. This is the second post in the series (see the first post [Feedreaders and Aggregators](http://citizen-statistician.org/2013/04/22/research-hack-…nd-aggregators/ ‎).) Electronically managing the absurdly large volume of articles, reports, book chapters and other writings that academics procure is a huge way to save time and increase production.

DataFest 2013

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:57:15 +0000

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.

Research Hack: Feedreaders and Aggregators

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:39:56 +0000

I have been thinking for several years that I should put together a series of blog posts about some of the tools, applications, and computer programs that I use in my workflow. Some of these I began using when I was a graduate student, and others I have picked up more recently. I wanted to initially do this to share these tools with our graduate students at the University of Minnesota.

A Course in Data and Computing Fundamentals

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:17:52 +0000

Daniel Kaplan and Libby Shoop have developed a one-credit class called Data Computation Fundamentals, which was offered this semester at Macalester College. This course is part of a larger research and teaching effort funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to help students understand the fundamentals and structures of data, especially big data. [Read more about the project in Macalester Magazine.] The course introduces students to R and covers topics such as merging data sources, data formatting and cleaning, clustering and text mining.

Datasets handpicked by students

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:40:41 +0000

I’m often on the hunt for datasets that will not only work well with the material we’re covering in class, but will (hopefully) pique students' interest. One sure choice is to use data collected from the students, as it is easy to engage them with data about themselves. However I think it is also important to open their eyes to the vast amount of data collected and made available to the public.

participatory sensing

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:40:14 +0000

The Mobilize project, which I recently joined, centers a high school data-science curriculum around participatory sensing data. What is participatory sensing, you ask? I’ve recently been trying to answer this question, with mixed success. As the name suggests, PS data has to do with data collected from sensors, and so it has a streaming aspect to it. I like to think of it as observations on a living object. Like all living objects, whatever this thing is that’s being observed, it changes, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly.

Facebook Analytics

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:29:10 +0000

WolframAlpha has a tool that will analyze your Facebook network. I saw this awhile ago, but HollyLynne reminded me of this recently, and I tried it out. You need to give the app(?) permission to access your account (which I am sure means access to your data for Wolfram), after which you are given all sorts of interesting, pretty info. Note, you can also opt to have Wolfram track your data in order to determine how your network is changing.

Open Access Textbooks

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:15:47 +0000

In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota has created this catalog of open textbooks. Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license. Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks.

Thursday Next

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:34:46 +0000

From Jasper Fforde’s latest Thursday Next novel (The Woman Who Died Alot): The Office for Ultimate Risk is one of the many departments within the Ministry of National Statistics. Although it was originally an “experimental” department, the statisticians at Ultimate Risk proved their worth by predicting the entire results of three football World Cups in succession, a finding that led to the discontinuation of football as a game and the results being calculated instead.

New Issue of JSE

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:47:59 +0000

Michelle Everson just announced that the March 2013 issue of the Journal of Statistics Education (JSE) is now available online. You can get to that issue from the homepage of JSE (http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/). This month, JSE also introduces some new features Department on Research in K-12 Statistics Education JSE webinar series (beginning June, 2013) New Facebook group New Twitter account Visit JSE online and enjoy the new issue!

Big Data Is Not the New Oil

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:21:08 +0000

Our colleague and dear friend John Holcomb sent an email to Rob and I in which he asked if we had heard the phrase “Big data is the new oil”. Neither of us had, but according to Jer Thorp, ad executives are uttering this phrase upwards of 100 times a day. Jer’s article is worth a read. While he points out in the title that big data is not the new oil, he astutely suggests that the oil/data metaphor does work to an extent.

Prediction Accuracy of the NCAA Bracket: Results

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 13:34:59 +0000

In Emanuel Derman’s book Models. Behaving. Badly, the author lays out a Modeler’s Hippocratic Oath. I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations. Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics. I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so. Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy.

NCAA Basketball Visualization

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 03:38:35 +0000

It is time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Sixty-four teams dream big (er…I mean 68…well actually by now, 64) and schools like Iona and Florida Gulf Coast University (go Eagles!) are hoping that Robert Morris astounding victory in the N.I.T. isn’t just a flash in the pan. My favorite part is filling out the bracket–see it below. (Imagine that…a statistician’s favorite part of the whole thing is making predictions.) Even President Obama filled out a bracket [see it here].

