Update: the event has ended, but can be watched via YouTube
Google+ Policy by the Numbers is airing a K-12 statistics education discussion on Nov. 28 at 4 pm EST via Hangout on Air. With the ever-increasing number of students taking AP Statistics each year and the inclusion of statistics in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, Franklin and Gould will address the value of statistical literacy, the increasing interest, and the challenges.
I have been thinking for quite some time about the computing skills that graduate students will need as they exit our program. It is absolutely clear to me (not necessarily all of my colleagues) that students need computing skills. First, a little background…
I teach in the Quantitative Methods in Education program within the Educational Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota. After graduating, many of our students take either academic jobs, a job working in testing companies (e.
In an effort to integrate more hands on data analysis in my introductory statistics class, I’ve been assigning students a project early on in the class where they answer a research question of interest to them using a hypothesis test and/or confidence interval. One goal of this project is getting the students to decide which methods to use in which situations, and how to properly apply them. But there’s more to it – students define their own research question and find an appropriate dataset to answer that question with.
The L.A. Times today (Monday, November 19) ran an editorial about the benefits and costs of Big Data. I truly believe that statisticians should teach introductory students (and all students, really) about data privacy. But who feels they have a realistic handle on the nature of these threats and the size of the risk? I know I don’t. Does anyone teach this in their class? Let’s hear about it! In the meantime, you might enjoy reading (or re-reading) a classic on the topic by Latanya Sweeney: k-Anonymity: a model for protecting privacy.
It is a happy day to be a statistician, as bloggers and columnists are bragging about many correctly predicted victories in an age in which traditional survey methodologies have been made out of date. Mark Blumenthal at the Huffington Post reminds us that one role of statistics is to temper personal bias. He gives a shout out to several pollsters, but I think Nate Silver at 538 is due special mention.
After my Pinterest post, I got a little bit hooked, mostly because I realized that it was a visual way for me to see my bookmarks. This makes it easier for me to find the information I am looking for quickly. One problem is that it requires an image, so I quickly realized that the links for data sets wouldn’t work so well on Pinterest.
Then I remembered that I have used my personal blog as an organized reminder list (see this post where I remind myself how to re-set features on my computer after disaster), and thought I could do the same here, but with data sets that others could also use.
I don’t understand the website Pinterest, but it looks pretty (especially on the iPad), and an undergraduate student said it was the greatest thing since Facebook, so I thought I would give it a shot. The idea is that Pinterest “lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” You organize beautiful things by creating a “board” (a page), and then adding “pins” (links to websites).
