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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