This Day in Statistics

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:20:17 +0000

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

ggplot ggoldy

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:10:22 +0000

One of my graduate students worked some ggplot magic and created an almost Light Bright-esqe plot of our very own Goldy Gopher. She also, thoughtfully, published a tutorial on her blog. Read and enjoy! [visit Rita’s blog here]

Stats on NPR

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:35:17 +0000

Charles Wheelan, the author of Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, was interviewed on The Daily Circuit this last Monday (March 4, 2013). You can listen to the audio of that interview over on The Daily Circuit’s website [visit webpage]

Wall Street Journal

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 13:15:40 +0000

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.

Dear Gmail...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:46:39 +0000

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.

Waiting for Tempo

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 04:15:38 +0000

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.

NCTM Essential Understandings

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:34:44 +0000

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.

Extreme Fitbit

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:35:18 +0000

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.

Your Flowing Data Defended

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:19:34 +0000

I had the privilege last week of listening to the dissertation defense of UCLA Stat’s newest PhD: Nathan Yau. Congratulations, Nathan! Nathan runs the very popular and fantastic blog Flowing Data, and his dissertation is about, in part, the creation of his app Your Flowing Data. Essentially, this is a tool for collecting and analyzing personal data–data about you and your life. One aspect of the thesis I really liked is a description of types of insight he found from a paper by Pousman, Stasko and Mateas (2007): Casual information visualization: Depictions of Data in every day life.

Happy Birthday Florence Henderson

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 22:53:16 +0000

As a celebration of Florence Henderson’s 79th birthday (on February 14), I have created this scatterplot to use in my regression course. The plot depicts the relationship between time spent on mathematics homework outside of school (expressed as z-scores) and mathematics achievement scores (expressed as T-scores, M=50, SD=10) for 200 8th-graders taken from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study. The color–in a display of very poor data science–is just randomly applied to the observations rather than meaning anything substantial.

iNZight

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 05:22:01 +0000

We spend too much time musing about the Data Deluge, I fear, at the expense of talking about another component that has made citizen-statisticianship possible: accessible statistical software. “Accessible” in (at least) two senses: affordable and ready-to-use. This summer, Chris Wild demonstrated his group’s software iNZight at the Census@ School workshop in San Diego. iNZight is produced out of the University of Auckland, and is intended for kids to use along with the Census@Schools data.

Data Diary Assignment

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 03:12:15 +0000

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.

A walk in Venice Beach

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:34:53 +0000

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.

Miscellany that I have Read and been Thinking about this Last Week

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:35:48 +0000

I read a piece last night called 5 Ways Big Data Will Change Lives In 2013. I really wasn’t expecting much from it, just scrolling through accumulated articles on Zite. However, as with so many things, there were some gems to be had. I learned of Aadhar. Aadhar is an ambitious government Big Data project aimed at becoming the world’s largest biometric database by 2014, with a goal of capturing about 600 million Indian identities.

New Flowing Data Book

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:30:06 +0000

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!

Clueful

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:43:22 +0000

Since posting last month about data-sharing concerns with some popular apps, I’ve since learned about Cluefulapp.com which, apparently, helps us see how are data are used by iOS apps. For instance, according to Cluefulapp, Google Maps can read my address book, uses my iPhone’s unique ID, encruypts stored data, “could” track my location, and uses an anonymous identifier. Waze is somewhat similar. It “could” track my location [quotes are because I wonder what they mean by could—does it?

Introducing Statistics: A Graphic Guide

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 14:37:20 +0000

Source: introducingbooks.com Over the winter break I was travelling in the UK and I came across this little book called “Introducing Statistics: A Graphic Guide” by Ellen Magnello and Borin Van Loon at the gift shop in the Tate Modern museum in London. The book is published in 2009, and Significance magazine already reviewed it here, so I won’t repeat their comments. I hadn’t heard about the book before, so I picked it up, along with a copy of Introducing Post-Modernism (they were 2 for £10, I had to get two, obviously).

My Year of Reading in Review

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 23:53:36 +0000

Two years ago, I made a New Year’s Resolution to read more books. At that point I joined GoodReads to hold myself accountable. I read 47 books that year (at least that I recorded). In 2012, I didn’t re-make that resolution, and my reading productivity dropped to 29 (really 26 since I quit reading 3 books). While the number of books is lower, I did some minor analyses on these books based on data I scraped from GoodReads and Amazon.

Big Data for Little People

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:06:01 +0000

On New Year’s Eve, All Tech Considered, had a segment looking ahead to interesting technology in the coming year. One of the themes was Big Data, but I particularly liked the way they sold it: “Big Data For Little People.” The basic idea being that much of big data is owned by big companies, which crunch the data for their own purposes. But the NPR folks are seeing a trend for applications that crunch big data and bring the results to your smartphone or other app.

