It is time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Sixty-four teams dream big (er…I mean 68…well actually by now, 64) and schools like Iona and Florida Gulf Coast University (go Eagles!) are hoping that Robert Morris astounding victory in the N.I.T. isn’t just a flash in the pan.
My favorite part is filling out the bracket–see it below. (Imagine that…a statistician’s favorite part of the whole thing is making predictions.) Even President Obama filled out a bracket [see it here].
I was looking to find an add-on Google Calendar that included important days in the history of statistics. They have one for seemingly everything under the sun, except this. So I created one and made it public in honor of the International Year of Statistics. I will continually add to it as I find time.
Feel free to add it. As always, it is available in the following formats
HTML
One of my graduate students worked some ggplot magic and created an almost Light Bright-esqe plot of our very own Goldy Gopher. She also, thoughtfully, published a tutorial on her blog. Read and enjoy! [visit Rita’s blog here]
Charles Wheelan, the author of Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, was interviewed on The Daily Circuit this last Monday (March 4, 2013). You can listen to the audio of that interview over on The Daily Circuit’s website [visit webpage]
Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal has a nice article about the growth of statistics. The print version differs substantially from the online version in content, though not in message.
Missing from this message is the urgent need to have more teachers, at all levels, trained in statistics. I’m currently at a meeting of the joint committee on education of the American Statistical Association and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
I recently added a free application/service that analyzes my email called Gmail Meter. This service sends me a comprehensive weekly report full of summaries and plots that indicate how I use Gmail.
The first thing I learned is that Wednesdays are for emailing and I seem to respond in a timely manner, on average, to emails sent to me…when I actually respond (I have a 24.58% response rate. Yikes!) Wednesdays I only teach one class (at 4:40pm) this semester, but I have a morning meeting so I am on campus and generally have time to respond to emails that I may not have gotten to.
I got pretty excited about a new calendar app, in part because I love these productivity tools and in part because I really hate the calendar that comes with the iPhone. Tempo, as it is called, seemed nifty because it integrates data on your phone into the calendar so, for instance, you can get directions to your next meeting easily, alert people that you’re going to be late, have documents related to your appointment automatically opened, and other features that will either save lots of time and hassles or themselves become time-sinks and hassles.
