I was perusing Bobby Gramacy’s introductory slides for his Bayesian Inference course here at UCSB. On slide 11, he mentions the saying “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Googling for this phrase, I found a post by Andrew Gelman about this phrase where he reiterates the point that all models are wrong and the goal of posterior model checking is “to understand what aspects of the data are captured by the model and what aspects are not.”

My addition to this conversation focuses on the second half of the saying. The fact that all models are wrong should not discourage anybody from trying to model in the first place. Instead, modelers need to understand what scientific question is being asked and build a model to answer that question. A model will be useful if it can answer the question of interest.

During my job interviews last winter, somebody mentioned they had created a professional google calendar. The purpose of this calendar was to ease the burden of scheduling appointments with students by allowing students to suggest a time when the instructor was available. I have done the same, although at the moment my free time is abundant. The calendar can be found here.

This template looks promising. I found it at http://imjtk.com/ as a free template. The downsides are the first two links under blogroll and the attribution. Apparently for $35 I can get rid of these, but I think I will wait a bit longer to see if I like this template over all. One upside is that the header images seem easy to modify, but I don’t have to worry about that initially since I actually like the images (except for the one I already deleted).

I have just set up my homepage and likely there will be many changes in the near future. Certainly this template will have to change. It is unclear how often I will use this blog feature.