Google Reader is a fantastic way to keep track of new papers that are appearing in many different journals, and also to follow some of the interesting research blogs (and blogs on other topics) that are out there. Google Reader checks websites for you and lets you know of any new material that appears. Instead of [...]
Posts about statistics
Using Google Reader
Feb 16
Learning by video
Nov 24
There are some nice online videos available on various aspects of statistics and mathematics that might be helpful to students trying to learn about new areas.
A search on YouTube will lead to a few fairly basic videos.
Statistics playlists
Mathematics playlists
A better place to go is YouTube EDU which contains material from universities.
Something similar is offered at [...]
Check out the two posts by Galit Shmueli over at Bzst on hypothesis tests: one on the value of p-values and another on one-sided tests.
She says “Shockingly enough, people seem to really want to use p-values, even if they don’t understand them.” That mirrors my experience too. Confidence intervals are much more useful because they [...]
It may come as a shock to discover that a statistician does not like statistical tests. Isn’t that what statistics is all about? Unfortunately, in some disciplines statistical analysis does seem to consist almost entirely of hypothesis testing, and therein lies the problem.
The standard practice is to construct a hypothesis test to determine if some [...]
Songs of Statistics
Aug 5
If you love statistics (don’t we all?) and can write Chinese (which rules me out), you might like to contribute to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the “founding of New China”. They are calling for submissions of prose, poetry or song which will “enhance people’s patriotic feelings, statistics [...]
So what is the ultimate job? According to Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, it is being a statistician (see this interview)
Here he is on YouTube with a longer comment:
Statistics – Dream Job of the next decade
From a keynote presentation to the 2008 Almaden Institute – “Innovating with Information”.
The full presentation is available at [...]
There is a great article in today’s Australian by my co-author Peter Hall on the crisis in mathematics & statistics education (with student numbers falling at the same time as the number of jobs is rising).
The most interesting comment is the last paragraph:
For a nation in the grip of a serious skills shortage in mathematics [...]