Gun deaths and data

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 18:30:26 +0000

This article at Slate is interesting for a number of reasons. First, if offers a link to a data set listing names and data of the 325 people known to have been killed by guns since December 14, 2012. Slate is to be congratulated for providing data in a format that is easy for statistical software to read. (Still, some cleaning required. For example, ages include a mix of numbers and categorical values.

Happy Holidays

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 19:09:57 +0000

assessment, research, teaching

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 17:34:17 +0000

A new report released by CAUSE is well worth reading: _Connecting Research to Practice in a Culture of Assessment for Introductory College-level Statistics, _www.causeweb.org/research/guidelines/ResearchReport_Dec_2012.pdf Read it. We’ll discuss later. Pop quiz. I haven’t yet read it myself (in my eagerness to publicize it as quickly as possible), but of particular interest to this blog is the role that data science plays, or does not play. For instance, Question 1 under Research Priority 1 is “What core learning outcomes employed in a particular profession do individuals need to develop in order to perform well in that profession (e.

Stats in School

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:54:42 +0000

Just read a great paper by Anna Bargagliotti in the current Journal of Stats Education, “How well do the NSF Funded Elementary Mathematics Curricula align with the GAISE report recommendations? “. The answer: it depends. Anna compares three math curricula designed to meet the Common Core Standards for grades K-12: “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space”, “Math Trailblazers”, and “Everyday Mathematics.” Anna compared them to the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education K-12 report, which, to quote her paper, “defines a statistically literate person as one who is able to formulate questions, collect and analyze data, and interpret results.

Turning Tables into Graphs

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:58:05 +0000

We have just finished another semester, and before my mind completely turns to rubble, I want to share what I believe to be a fairly good assignment. What I present below was parts of two separate assignments that I gave this semester, but upon reflection I think it would be better as one. Read the article Let’s Practice What We Preach: Turning Tables into Graphs (full reference given below). In this article, Gelman, Pascarica, & Dodhia suggest that presentations of results using graphs are more effective than results presented in tables.

Data Privacy for Kids

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:57:18 +0000

The L.A. Times ran an interesting article about the new Federal Trade Commission(downloads) report, “Mobile Apps for Kids: Disclosures Still Not Making the Grade”, followed up on a February 2012 report, and concluded that “Yes, many apps included interactive features or shared kids’ information with third parties without disclosing these practices to parents.” I think this is issue is intriguing on many levels, but of central concern is the fact that as we go about our daily business (or play, as the case may be), we leave a data trail, sometimes unwittingly.

Accessing your 11.0 iTunes library

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 06:13:27 +0000

One of the themes of this blog is to make statistics relevant and exciting to students by helping them understand the data that’s right under their noses. Or inside their ears. The iTunes library is a great place to start. For awhile, iTunes made it easy to get your data onto your hard drive in a convenient, analysis-ready form. Then they made it hard. Then (10.7) they made it easy again.

Policy By the Numbers: Data in the News

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:59:43 +0000

Participating in the “hangout” hosted by Jess Hemerly’s Policy By the Numbers blog was fun, but even better was learning about this cool blog. It’s very exciting to meet people from so many different backgrounds and from so many varied interests who share an interest in data accessibility. One feature of PBtN that I think many of our readers will find particularly useful is the weekly roundup of data in the news.

Upcoming events: Rob Gould and Chris Franklin on Google+ Hangouts on Air

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 23:01:39 +0000

Update: the event has ended, but can be watched via YouTube Google+ Policy by the Numbers is airing a K-12 statistics education discussion on Nov. 28 at 4 pm EST via Hangout on Air. With the ever-increasing number of students taking AP Statistics each year and the inclusion of statistics in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, Franklin and Gould will address the value of statistical literacy, the increasing interest, and the challenges.

Computing Skills, Nunchaku Skills, Bow Skills...

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:27:02 +0000

I have been thinking for quite some time about the computing skills that graduate students will need as they exit our program. It is absolutely clear to me (not necessarily all of my colleagues) that students need computing skills. First, a little background… I teach in the Quantitative Methods in Education program within the Educational Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota. After graduating, many of our students take either academic jobs, a job working in testing companies (e.

Inference for the population by the population -- what does that even mean?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 04:22:54 +0000

In an effort to integrate more hands on data analysis in my introductory statistics class, I’ve been assigning students a project early on in the class where they answer a research question of interest to them using a hypothesis test and/or confidence interval. One goal of this project is getting the students to decide which methods to use in which situations, and how to properly apply them. But there’s more to it – students define their own research question and find an appropriate dataset to answer that question with.

