Category Archives: Uncategorized

Teaching Online During a Pandemic

Posted on December 8, 2020 by milesott

The 2020 Fall semester is almost over! Hurray! While part of me (maybe 95%) is tempted to put this semester in the past and never think about it again, I know that with all the challenges and difficulties I was … Continue reading →

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Teaching Data Feminism to Data Science Students

Posted on May 11, 2020 by milesott

The SDS Capstone is a one semester course focused on using data in ethical ways to collaboratively solve real-world problems. While the capstone has been offered numerous times, I just finished leading that course for the first time.  What a … Continue reading →

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Missing Data in Social Networks

Posted on December 16, 2017 by milesott

Much of my research is on Social Networks, which are representations of how people, groups of people, or sometimes chimpanzees interact or are otherwise connected with each other. When analyzing social network data, as when analyzing any data, it is … Continue reading →

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New Email Address

Posted on June 5, 2017 by milesott

You know what this blog needs? Considerably more Patti LaBelle: I’m feeling good from my head to my shoes Know where I’m going and I know what to do I tidied up my point of view I got a new … Continue reading →

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Gun Violence Data

Posted on November 19, 2016 by milesott

After digging around the internet looking for data on gun violence for a few minutes,  I found Gun Violence Archive which has a ton of great information on gun violence in the US. You can search for incidents by date, location, … Continue reading →

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Karate Club Network Club

Posted on August 26, 2016 by milesott

My research focuses on social networks.  Social networks, at least as I deal with them, are representations of how people (or organizations, or animals) perceive or interact with each other.  These representations can take the form of  visualizations (see below for … Continue reading →

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R Packages, easy as a delicious dessert

Posted on July 14, 2016 by milesott

I have long wanted to write R packages.  But for some reason, I thought that I wasn’t capable of such a feat.  “R package authors are super stars, I’m just me,” I would think in a mix of despair and … Continue reading →

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New paper about Random Walks and Edge Sampling

Posted on April 29, 2016 by milesott

I feel like I am on a roll here.  Last month, my Bayesian paper (joint work with Krista Gile, Joseph Hogan, Nancy Barnett, and Crystal Linkletter) was published in Statistics in Medicine, and just today my RDS paper (which I worked … Continue reading →

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New Publication in Statistics in Medicine

Posted on March 14, 2016 by milesott

I’m happy to report that my article Bayesian Peer Calibration with Application to Alcohol Use has been published in Statistics in Medicine.  If you love Bayesian statistics, social networks, multi-level models, and boatloads of conjugate prior distributions (check out the … Continue reading →

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An “Invitation” to Address World’s Leading Tech Conference or A Brief History of Biostatistics Ryan Gosling

Posted on October 11, 2015 by milesott

I recently(ish) received an email inviting me to speak at the 2015 Web Summit.  How did this come to be?  Well let me give you the back story.

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An Open Relationship with R: Learning Python

Posted on December 14, 2014 by milesott

I’ve decided that its time to learn Python.  While I feel very comfortable using R to scrape data from the internet, bring together different datasets, clean, analyze, and visualize data, there are a few things that R isn’t totally super … Continue reading →

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My First Animated Gifs! (with R)

Posted on October 29, 2014 by milesott

Ever since I found this tutorial yesterday, I have been so excited to be making animated gifs in R.  In fact, last night as I was laying my head upon my pillow, I almost couldn’t fall asleep because I kept thinking … Continue reading →

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Fun with USGS Earthquake Data

Posted on October 25, 2014 by milesott

I have been playing around with mapping data in R using the maps package.

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My Picks for JSM 2014

Posted on July 9, 2014 by milesott

Here we are in the middle of the summer.  The humidity is reaching peak levels.  Offices are vacant as people venture out for their much awaited vacations.  And as hard it is for me to believe, JSM (Joint Statistical Meetings) 2014 is … Continue reading →

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More about that please…

Posted on March 14, 2014 by milesott

I was reading this article in the New York Times about the same sex marriage case in Michigan.  Nothing particularly remarkable was said until I got to this one-sentence paragraph: At times, the eight days of testimony resembled a droning … Continue reading →

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The Stuff that Makes a Researcher

Posted on January 14, 2014 by milesott

  Chad Topaz, a Math professor at Macalester College wrote an interesting blog entry on undergraduate research over at siam.org.  Chad explains that many undergraduates tend to be unduly intimidated by Research: I think the view that research necessitates genius is … Continue reading →

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Summer Math Program for Women Undergraduates at Carleton

