David Hogg sends in this bizarre bit of news reporting by Robert Evans: Until now, in the four decades since it was first posited, no one has convincingly claimed to have glimpsed the Higgs Boson, let alone proved that it actually exists. At an eagerly awaited briefing on Tuesday at the CERN research centre near [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Teaching category.
Drawing to Learn in Science
Joshua Vogelstein points us to an article by Shaaron Ainsworth, Vaughan Prain, and Russell Tytler: Should science learners be challenged to draw more? Certainly making visualizations is integral to scientific thinking. Scientists do not use words only but rely on diagrams, graphs, videos, photographs, and other images to make discoveries, explain findings, and excite public [...]
Going Beyond the Book: Towards Critical Reading in Statistics Teaching
My article with the above title is appearing in the journal Teaching Statistics. Here’s the introduction: We can improve our teaching of statistical examples from books by collecting further data, reading cited articles and performing further data analysis. This should not come as a surprise, but what might be new is the realization of how [...]
Good examples of lurking variables?
Rama Ganesan writes: I have been using many of your demos from the Teaching Stats book . . . Do you by any chance have a nice easy dataset that I can use to show students how ‘lurking variables’ work using regression? For instance, in your book you talk about the relationship between height and [...]
My talk at Math for America on Saturday
Here’s what I’ll talk about for 3 hours:
Student project competition
Yongtao Guan writes:
Val’s Number Scroll: Helping kids visualize math
This looks cool.
“Venetia Orcutt, GWU med school professor, quits after complaints of no-show class”
She was assigned to teach a class in “evidence-based medicine”! (link from my usual news source). I wonder what was in the syllabus? If anyone has a copy, feel free to send to me and I will post it here. My favorite part of the story, though, is this: Almost all physician assistant students refused [...]
Deadwood in the math curriculum
Mark Palko asks: What are the worst examples of curriculum dead wood? Here’s the background: One of the first things that hit me [Palko] when I started teaching high school math was how much material there was to cover. . . . The most annoying part, though, was the number of topics that could easily [...]
How Khan Academy is using Machine Learning to Assess Student Mastery
This is sooooo cool. The actual statistical methods they are using are pretty crude, but that’s fine. What’s important is their focus on the important goal. It’s sort of like Bill James or Nate Silver: if you’re using good information, and you’re focused on good questions, then the fancy statistics can come later (or from [...]
Caffeine keeps your Mac awake
Sometimes my computer goes blank when I’m giving a presentation and I haven’t clicked on anything for awhile. I mentioned this to Malecki and he installed Caffeine on my computer; problem solved.
Could I use a statistics coach?
In a thought-provoking article subtitled “Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?,” surgeon/journalist Atul Gawande describes how, even after eight years and more than two thousand operations, he benefited from coaching (from a retired surgeon), just as pro athletes and accomplished musicians do. He then talks about proposals to institute coaching for teachers to [...]
Hey, you! Don’t take that class!
Back when I taught at Berkeley, I once asked a Ph.D. student how he’d decided to work with me. He said that a couple of the tenured professors had advised him not to take my class, and that this advice had got him curious: What about Bayesian statistics is so dangerous that it can scare [...]
My homework success
A friend writes to me: You will be amused to know that students in our Bayesian Inference paper at 4th year found solutions to exercises from your book on-line. The amazing thing was that some of them were dumb enough to copy out solutions verbatim. However, I thought you might like to know you have [...]
My course this fall on Bayesian Computation
Bayesian Computation, Fall 2011, Andrew Gelman (Statistics G8325, section 002) Class meets Wed 9:30-12, Mudd Hall 1106B Research topics. We are working on the following Bayesian computation projects: – Automated adaptive Hamiltonian Monte Carlo – Penalized maximum likelihood for multilevel models – Weakly informative prior distributions – Multilevel regression and poststratification – Missing-data imputation using [...]
An illustrated calculus textbook
Aleks sends along this (by Robert Ghrist). It reminds me a lot of my class notes from high school. I took a look at the book, starting on page 1 with the description of functions, and it made me think that maybe a more historical approach would be useful. The idea presented in this book, [...]
Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer (link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. [...]
Super Sam Fuld Needs Your Help (with Foul Ball stats)
I was pleasantly surprised to have my recreational reading about baseball in the New Yorker interrupted by a digression on statistics. Sam Fuld of the Tampa Bay Rays, was the subjet of a Ben McGrath profile in the 4 July 2011 issue of the New Yorker, in an article titled Super Sam. After quoting a minor-league trainer who described Fuld as “a bit of a geek” (who isn’t these days?), McGrath gets into that lovely New Yorker detail:
One could have pointed out the more persuasive and telling examples, such as the fact that in 2005, after his first pro season, with the Class-A Peoria Chiefs, Fuld applied for a fall internship with Stats, Inc., the research firm that supplies broadcasters with much of the data anad analysis that you hear in sports telecasts.