Big Data and Privacy

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:55:28 +0000

The L.A. Times today (Monday, November 19) ran an editorial about the benefits and costs of Big Data. I truly believe that statisticians should teach introductory students (and all students, really) about data privacy. But who feels they have a realistic handle on the nature of these threats and the size of the risk? I know I don’t. Does anyone teach this in their class? Let’s hear about it! In the meantime, you might enjoy reading (or re-reading) a classic on the topic by Latanya Sweeney: k-Anonymity: a model for protecting privacy.

Winner: Statistics

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:24:08 +0000

It is a happy day to be a statistician, as bloggers and columnists are bragging about many correctly predicted victories in an age in which traditional survey methodologies have been made out of date. Mark Blumenthal at the Huffington Post reminds us that one role of statistics is to temper personal bias. He gives a shout out to several pollsters, but I think Nate Silver at 538 is due special mention.

Data Sets: A List in Flux

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:23:58 +0000

After my Pinterest post, I got a little bit hooked, mostly because I realized that it was a visual way for me to see my bookmarks. This makes it easier for me to find the information I am looking for quickly. One problem is that it requires an image, so I quickly realized that the links for data sets wouldn’t work so well on Pinterest. Then I remembered that I have used my personal blog as an organized reminder list (see this post where I remind myself how to re-set features on my computer after disaster), and thought I could do the same here, but with data sets that others could also use.

ggplot2 Pinterest

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 20:09:45 +0000

I don’t understand the website Pinterest, but it looks pretty (especially on the iPad), and an undergraduate student said it was the greatest thing since Facebook, so I thought I would give it a shot. The idea is that Pinterest “lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” You organize beautiful things by creating a “board” (a page), and then adding “pins” (links to websites).

Contributions to the 2012 Presidential Election Campaigns

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:20:01 +0000

With fewer than two weeks left till the US presidential elections, motivating class discussion with data related to the candidates, elections, or politics in general is quite easy. So for yesterday’s lab we used data released by The Federal Election Commission on contributions made to 2012 presidential campaigns. I came across the data last week, via a post on The Guardian Datablog. The post has a nice interactive feature for analyzing data from all contributions.

DC children statisticians

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 04:37:43 +0000

http://www.dcactionforchildren.org/kids-count/dc-kids-count-data-tools Thanks, Frauke.

Citizen Scientists in Space...

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 00:10:45 +0000

The L.A. Times had an interesting article about how a pair of ‘citizen scientists’ discovered a planet with four suns. I would say that a more accurate term for the pair would be ‘citizen data miners’, because essentially the astronomy community crowd sources data mining by providing reams of data for anyone to examine. It seemed timely for me, following a seminar at the UCLA Center for Applied Statistics by Kiri Wagstaff on automated procedures for discovering interesting features in large data sets.

Recoding Variables in R: Pedagogic Considerations

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 19:37:34 +0000

I was creating a dataset this last week in which I had to partition the observed responses to show how the ANOVA model partitions the variability. I had the observed _Y _(in this case prices for 113 bottles of wine), and a categorical predictor X (the region of France that each bottle of wine came from). I was going to add three columns to this data, the first showing the marginal mean, the second showing the effect, and the third showing the residual.

Nate Silver's New Book

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:15:49 +0000

I’ve been reading and greatly enjoying Nate Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—and Some Don’t. I’d recommend the book based on the introduction and first chapter alone. (And, no, that’s not because that’s all I’ve read so far. It’s because they’re that good.) If you’re the sort who skips introductions, I strongly suggest you become a new sort and read this one. It’s a wonderful essay about the dangers of too much information, and the need to make sense of it.

Red Bull Stratos Mission Data

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:06:16 +0000

Yesterday (October 14, 2012), Felix Baumgartner made history by becoming the first person to break the speed of sound during a free fall. He also set some other records (e.g., longest free fall, etc.) during the Red Bull Stratos Mission–which was broadcast live on the internet. Kind of cool, but imagine the conversation that took place daydreaming this one… **Red Bull Creative Person: **What if we got some idiot to float up into the stratosphere in a space capsule and then had him step out of it and free fall four minutes breaking the sound barrier?

Current Population Survey Data using R

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:34:15 +0000

TheCurrent Population Survey (CPS) is a statistical survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The data collected is used to provide a monthly report on employment in the United States. Although the CPS data are available, to this point it has really only been easy to deal with for SPSS, Stata, or SAS users. A new blog is also making it easy for R users to obtain and analyses these data.

