Musing about mathematics, biology, and other stuff.
Even if you’ve forgotten everything else about statistics, mean and standard deviation are probably familiar. Both measures describe important characteristics of a numerical data set. The mean gives us a sense of the “average” or “typical” value of the data, and the standard deviation tells us how widely values vary from that average. Sometimes, however, those two measures don’t work as well as we…
This post might be the only time Stata code appears on the blog. Most of the software I share here will be written in a freely available language such as Python. But I’ve had these notes tucked away for awhile, and someone else may find them useful. Even long-time Stata users might be unaware of its versatility for developing arbitrary statistical models. We can see that flexibility by analyzing…
Those of you who read at night may have noticed that this site has a dark mode. Pages follow the lead of your web browser. When your browser switches to dark mode, they change with it. Or, at least, most pages do. This particular page works differently. There is a button in its upper right corner that manually sets light or dark mode. That button gives you direct control over the mode. This page…
I’m truly grateful to all the generous developers whose open source software makes this site possible. They certainly deserve acknowledgment as well as other forms of support. And since some readers might be curious to learn the reasons behind my choices, a brief post on the site’s construction seemed appropriate. When I began to contemplate a new blog, there were really only two requirements, and…
It's been way more than a minute, long enough to wonder if I can still write a decent blog post. After all, a lot can change in nearly a decade. Still, I have been thinking about writing again, and a blog post from Cory Doctorow finally helped me overcome my intertia. Cory says that “ Writing is a cognitive prosthesis for me. Working things out on the page helps me work things out in my life. ”…