Signal + Noise

Good Press

I'm pleased to note that this week's New Scientist has an article by Dana Mackenzie (Vital Statistics, p. 36 in the June 26-July 4 issue, not yet online) that features some of my work with colleagues Larry Wasserman, Bob Nichol, and Chris Miller on cosmology and multiple testing. It's rare to see Statistics get such good press, and I think the article does a nice job capturing the challenges of bringing new statistical methods to astronomy.

UPDATE: In response to a question, let me point out a very minor correction. I'm not really sure to which “seminar on the use of statistics in biology” the article is referring. Our work with FDR started quite a bit earlier. That's just a quibble in an enjoyable article.

UPDATE: You can find more of Dana Mackenzie's work here. Check out also his Tenure-Chase Papers.

All or Nothing

Shameful, shameful, to leave an empty screen for so long. Over the past month, I found myself utterly absorbed — OK, some might say obsessed — with another project, and now that it is well in hand, I return to the daylight world to survey the wreckage of my blog, inbox, exercise routine, and other aspect of my life. So it goes.

I admit to feeling guilty for letting this blog languish unannounced, especially after the work-induced hiatus the month before. It's a shame to have lost a hard-won audience, which while not large relative to the big guys, I very much appreciated.

For good or ill, I have a tendency to obsessively focus on what's interesting me at a given time. For a year, this blog took most of my energy that remained after child and work, and still I posted much less than I wanted to. I am still irked by what I've left unfinished: a book review I agreed to do, the K-T series, nearly completed posts that just didn't quite make it out. Over a dozen such pieces record my increasing despair and anger over Iraq, but much to my regret, they never seemed quite good enough for so weighty a topic. (I'll try to get some closure on that in the next few days, if only to help ease my own frustration.)

I've covered a variety of topics in the past 15 months. I'm a fan of provocatively idealistic solutions to thorny problems, but I haven't been satisfied with how these have come out. The family posts are among my favorites, though I don't expect them to be of wide interest. What I think worked best were the posts in which the blog served as a motivator for me to explore a new area of interest. What drew me to Statistics is the scope it offers for immersing myself in a wide range of scientific disciplines — they all need Statistics — and I've been able to take advantage of that in my work. The blog became a more fun-loving extension of that. Encountering interesting ideas and wanting to write coherently about them pushed me to read deeply into new literatures. For even simple posts, I tried to back up my words with hard work at understanding the ideas and reading the original research. I've learned a great deal in the process, though at times it has been exhausting.

So, where to go next? Having enjoyed blogging so much, I'd like to continue, and I plan to use it as spur to learning, which is both fun and enriching. I hope and believe that this will produce interesting material for others as well. That said, I'm not sure if I can sustain my obsessive focus on the blog indefinitely. For the moment, I plan to put my “all or nothing” tendencies on hold and blog as I feel able — without feeling guilty. We'll see how that goes for a while.

I'd like to thank all those who have visited and read this blog, and I hope you will visit again. Please note the syndication link in the upper right side bar. Thanks again.