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I’m sure there are a ton more good blogs like this out there. Any suggestions of what I should be reading?
Thanks to Hilary Parker for pointing out Google Fusion Tables. The coolest thing here, from my self-centered spatial statistics point of view, is that it automatically geocodes locations for you. So you can upload a spreadsheet of addresses and it will map them for you on Google Maps.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to extract the latitude/longitude values, but I’m hoping that’s just a quick hack away….
From a cool review about communicating risk to people without statistical/probabilistic training.
Despite the burgeoning interest in infographics, there is limited experimental evidence on how different types of visualizations are processed and understood, although the effectiveness of some graphics clearly depends on the relative numeracy of an audience.
Liberal arts colleges are option that falls close to the 75% hard/25% soft option described by Rafa in his advice for folks on the job market. At these schools the teaching load may be even a little heavier than schools like Berkeley/Duke; the students will usually be exclusively undergraduates. Examples of this kind of place are Pomona College, Carleton College, Grinnell College, etc. The teaching load is the focus at places like this, but research plays an increasingly major role for academic faculty. In a recent Nature editorial, Amy Cheng Vollmer produces an interesting analogy for the differences in responsibilities.
“It’s like comparing the winter Olympics to the summer Olympics,” says Vollmer, who frequently gives talks on career issues. “It’s not easier, it’s different”
A paper came out in the latest issue of Nature called the “Evolution of Confidence”. The authors describe a simple model where two participants are competing for a resource. They can either both claim the resource, only one can claim the resource, or neither can. If the ratio of the value of the resource over the cost of competition is good enough, then it makes sense to be overconfident about your abilities to obtain it.
The amazing thing about this paper is that it explains a really old idea “why are people overconfident” with really simple models and simulations (done in R!). Based on my own experience, I feel like they may be on to something. You can’t get a paper in Nature if you don’t send it there…