After a description of what they had him doing, reviewing footage of games and cataloguing, he said
“I thought, They have a stat for everything, but they don’t have any stats regarding foul balls.”
Should we always be using the t and robit instead of the normal and logit?
My (coauthored) books on Bayesian data analysis and applied regression are like almost all the other statistics textbooks out there, in that we spend most of our time on the basic distributions such as normal and logistic and then, only as an aside, discuss robust models such as t and robit. Why aren’t the t [...]
Looking for a purpose in life: Update on that underworked and overpaid sociologist whose “main task as a university professor was self-cultivation”
After posting on David Rubinstein’s remarks on his “cushy life” as a sociology professor at a public university, I read these remarks by some of Rubinstein’s colleagues at the University of Illinois, along with a response from Rubinstein.
Before getting to the policy issues, let me first say that I think it must have been so satisfying, first for Rubinstein and then for his colleagues (Barbara Risman, William Bridges, and Anthony Orum) to publish these notes. We all have people we know and hate, but we rarely have a good excuse for blaring our feelings in public. (I remember when I was up for tenure, I was able to read the outside letters on my case (it’s a public university and they have rules), and one of the letter writers really hated my guts. I was surprised–I didn’t know the guy well (the letters were anonymized but it was clear from context who the letter writer was) but the few times we’d met, he’d been cordial enough–but there you have it. He must have been thrilled to have the opportunity to write, for an audience, what he really thought about me.)
Anyway, reading Rubinstein’s original article, it’s clear that his feelings of alienation had been building up inside of him for oh I don’t know how long, and it must have felt really great to tell the world how fake he really felt in his job. And his colleagues seem to have detested him for decades but only now have the chance to splash this all out in public. Usually you just don’t have a chance.
Looking for a purpose in life
To me, the underlying issue in Rubinstein’s article was his failure to find a purpose to his life at work. To go into the office, year after year, doing the very minimum to stay afloat in your classes, to be teaching Wittgenstein to a bunch of 18-year-olds who just don’t care, to write that “my main task as a university professor was self-cultivation”–that’s got to feel pretty empty.
“Sampling: Design and Analysis”: a course for political science graduate students
Early this afternoon I made the plan to teach a new course on sampling, maybe next spring, with the primary audience being political science Ph.D. students (although I hope to get students from statistics, sociology, and other departments). Columbia already has a sampling course in the statistics department (which I taught for several years); this [...]
The “cushy life” of a University of Illinois sociology professor
Xian points me to an article by retired college professor David Rubinstein who argues that college professors are underworked and overpaid:
After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I [Rubinstein] recently retired at age 64 at 80 percent of my pay for life. . . . But that’s not all: There’s a generous health insurance plan, a guaranteed 3 percent annual cost of living increase, and a few other perquisites. . . . I was also offered the opportunity to teach as an emeritus for three years, receiving $8,000 per course . . . which works out to over $200 an hour. . . .
You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that I had two immediate and opposite reactions to this:
1. Hey–somebody wants to cut professors’ salaries. Stop him!
2. Hey–this guy’s making big bucks and doesn’t do any work–that’s not fair! (I went online to find David Rubinstein’s salary but it didn’t appear in the database. So I did the next best thing and looked up the salaries of full professors in the UIC sociology department. The salaries ranged from 90K to 135K. That really is higher than I expected, given that (a) sociology does not have a reputation as being a high-paying field, and (b) UIC is OK but it’s not generally considered a top university.
Having these two conflicting reactions made me want to think about this further.
New app for learning intro statistics
Carol Cronin writes: The new Wolfram Statistics Course Assistant App, which was released today for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Optimized for mobile devices, the Wolfram Statistics Course Assistant App helps students understand concepts such as mean, median, mode, standard deviation, probabilities, data points, random integers, random real numbers, and more. To see some [...]
Statistics in high schools: Towards more accessible conceptions of statistical inference
At the Statistics Forum, we highlight a debate about how statistics should be taught in high schools. Check it out and then please leave your comments there.
The saber saw, the ashtray, and other stories of misbehaving profs
This recent story of a wacky psychology professor reminds me of this old story of a wacky psychology professor. This story of a wacky philosophy professor reminds me of a course I almost took at MIT. I was looking through the course catalog one day and saw that Thomas Kuhn was teaching a class in [...]