On the front page of the Los Angeles Times today was a story about three of the middle schools in Los Angeles serving the highest proportion of students in poverty. My daughter, “The Perfect Jennifer”, did her student teaching at one of the three and teaches at a second. She said to me today, Mom,…
The #reverb10 prompt for December 3rd was to write about a time when you felt most truly alive in 2010. There were more prompts, about what you wonder about and other examining-your-soul type of introspection. This isn’t that kind of blog. I don’t think I’m that type of person. For the record, the time I…
Hello, world – It’s me, on my soapbox again. The latest straw was a discussion of articles in Science which have been the subject of retraction or “expression of concern”. According to Retraction Watch there are between 30 and 95 retractions each year. The ones you hear about are usually in medicine and the “hard”…
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…
My paper on data visualization next week may be the most useful thing I do this year, if I succeed in convincing my audience, that is. Fact: Statisticians have failed in a very important respect. This fact became apparent to me on a beautiful day lying on the beach in Santa Monica when it was…
Statistics is definitely in. In the last month I’ve gotten three invitations to “tech events” from organizations which will remain nameless on the grounds that I may want to do business with them some time in the current century. All of them wanted to do something with statistics. And apps. And social media. And whatever…
I am a huge fan of the OpenGov initiative. In brief, this is an effort mandated by executive order to increase transparency in government. One of the major benefits to people like me with equal parts curiosity, cynicism and gigabytes of RAM is that anyone can access just mountains of government data by going to…
We interrupt the prior rambling discussion of high performance computing for a new rambling discussion. A lot of things bother me – hate crimes, domestic violence, terrorism, drug-related crimes in Mexico, low college graduation rates of minority youth – well, it’s a very long list. When I was younger, so much younger than today ……..
AN ACTUAL CONVERSATION THIS WEEK … “This paper is not going to be as much an academic treatise as most of the ones I write, but I am hoping it will be more interesting. I was wondering about the fact that some well-respected people say the secret to career success is to be the foremost…
I probably hadn’t thought about canonical correlation in twenty years, but then a problem came up this week where it was the exact technique I needed. What made me laugh, though, is the particular problem I was dealing with twenty years ago had school achievement measures – tests of English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies…