New pages are up!

I posted the updated pages today---new design and updated content.

I also posted the demonstration course, 16 slides from the introductory course. I wanted to put up a bit of a trailer/teaser for the courses, and I also wanted to make sure that people could navigate the courses properly before the spent money for a full course.

The full introductory course has about 320 slides. My web site designer made it very easy for me to load the slides and the audio into the course pages, but recording the audio for 320 slides will take some time. I feel like on some of the 16 audio files I already recorded, I sound like I have a cold, and I don't. I think that my mouth gets dry from all the talking. With more audio files to record, I will need to find a better way to stay hydrated.

If you'd like to test out the format for the web courses, please do. The link is here at
http://www.catherinechhood.net/samplecourse_whysa.html.

Any questions or comments you have are also appreciated.

Updates on FAQ (and the need for some motivation)

I've finished updating the FAQ. I incorporated some answers to some questions from readers of the FAQ, particularly about the spectral diagnostics. I also needed to update some answers in regards to Windows Vista and Windows 7, and make sure the information was correct about Census's new interface to X-12.

I need to finish testing all the links and check through the spelling again. With some luck (and hopefully some spelling skills over the past few days), I should have the new pages posted by March 4 or 5.

I need to download TSW again and make sure it hasn't changed too much. I have so many papers started about TSW that aren't finished. I need to treat this project like it's a project for clients and set some firm deadlines. That's an idea I will need to think about . . .

New web pages

David (at Exit 42 Design) sent me the code for the new web pages today. Very exciting! I have known David since he was born, so it was really fun to work with him and to get to know him better now that he is "all grown up."

Between the time I talked to David and when he sent the code, however, I had changed my mind about the color scheme for the site. It's been gray, green, and blue, with some purple for some links. I decided that to make the site really look like my site, I needed more purple. Purple has been my favorite color for years, though it is also my school color (Go Paladins!), and one of my sorority colors.

To try different colors, I used the site http://colorschemedesigner.com/. I had been there before, and I like it. Besides having great tools to find colors that go together, they have a place where you can test your colors against different kinds of color blindness.

David added some black, and I've replaced the green with purple, though there is still green in my logo. I like the new pages and the new colors. However, the best part is the page for the web courses. I can't wait to finish the audio files so I can show off the pages.

While updating the web pages, I realized that my business plan is also woefully out of date, so it is time to update the plan and reassess my short- and long-term goals.

I also realized that if I was changing the colors for my pages, I should change them on the blog, too. I also finally updated my Blogger template.

Time to get back to work.

ttfn

Mentors and anniversaries

Today would have been my grandmother's birthday. I loved being with her because she was so much fun. As I got older, she became more and more of a mentor to me. My grandma didn't know statistics, but she knew people, and she always gave me great advice about how to get along with difficult people. When people would tell me that my children were too close in age, she was the person I would turn to for comfort. (And what are you supposed to do about it anyway after you already have the kids?) Grandma would tell me over and over that having the girls be so close in age would be better for them in the long run. "Just get through the diaper days," she would say. Grandma was right. The kids are such good friends now, and teaching them at home has be easier because they are so close in age. I only wish that Grandma were still alive to see how right she was and how beautiful my girls are. Grandma has been gone for some time now, but I still miss her every day.

My dad's birthday would have been next week. I loved being with Daddy because he was so much fun. Daddy was a great mentor to me, too. He understood about the pressures of grad school and difficult supervisors, and he understood the frustration of not being able to get the data you needed for a big regression project. He was a great person to talk to, and it wasn't until he was gone that I realized how much I depended on him. It's been almost three years since Daddy died, and I still miss him every day.

Next week also marks the five year anniversary of my last day at the Census Bureau. Some days I can't believe that it has been five years because it seems like yesterday when I was there. On other days it seems like an entire lifetime ago that I was there. At Census I had some incredible mentors, some formal and some informal: Bud, Nash, David, Al, John, to name a few. At Census I also had wonderful friends: Kathy, Amy, Joe, Brian, Roxanne, Ayonda, to name a few. These last few years have been a lot of fun in many ways, but they have also been very lonely years.

Along with the obit for Dr. Lehmann, this month's Amstat News also had a letter from Dr. Pantula encouraging us to be a mentor to young statisticians. That is not a problem for me since I happen to live with a high school student who wants to be a statistician and follow in the footsteps of her mother and grandfather. Though I don't feel like a "young statistician" at this point, I don't feel like an old statistician either. I think that maybe this middle-aged statistician needs to find more mentors in her life. I think it would help me be less isolated. At the Census Bureau, you could sign up to be a mentor or to get a mentor. I wish there was a way for isolated statisticians to find other statisticians for mentors.

In the meantime, I thank God for the mentors that I have had in my life.

Just some thoughts for today. Happy birthday, Grandma!

Erich Lehmann (1917-2009)

I just read in the February issue of Amstat News that Erich Lehmann passed away on Sept. 12, 2009, at the age of 91. I was just telling my AP Statistics student about taking a class on point estimation. (She couldn't believe that you could teach nothing but that for an entire semester. Sometimes I have trouble believing it, and I was there.) The textbook: Lehmann's Point Estimation.

The book was difficult, but that wasn't why the class was so hard. I took this class in the fall of 2001. I had gone back to grad school in 1999 after several years of working and kids. The kids were so great about leaving me alone when I had homework, but after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, I had trouble doing homework. I wanted so much just to play with the kids, or just to sit and hold them. I talked to Dr. Gentle about it, and he was nice about it, but I knew that I didn't have enough of a grasp on the material to continue with the next class. So Lehmann's Point Estimation was my last textbook in my schooling in Statistical Computing at George Mason University.

Lehmann had a very interesting life. He was born in France, raised in Germany, and had to flee from the Nazis in 1933. He went to graduate school at Berkeley in 1940 and never left. The list of honors he had won is incredible.

Modern statistics was founded just before World War II by men like Jerzey Neyman and R.A. Fisher. Lehmann was, for me, the most famous of the second-generation statisticians. Even though I didn't really enjoy my point estimation class, I would see his work in lots of different things that I would read.

May God bless his family.

DreamHost versus Seanic

As I work on web pages for my courses, I thought that maybe I would need a web hosting company that offers more bandwidth and disk space. I have been with Seanic since I started my web pages, but I went with Seanic without doing any research, so I thought maybe it was time to do some research on web hosting companies.

I signed up for DreamHost with a 97-day money back guarantee. Today was day 89, and I cancelled my account. There were some billing problems, and they didn't seem willing to fix the problem. It seemed kind of crazy to me that they wouldn't work harder to keep my business when they knew I was in the first 97 days.

In the meantime, I had some problems on catherinechhood.net which is hosted by Seanic. The fault was completely mine, and yet when I contacted customer support, they were extremely helpful and polite. He sent me instructions to fix my problem to my email address and told me to contact him again if they were unclear. The instructions were clear, my problem fixed, and I'm staying with Seanic. I may have to buy a more expensive plan with more bandwidth, etc., but it will still be very reasonably priced, and with great customer service.

It's been a bit frustrating, but now in hindsight, I'm glad I tried another hosting company, and I'm happy that I got lucky back in 2006 and found Seanic. It was good that I saw the true customer service at DreamHost, even in my first 97 days.

If you are looking for a new web hosting company, I can say now that I've done some research, and I can recommend Seanic.Net (http://www.seanic.net/).

ttfn

New Version of X-12 and the Window Interface

The Census Bureau released a new version of the Windows Interface to X-12 and a new version of X-12-ARIMA in December. I've been so swamped with work that I downloaded the new X-12-ARIMA without downloading the new interface. However, I found myself recommending the new interface to someone based only on the word of friends at Census, so I decided I should try it out myself.

Generally, I like the diagnostics output now, and I think it's great that there are Java graphs available. But I'm not crazy about the graphs. Maybe I'm too sensitive about graphs, and maybe I'm jealous that I wasn't the person to program the graphs. I still need to read the documentation. Maybe I can do what I want with the graphs if I read the instructions.

Whatever the case, I still need to redo my web pages to reflect the changes in the programs available from Census. I should download TRAMO/SEATS again, too, just to see if there are changes there. I realized today that I've been so focused on work for my clients that I haven't been keeping up with my reading and research. That will change starting today.

ttfn

A new direction for my teaching career

This year I'm taking a break from Belmont to teach AP statistics to my oldest child.

My husband and I have taught our three children at home since kindergarten. Darin felt it was essential for their safety when we lived in the DC suburbs, and it was essential when we lived in Europe because they couldn't attend school there. My high school students attend Christian Liberty Academy through correspondence. I like the curriculum for the most part except for the mathematics courses (though I believe my children may disagree with me about the theology courses). CLA is just starting to offer Algebra I and Geometry by Harold Jacobs, which is good, but they offer Algebra II only through Saxon Math, which I don't like. They also don't have any good pre-calculus or calculus class, and no statistics.

