From Andrew Gelman’s Blog: “P.S. Statisticians are special because, deep in our bones, we know about uncertainty. Economists know about incentives, physicists know about reality, movers can fit big things in the elevator on the first try, evolutionary psychologists know how to get their names in the newspaper, lawyers know you should never never never…

Here are two interesting articles related to statistics that were featured on Slate.com two Mondays ago: The first article, by Kevin Gold, is called “The Leaky Nature of Online Privacy: Network analysis can uncover your personal details even if you choose to hide them.”  This led me to LaTanya Sweeney’s webpage (of k-anonymity fame), which…

Recently, I posted (“Multidimensional Scaling, Republican Presidential Candidates, and ‘a douchebag” and “Tracking the Republican candidates via google auto-complete“) about Google auto-complete and potential Republican presidential candidates.  Slate.com posted a good piece called “Google’s GOP Search Suggestion” (a day after my original post, I should note) where they look at the auto-complete for candidates names using a Google…

Tomorrow I defend my dissertation. If all goes well, you will all have the opportunity to finally call me doctor; I know you are just as excited about this as I am. Hopefully, I will have more time to write blog posts post-defense. Cheers.

Well, I’m almost done with my dissertation, which means I’m almost done with my Ph. D.  And when I say done, I mean it in both the senses of “finished” and “sick of”.  I have a nearly complete document AND a defense date.  Now all I have to do is put the most important skill…

I’m currently attending the 2011 ENAR spring meeting in Miami.  I arrived Sunday night an presented a poster at the opening poster presentation session.  On Monday, I attended two sessions in the afternoon: the survival analysis section and, later, the policy section. In the policy section, I saw a presentation entitled “Issues in the use…

Here are the StatsInTheWild rankings of the NFL teams after Week 10. Rank Teams Wins 1 NewEngland 7 2 Atlanta 7 3 NYJets 7 4 Pittsburgh 6 5 Baltimore 6 6 Miami 5 7 Philadelphia 6 8 NewOrleans 6 9 TampaBay 6 10 GreenBay 6 11 Indianapolis 6 12 Tennessee 5 13 Cleveland 3 14…

So I’m in a poker league. We play three out of four Thursday nights in a month for a total of fifteen events in a season. Each event you earn a certain number of points. You’re 10 best finishes based on points out of the fifteen events are counted. After the grueling fifteen week season,…

I’m teaching my first class this fall, and I’ve been preparing my notes for class this past week. I wanted to use keno as an example of how to compute probabilities. So I was computing some probabilities and checking them against the posted “odds” on masslottery.com. I couldn’t get my computed odds to match with…

According to infochimps.org these are the 25 most used emoticons on twitter.com. Download the whole data set yourself here. 1 13458831 🙂 2 3990560 :d 3 3182129 😦 4 2935301 😉 5 2082486 🙂 6 1461383 =) 7 1439234 :p 8 1013758 😉 9 979947 (: 10 669086 xd 11 656784 12 595140 =d 13…