There’s nothing like a 7-hour travel day to catch up on reading. I managed to crack open and finish Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Levitt is a lauded young economist from the University of Chicago who likes to use his statistical superpowers to answer interesting questions. Dubner is a New York Times journalist [...]
Stats Hacks #4
Playing a little catch-up here … Hack #4 is: Reject the Null.
Scientific method is all about taking guesses and then finding ways to prove them in the real world, through experimentation. Sometimes, though, it is just as effective to prove that a guess is wrong as it is to prove that it is right. [...]
Stats Hacks #3
Wow. Didn’t take long to get off the daily schedule. Credit a truncated work week and a weekend trip north for a funeral for that (but for God’s sake, don’t blame me). My new goal is to be through with the 75 hacks in O’Reilly’s Statistics Hacks by the time Archie turns 3 in mid-October.
The [...]
Wal-Mart has eaten my hometown
This weekend I planes-trains-and-automobiled it from Bloomington to Woodstock, my hometown. The occasion is sad — the death of my friend\’s father — but I also looked forward to reconnecting with my oldest friends and my former community. It turns out, not much of the former actually exists.
Woodstock was home to Orson Welles at one [...]