Someone who graduated from college a couple years ago writes: My educational background is almost entirely science and math. However, since graduating and thinking about what I do, I’ve realized that I’ve always found demographics, geography, urban planning more interesting – and I’d like to pursue research in social science. I’m currently applying to MS […] The post He has a math/science background and wants to transition to social science.…
Seth Flaxman sends this along: The Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London wishes to appoint a Senior Strategic Teaching Fellow in Data Science, to be in post by September 2018 or as soon as possible thereafter. The role will involve developing and delivering a suite of new data science modules, initially for the MSc […] The post Data science teaching position in London appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
OK, this is a nice juicy problem for a political science student . . . Act 1: “Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists” David Adler writes in the New York Times: My research suggests that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its […] The post Can somebody please untangle this one for us? Are centrists more, or…
We need to teach all our students how to design, create, test, debug and use spreadsheets. We need to teach this integrated with mathematics, statistics and computational thinking. Spreadsheets can be a valuable tool in many other subject areas including … Continue reading →
I happened to come across this classic from 2014. For convenience I’ll just repeat it all here: It all started when I was reading Chris Blattman’s blog and noticed this: One of the most provocative and interesting field experiments I [Blattman] have seen in this year: Poor people often do not make investments, even when […] The post How to read (in quantitative social science). And by implication, how to…
Why decimals are difficult Recently a couple of primary teachers admitted a little furtively to me that they “never got decimals”. It got me wondering about what was difficult about decimals. For people who “get” decimals, they are just another … Continue reading →
Someone sent me an email writing that one of my papers “has an embarrassing amount of self-citation.” I’m sorry that this person is embarrassed on my behalf. I’m not embarrassed at all. If I wrote something in the past that’s relevant, it makes sense to cite it rather than repeating myself, no? A citation is […] The post There’s nothing embarrassing about self-citation appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference,…
A students wrote in one of his homework assignments: Sidenote: I know some people say you’re not supposed to use loops in R, but I’ve never been totally sure why this is (a speed thing?). My first computer language was Java, so my inclination is to think in loops before using some of the other […] The post Learn by experimenting! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
Statistical software for worried students: Appearances matter Let’s be honest. Most students of statistics are taking statistics because they have to. I asked my class of 100 business students who choose to take the quantitative methods course if they did not … Continue reading →
Mitzi returns to her alma mater to give a talk at joint meeting of the Ann Arbor useR and ASA Meetups: Spatial models in Stan Abstract This case study shows how to efficiently encode and compute an intrinsic conditional autoregressive (ICAR) model in Stan. When data has a neighborhood structure, ICAR models provide spatial smoothing […] The post Mitzi’s talk on spatial models in Ann Arbor, Thursday 5 April 2018…
