Statistics blogs and blog statistics

I received two doctoral fellowships, and, years later, a post-doctoral fellowship. My grandmother, who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and had never been to college, was quite worried. On more than one occasion, she grilled me about what I actually did, and when I told her that I went to the library, read, and then wrote about what I read, she kept insisting that no one could be collecting a check every month and just doing that. I’m sure she died still suspecting that I was secretly a “kept woman” and just not willing to ‘fess up to a sugar daddy named Elmer in the woodwork.

Decades later, I’m still spending a good bit of my time reading stuff and writing about it. Tonight, I thought instead of writing a post on statistics, I’d read some. Besides, Elmer’s asleep.

According to Caslon, the average blog has the lifespan of a fruit fly, lasting around a month because, “blogging met human nature and human nature won”. In other words, people’s intention to continue blogging is about as successful as my intention to clean off my desk.

LoveStats – blog on social media, sampling, survey design and occasionally random. Besides the name is cool.

John D. Cook’s blog – pretty much all statistics all the time. When I read it today he was discussing bias and consistency.

Blog-normal, by John Sall, co-founder of SAS and one of the masterminds behind JMP is sometimes rah-rah company stuff but sometimes, like his posts on Goldilocks, the research bears and negative R-square, it is just too cool. As someone who spent decades teaching statistics to graduate students who didn’t want to learn it, I wish his blog had been around sooner.

StatChat, from the Analysis Factor, by Karen Grace Martin – I liked this blog because along with statistics it includes SAS, SPSS syntax and some general discussion of statistical software that is not “I like this and you suck”. Also, the only mention I have heard of BMDP in forever (not missed by me).

Andrew Gelman’s blog is more statistics applied to important (or, at least, interesting) issues than discussions of sums of squares, residuals and domain sampling. That’s okay with me, though. I like interesting.

Michael O’Brien’s blog is another one that is useful if you are teaching statistics. It is a relatively new blog and relatively basic stuff so far. I’d be more likely to recommend it to students than read it myself but it was kind of him to put it out there as a public service.

500 hats – Doesn’t have much to do with statistics but is funny, thought-provoking and the only old person that swears more than me now that George Carlin is dead.

Well, this was fun, but from my non-random sample, I did not find a lot of statistics blogs that were interesting, exceeding the lifespan of a fruit fly or not. The many daughters would no doubt have some sarcastic comments on this finding, but I hear Elmer stirring so I gotta go.