http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi Assistant Professor <br />Department of Statistics and Applied Probability <br />University of California, Santa Barbara Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:15:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There is an interesting discussion over at Environmental Economics discussing the UC student protests against raising student fees. The economic argument they are making is that if university tuition and fees remain the same while at the same time the university is receiving less state subside then the amount (or ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/11/23/student-fee-hikes/ This title is taken directly from this article which discusses research implies or explicitly says a number of "good" parent tactics are actually bad for your child. The actual list of things that seem good, but aren't are Giving Your Kids a Creative Name Teaching Them To Be Themselves Making Them Play Sports Starting ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/11/13/7-things-good-parents-do-that-screw-kids-up-for-life/ Synthetic biology holds a lot of promise for developing organisms that perform functions that would otherwise require delicate and expensive devices. Imagine a bacteria designed to eat oil. Put some on an oil spill and they will clean up the area with minimal human intervention. They could even be dropped ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/11/12/synthetic-biology/ Originally posted by the blog Calculated Risk and then duplicated on The Big Picture, the figure below shows employment numbers for various recessions in U.S. history. Obviously this data is relevant to many people at the moment. Anybody in my PSTAT 262 care to take a stab at this data ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/11/06/employment-recession/ This story that I picked up on slashdot says that the Centers for Disease Control have partnered with GE Healthcare to receive data on 14 million patients in their network. (Of course, I cannot actually find an announcement from the CDC about this.) The data will be collected on a ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/11/06/cdc-adds-daily-flu-tracking/ Today on Andrew Gelman's blog he discusses whether it is better to use Stata, SAS, or R to run multi-level models on large datasets. Since I am in the process of (possibly) creating a short course on R and since I know very little about Stata and SAS, the topic ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/11/05/multi-level-models-in-stata-sas-or-r/ The plot below from the National Data Buoy Center is from two different stations (no idea where they are located) measuring air pressure. Although the data shown in this plot isn't current, data of this sort would be appropriate for my PSTAT 262 project. Apparently the upshot of this particular ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/11/05/national-data-buoy-center/ Here are a number of datasets that could possibly be used for a project in PSTAT 262. All the time series indicate, in some fashion, our current economic condition. http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/11/03/october-economic-summary-in-graphs/ Previously I have mentioned I'm in the market to get a new phone. The Motorola Droid is a possible alternative to getting an iPhone. This review is pretty enthusiastic and the full specifications can be found here. What is unclear to me at this point is what plan I will ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/10/30/motorola-droid/ The other day, I criticized a graphic describing swine flu deaths in terms of its relevance to me. The figure below provides the estimates of the marginal probability of dying from different causes including H1N1 (swine flu). Of course, I will still complain and say, I'd prefer to see a ... http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/faculty/niemi/2009/10/30/h1n1-deaths/