Author Archives: pmean

Recommended: Announcing a new monthly feature: What’s going on in this graph

Through the effort of a team of statisticians with the American Statistical Association, the New York Times is producing a new resource for educators called “What’s Going On in This Graph?”. This is similar to another New York Times effort called “What’s Going On in This Picture?”

Every month the New York Times will publish a graph stripped of some key information and ask three questions: What do you notice? What do you wonder? and What do you think is going on in this graph?

The content will be suitable for middle school and high school students, but I suspect that even college students will find the exercise interesting.

The first graph will appear on September 19 and on the second Tuesday of every month afterwards. Continue reading →

Recommended: Good enough practices in scientific computing

There is more than one way to approach a data analysis and some of the ways lead to easier modifications and updates and help make your work more reproducible. This paper talks about steps that they recommend based on years of teaching software carpentry and data carpentry classes. One of the software products mentioned in this article, OpenRefine, looks like a very interesting way to clean up messy data in a way that leaves a well documented trail. Continue reading →

PMean: Open source as a budgetary measure

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Like a lot of public universities, UMKC is having a lot of financial difficulty. They are asking for advice from faculty members on how to address this budget shortfall. Not being the bashful type, I suggested that we stop paying commercial software vendors and commercial journal publishers and rely instead on open source. Here’s the details of my letter. Continue reading →