Posted on October 25, 2013 by milesott

https://s3.amazonaws.com/carleton_reason_media/64/1046364_83cc104dab79/small/SMP_Promo_98035c3c22d8.mp4 Are you a woman undergraduate who is interested in math? Do you know a woman undergraduate who is interested in math? Watch this video and learn about the amazing Summer Math Program at Carleton College. You can learn more … Continue reading →

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The year is 2013… the International Year of Statistics.  Dr. Susan Murphy is a biostatistician working in causal inference at the University of Michigan.  And she is now a MacArthur Genius!  Congratulations to Dr. Murphy on being recognized for her … Continue reading →

Posted on September 25, 2013 by milesott | Comments Off on

Advice for new college students

Posted on August 26, 2013 by milesott

Here’s some great advice from Smith College President Kathleen McCartney.  I absolutely agree.  Here she recounts a story from her days as an undergraduate at Tufts: I was a strong student when I entered college. I was good at “doing school.” … Continue reading →

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A Sample of Stats Songs

Posted on August 2, 2013 by milesott

There is something about statistics that inspires people to break into song and (sometimes) choreographed dance.  Here are a few videos of people who made the sound decision to video themselves doing just that:

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Emails to New Grad Students

Posted on July 22, 2013 by milesott

Here it is July 22, 2013!  Unless the structure of time and/or the academic calendar has changed, that means that many thousands of people are about to embark on the wondrous adventure of graduate school in a mere month or … Continue reading →

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Screwing Up the National Anthem

Posted on May 27, 2013 by milesott

I just saw this NSFW (due to language) data visualization & analysis by Reuben Fischer-Baum of when singers of the United States’ national anthem first flub the lyrics based on 26 youtube videos. I slightly altered their graphic to make it … Continue reading →

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Getting an edge on “battleship”

Posted on April 23, 2013 by milesott

If you have youngsters in your life, you may have had the experience of playing different games of skill and chance with them.  And though you may be taller, have many more years of experience to draw from, and are … Continue reading →

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Bald Associates

Posted on April 20, 2013 by milesott

A recent meta-analysis in BMJ on the association between baldness and coronary heart disease has gotten a lot of press (see NYT and Boston Globe).  Looking at the comments section for these articles you can see that some readers are jokingly conflating this … Continue reading →

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Graduate Student Statistics Teaching Inventory

Posted on April 19, 2013 by milesott

Andrew Gelman’s blog links to this survey of graduate students’ experiences TA’ing or teaching statistics courses. If you fit the bill, consider filling it out. It only took me about 5 minutes and will add to research on statistics education. … Continue reading →

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Capital Bikeshare Data Release

Posted on April 15, 2013 by milesott

The Simply Statistics Blog‘s “Sunday Statistics Roundups” are always an interesting read.  These posts tend to bring together links about statistics in the news, contests, conferences, and also data sets.  This week’s roundup had a link to a really interesting data … Continue reading →

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ENAR

Posted on March 9, 2013 by milesott

Tomorrow I head off to Orlando for ENAR where I will be presenting a poster on Sunday night. If you are at ENAR and are inclined, drop by my poster to say hi.

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JSM

Posted on February 20, 2013 by milesott

  I am excited about attending the Joint Statistical Meetings in Montreal for several reasons, but I am even more excited now.  Nate Silver of election predicting fame will be giving the President’s Invited Address.  

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2013

Posted on January 1, 2013 by milesott

Happy International Year of Statistics!  I am going to celebrate by analyzing social network data in my favorite cafe.

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Much Ado about the Null Set

Posted on October 8, 2012 by milesott

What happens when a Mathematician and a Shakespeare scholar develop a course together?  Apparently, one possibility is Mathematics and What it Means to be Human, a course developed and taught by Dr. Manil Suri and Dr. Michele Osherow at UMBC.  The Chronicle of Higher Education is … Continue reading →

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Projects Galore (Part 1) Ego-Networks of Women with Advanced Cancer

Posted on September 26, 2012 by milesott

I am working on many projects with Dr. Melissa Clark.  Here is one project that is coming along nicely: We have access to data on women who have advanced cancer.  Each woman (the ego) was asked about the important people in … Continue reading →

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Your Random Number Generator Dresses You Funny

Posted on August 29, 2012 by milesott

I recently lead an intense course for incoming undergraduates who are going to concentrate in the sciences. I started the class by talking about sets, then moved into counting problems, followed by calculating probabilities, independence/dependence, unions & intersections, probability distributions, … Continue reading →

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Extracurricular activity

Posted on August 10, 2012 by milesott

I recently read in Inside Science that physicists had applied network analytic tools to discover whether three classic myths: Beowulf, the Iliad, and Tain Bo Cuailnge, were based in real life events (Here is the original article).    In a project that … Continue reading →

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About that Header Image

Posted on July 5, 2012 by milesott
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