I'm writing course materials for my students. Because I like real world problems, I'm basing some of my quiz questions around my spam phone calls. Since I implemented the plan to block all phone calls not in my contacts, I am no longer getting 35-55 spam calls a week. Buuut.... My phone randomly turns off my spam blocker and they come back until I ( Read more... )

 The spam calls have been getting worse (previous entry). A lot worse. I thought I could just wait it out. Bear the annoyance.

Remember last year it averaged 4 calls a week. Now it is more. Two weeks ago it was 52 spam calls in a week. Last week it was 38 spam calls in a week. Monday.... Monday it was 49 spam calls in a single day. In. A. Single. ( Read more... )

 It was late November of last year. I kept getting so many spam calls I thought I must be going insane. So... I started collecting data on how many of my incoming calls are spam.

So that week was unusual. But then the number of calls went back to the typical about 4 a week.

So, being me with my fondness for data, I kept collecting the data. And ( Read more... )

It turns out that school shootings have been happening for a much longer time than I had any idea.

People keep talking about "The number of school shootings this year is..." and then they will name a number that just seems insane. So I went looking for a reference and some data. Wikipedia is our friend. Without too much trouble, I even pulled the ( Read more... )

I'm always on the lookout for cool graphs. I appreciate the opportunity to see graphs communicate and teach. I really like this one. It is about the recent and ongoing flu season in the US.  I particularly like what they did to show the passage of time, the changes state to state, and the intensity of the flu in each state. 

http://xkcd.com/552/

I am watching Gore's film on the Discovery Channel.  I have to admire his amazingly good use of graphs!  Every graph is simple, clearly labeled and fits perfectly into his talk.  Even when he puts two graphs on top of each other, it is obvious which y-axis goes to which line.   Each graph builds on the information discussed in the previous graphs ( Read more... )

You get the part about me being a statistician, right?  One of my occasional job duties is to teach a class on surveys.

So I start teaching a regular statistics class yesterday and we get to the part where I am introducing the Greek letters for mean and standard deviation.  So I go off on a  sample vs population tangent with the Census as the ( Read more... )