More Fitbit

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 20:34:18 +0000

Simply Statistics lists some data analysis projects. Skewing towards the intermediate rather than novice student. But still useful in many ways. And—some FitBit ideas! http://simplystatistics.org/post/32881133740/statistics-project-ideas-for-students-part-2

TV Show hosts

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 20:10:28 +0000

A little bit ago [July 19, 2012 — so I’m a little behind], the L.A. Times ran an article about whether TV hosts are pulling their own weight, salary wise. (What is the real value of TV stars and personalities?) I took their data table and put it in a CSV format, and added a column called “epynomious”, which indicates whether the show is named after the host. (This apparently doesn’t explain the salary variation.

Data and the Freedom of Information Act

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 02:16:05 +0000

In reading one of the many blogs that I read, there was a suggestion to use the Baltimore’s parking citation data to see if some makes/models of cars get citations more than others. Now parking citations are very near and dear to me since I get at least one (n ≥ 1) parking citation a year parking near the University of Minnesota–which most often also leads to my car being towed since you only have so many hours to move your car after they ticket it.

Planting seeds of reproducibility with knitr and markdown

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 04:22:56 +0000

I attended useR! 2012 this past summer and one of the highlights of the conference was a presentation by Yihui Xie and JJ Allaire on knitr. As an often frustrated user of Sweave, I was very impressed with how they streamlined the process of integrating R with LaTeX and other document types, and I was excited to take advantage of the tools. It also occurred to me that these tools, especially the simpler markdown language, could be useful to the students in my introductory statistics course.

Finding Data

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 23:53:56 +0000

RevoJoe on Inside-R posted a nice list of data sources. Thanks to Tim Hesterberg for pointing this out on the Iso-stat listserv.

Mathapalooza and Citizen Statisticians

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 16:13:58 +0000

This Friday, I (Rob) had the honor of giving the same talk three times in a row at the Mathapalooza, held at one of the Austin City College campuses. The audience was mostly central-Texas area community college faculty. Giving the same talk three times in a row can be tiring, but the professors were very engaged and very involved and so I had fun. The topic was ‘Educating Citizen Statisticians’, and I mentioned the need to do what it takes so that intro stats is the most important class students take in college.

An Apropos Talk for this Blog

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:55:24 +0000

Jeffrey Breen just gave a talk entitled “Tapping the Data Deluge with R” to theBoston Predictive Analytics Meetup. He suggests there are two types of data in this world Data you have, and Data you don’t have…yet. In the talk Jeffrey provided a nice overview of several methods for importing data into R, including: Reading CSV files Reading XLS files

More on FitBit data

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:59:17 +0000

First the good news: And now the bad: It costs you $50/ year for your data to truly belong to you. For a ‘premium’ membership, you can visit your data as often as you choose. If only Andy had posted sooner, I would have saved $50. But, dear readers, in order to explore all avenues, I spent the bucks. And here’s some data (screenshot–I don’t want you analyzing my data!

Yelp Data

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:03:56 +0000

Yelp is a website on which people review local businesses. In their own words, Yelp describes themselves as an “online urban city guide that helps people find cool places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, based on the informed opinions of a vibrant and active community of locals in the know.” Earlier this year, Yelp released a subset of their data to be used for academic use. The dataset includes business data (e.

Getting Data from FitBit

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 23:16:36 +0000

Getting data out of a FitBit, as Rob pointed out, is not as easy as simply clicking an export button on the FitBit website. Fortunately, FitBit released their API to developers in February and since then a few solutions of obtaining the raw data have been realized. John McLaughlin has written an open source script (available on GitHub) that enables FitBit users to download their data into a Google spreadsheet.

Fit Bit

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 03:32:20 +0000

I just bought a “personal fitness tracking device.” It records my every movement. Even keeps track of when I sleep, in theory at least. So far, its pretty cool. Certainly its made me aware of how many steps I take during a day, and how rarely I meet the sacred 10,000 step goal. Today, for example, I’ve taken 8748 steps. Although, since its 9:30pm, the day is still young. What’s frustrating is that even though its my data, it’s not “mine”.

Introduction

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 04:20:41 +0000

We live in the Data Deluge, but we confess we still teach stats as if data were rare and easily-managed. But in this blog, we embrace the Deluge, an age where data and software are accessible and ubiquitous. The day of telling students to pay attention because Some Day This Will Be Good For You are over. This stuff is good for them NOW, and we need to show them why.