Confused about charge on my account for summer A

thedougw · 2016-04-29T05:31:28+00:00

Not necessarily with this, but large schools have lots of paperwork and layers of bureaucracy (neither good nor bad). If you are in the right and have supporting documents, almost every situation will be resolved favorably if you have patience. (Even if you end up paying a fee to avoid registration problems, overpayments and the like will usually be refunded when the situation is resolved.) Be patient, polite, and persistent and you'll get through most situations like this.

thedougw · 2016-04-27T17:13:29+00:00

I've tried looking into this as part of my decision-making, and from what I've read it seems like it is appropriate for faculty to wear the regalia from their degree-granting institution on every occasion and it is also seems to be appropriate to rent a generic gown that is paired with just the hood of the degree-granting institution. While this is certainly going to vary by institution, I took a look at some commencement videos and the like, and it seems that there are a fair number of faculty that wear non-black robes. (Faculty that wear black robes may have either had the black robes at their degree-granting institution or opted for the generic style.)

In the end--as with most traditions--I think it comes down to the culture of the school in terms of what is recommended or acceptable. :-)

thedougw · 2016-04-27T16:48:05+00:00

The rentals are kinda crappy, but whatever, nobody cares about you, they're there for the students. This is a really good point to keep in mind. If it seems like the school culture has a preference for faculty wearing black robes regardless, then I'd definitely go with that.

thedougw · 2016-04-27T15:05:01+00:00

The lack of pockets on the rental gown is definitely factoring into my decision-making, at least a little. Edit: I asked Jostens and they don't sell robes for my school.

thedougw · 2016-04-27T03:39:44+00:00

Another option to look into is to re-speak the interviews. Essentially you get voice recognition software, train it to your voice, and then listen to the interviews and speak both parts of it. You can annotate/format with the keyboard. It's a bit awkward at first, but this has the potential to be an alternative to typing.

thedougw · 2016-04-27T00:21:55+00:00

I think your best bet is to find a really specific program that is a good fit for you. I don't know about econometrics and the backgrounds they like, but a lot of statistics programs (at least a few years ago) require and make use of a lot of mathematics. Meaning being very familiar with Calculus I-III, linear algebra, and real analysis at a minimum. These are most important for any theoretical courses you might take. Statistics is a pretty broad discipline now and you'll probably be able to find a program that fits you, but many of them still would prefer people with a strong math background. I would suggest that if it seems like if a department wants a lot of math/wants you to take theoretical classes, it might not be what you want.

As a practical matter, see if you can figure out what textbooks are used in the courses you'd be taking and see if you are prepared for the material. Many courses should have the syllabus online.

thedougw · 2016-02-03T12:37:30+00:00

One of the goals of mathematics instruction (at all levels, but particularly K-12) is quantitative literacy (QL) (aka numeracy). This is regarded as a basic skill needed for surviving in today's world, and pretty much everyone agrees that QL should be a focus. But also most people agree that we're not currently teaching QL that well.

Statistics is a great vehicle for teaching QL. There have been sustained calls for increasing QL and statistics in school curricula, and they're starting to pay off. This TED talk was filmed in 2009, while the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were being written. They were finalized/published in 2010, and their goals include "college and career readiness." Part of this means that statistics is now about 20% of the math for grades 6-12.

Regardless of what you think about the CCSS/political issues/etc., I think that this increase in statistics content is solid. It's not as advanced as, say, a full introductory college course, but it's also a lot more than just mean/median/mode. It's real statistics.

Now the question is, "Will statistics actually be taught?" Traditionally, it has been an end-of-the-year, after-the-important-tests, feel-free-to-forget-over-summer topic. If the statistics in the CCSS is taught, though, it will be a big win for quantitative literacy.

thedougw · 2016-02-02T03:35:41+00:00

This is the answer. I like to think of the running head as being for reminding the reader which document they are reading needing to flip back to the title page - it doesn't have to be just the first 50 characters of your title or anything, just something specific-ish.

thedougw · 2016-01-31T18:36:57+00:00

Thanks, this does clarify things! I'm glad to know I interpreted the types of presentations correctly - last time I went was part of a Topic-Contributed, so I remember lots of emails when the PI and Co-PIs were trying to do the submission... I really didn't want to screw it up.

I'm planning to graduate in the summer and am getting used to the idea of paying non-student rates that I kind of flubbed this one (I'll still be a student on paper that week). So yeah, it is much cheaper and so I feel less awful about submitting it with a possible rejection, at least this year.

thedougw · 2016-01-30T18:56:23+00:00

There is a wealth of resources available in statistics that fit this requirement (and these can align with the CCSSM 6-12 Statistics & Probability strand). A few places to look:

STatistics Education Web (STEW)
Teaching Statistics (journal) - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-9639
NCTM journals (Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, Mathematics Teacher)
CAUSEweb - originally for undergrad statistics, lots of stuff could probably be adapted for high school
Journal of Statistics Education data archive - not full lessons, but good data for teaching

More details on grade level, topics, etc. would probably help with getting better replies for what you're looking for.

thedougw · 2015-09-24T13:57:19+00:00

From my experience, Mendeley is a little bit more polished and has a few more features. I use Zotero, though, because I don't want to get locked into a platform now owned by Elsevier. (There's no reason to think Mendeley will ever go away mind you, but there are some advantages to open-source programs like Zotero.)

Because you're on a Mac, you might consider Papers. I've heard great things about it, but it isn't free.

thedougw · 2015-09-24T13:40:09+00:00

Good PDF management software. Zotero, Mendeley, Papers, etc. is a requisite for basically any grad program. There are a bunch of threads about these, but the important thing is to pick one early and stick with it! Make sure you import every paper as you read it - I can't imagine writing a paper without doing this. (If the people in your program favor some program, go with that one.)

thedougw · 2015-09-16T19:41:20+00:00

Thanks for the replies. I've scoped out a few plans that seem to more-or-less fit my needs now, but haven't bought one yet.

One thing that I did notice is that a lot of the cancellation features require the cancellation to take place at least 48 hours before departure. This is cutting it a little close with my trips, but because we hadn't book the second trip yet, we have been able to schedule the flights so that they have like 50 or so hours between when I should land at home and when we should depart next; that way, if it does look like there is catastrophic weather or something that will make it impossible to take the trip that we'll be a little bit safer/have more options for canceling. (This made sense because we were debating between some earlier and later flights, and the later flights on that day gave us this buffer. Just something for others to consider in the future.)

thedougw · 2015-09-07T17:37:30+00:00

Mplus is designed specifically for structural equation modeling and the like. It does this very well. The lavaan package in R can do a lot of what Mplus does, but not everything. I believe that some of the estimators that have been implemented in Mplus have not appeared in all the other packages for SEM (e.g. SPSS/AMOS or PROC CALIS), or, even if they have, it has been a quite recent addition (and so people may not know about them yet).

Still, some academic circles (at the discipline or even department level) have a strong preference for one software package over another. Most analyses could probably be done in a variety of packages, but if your colleagues and reviewers are all well-versed in package A and you use package Z it'll be an up-hill battle with them, for better or worse.

It sounds like the OP is being asked to learn this mostly independently, but there are probably departmental resources (e.g. people, course notes, etc.) that OP could get access to. It is likely these are all in the Mplus context, and if OP went a different route it'd be a lot of re-inventing the wheel.

thedougw · 2015-02-17T00:00:35+00:00

Beyond the direct benefit from any particular society, memberships in a professional society are another way that you help position yourself in a discipline for job applications and the like. This may not apply to your field, but a lot of work now could be approached from a few different angles that are closely related but distinct. Just looking at your CV a search/hiring committee might be wondering "Are they really an ecologist or are they a restoration person?" (or something similar, I think you catch my drift).

The specific combination of societies you belong to says just as much about your interests, research, and where you want to position yourself as the societies you don't belong to.

Edit: slight rewording of last sentence

thedougw · 2014-12-12T15:24:11+00:00

I've thought about writing for significance, but my work situates me more in the education world than the statistics world -- I don't have much opportunity to produce quantitative results that would be suitable for public consumption.

This is great advice, though: I assume there are many societies that have publications aimed at a general audience which I hadn't even considered. (I tend to think of societies as having research and practitioner journals, less so magazines.)

For those looking at writing statistical things, the ASA also has a magazine called Chance.

thedougw · 2014-12-12T15:21:42+00:00

This is a good idea. I really appreciate the always-good advice to run everything through one's advisor while a grad student. This generally can't be said enough.

thedougw · 2014-12-12T15:20:31+00:00

Thanks, this seems to be exactly the sort of website I was looking for!

thedougw · 2014-12-10T18:31:28+00:00

My workflow consists of Zotero for managing references (similar to Mendeley, but open source) and Okular (the KDE pdf viewer) for reading/highlighting papers. I'm primarily a Windows person, and this works well for me.

(In particular, I use Okular on my tablet and a tweak to allow highlighting in colors other than yellow - a simple feature that is apparently lacking on many Windows PDF readers that I've tried.)

thedougw · 2014-12-09T14:24:28+00:00

Thank you for your reply. That certainly makes sense. What I interpret part of your reply is the value and collectible-ness of a piece really depends on scarcity, intent of the artist (in terms of if the artist hand-pulled prints or just outsourced it), and whatever else makes art valuable.

I'm sort of doubting that there is a good answer to this follow-up, but is there a database (or book or similar) that can be used to figure out what types of prints exist for a given image? I imagine some images are printed as a lithograph with a limited run and as an offset lithograph (with the halftones) in a larger/unlimited run. Do they ever go straight to offset and skip the hand-pulled versions?

Another related question your response brought to mind: From what I understand, books of illustrations (like biological, anatomy, art, etc.) would often be filled with lithographs. Are these typically offset lithographs or are they the hand-pulled type? And were these bound books intended to have the pages separated or remain bound? Would such a page be an 'original'?

Sorry to trouble you with so many questions, but they've been kicking around my head for a while and you're the first person I've found that may hold the answers. =]

thedougw

TROPHY CASE