My oldest child had Algebra I as a 7th grader (using Harold Jacob's book, which is a great book), and she finished pre-calculus last year using the trig book from CLA and an extra book by Forester. So this year I taught her AP Statistics, with moral support from teachers at church and friends from Facebook, using text books I've borrowed from staff at Belmont and the "5 Steps to a 5" book recommended by a college friend who teaches AP Statistics. I was a little bit worried that we'd do all this work and not find a place for her to take the test, but I talked to the AP coordinator at the high school closest to our church, and she was happy to include Miriam with her AP Statistics class.

With so little time before my children leave for college, it's nice to have more time to spend at home with them. We will be going to Belmont for their Preview Day for high school students, so that will be a different perspective for us all.

Next year I hope to teach calculus to my two oldest. So I don't expect to be teaching at Belmont next year either. Maybe for the 2011-2012 school year . . .

The Joint Statistical Meetings in the Post

From an article in The Washington Post style section,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/04/AR2009080403117.html):

In D.C., Statisticians Flex Their Strength in Numbers
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Real superheroes, most people know, skip the capes and tights. Too bulky, too flashy, spandex doesn't breathe well, etc.

Which is why they can be easy to miss when they're in town, even when there are 6,000 of them, super-number crunchers, data heroes, with powers of finding meaning in digits far beyond those of mortal men and women.

The 6,000 is just rough data, not accounting for last-minute arrivals. Their median annual income is $65,720. Their employment is expected to grow 9 percent by 2016.

That's not even getting into their standard deviations.

Ladies and gentlemen: statisticians. At the Washington Convention Center this week for the Joint Statistical Meetings, the largest international gathering of data junkies on the continent.

Later, the author discusses the importance of statistical literacy:

. . . The general population does not get it. Worse, they don't even get what they don't get. They use "random" when they mean "uniform." They confuse "cause" with "correlation." They do not question study designs, like the recent survey claiming Republicans were happier with their sex lives than Democrats, but failing to take into account that more Republicans are men, who always think they're studs. They can't tell the difference between relative and absolute risk. They can't tell the difference between the mean and the median. "That eats at me constantly," says Jim Cochran, a statistics professor from Louisiana.

Go ahead. Laugh. Roll your eyes at the number crunchers, and the way they flock excitedly to sessions with names such as "Alternatives to Proportional Hazards Survival Methods." But this stuff matters. Statistics on the recession -- you think those create themselves? What about tracking the spread of infectious diseases? Don't even get statisticians started on the 2010 Census, which for the first time will include an option for same-sex marriages. Which would be fine, except that some gay couples have actually self-identified as married on the Census for decades, which means that some valiant guy on a computer needs to figure out how to interpret the numbers.

Why do they do it?

"I think it must have been something that happened to us in childhood," Larry Featherston says. He's a member of the Committee on Statistics and Disability, which aims to improve disability research.

"We might like to hang around with numbers," says David Keer. "But the real question is, what can we use them for? In this country, if you're not counted you don't count."

It's so true, even while sounding so . . . boring. Who wants to save the world using the Bayesian method?

The statisticians get that, and they're working on their image.

Our 20th Anniversary

Twenty years ago today, Darin and I were married. We are celebrating by Darin working in Tennessee and me working at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC. Tonight I'll be going to a party at Dr. Findley's house (a former supervisor at Census).

It's not really how I imagined celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary on that long ago day back in 1989. But on the other hand, I did realize at the time that our wedding was at the same time as the JSM that year and knew it could happen again. Darin and I have spent several anniversaries together at the JSM and had a great time. Dallas especially comes to mind. There was nothing to do except watch people in the lobby and eat across the street at Denny's (where they did not appreciate my Redskins t-shirt).

Sometimes the JSM take place the same time as my middlest child's birthday which means she got to spend her 8th birthday shopping in New York City and her 11th birthday at the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

I'm happy that the 2010 meetings are on the west coast. It will give me a chance to be home with Darin for our 21st anniversary!

Happy Anniversary, Darin!

New web design coming

I've been saying for a while that I want to get my course on-line, and I've been working on it for a long time without making much progress. So I've finally hired someone to help me with the design aspects. David Joyce of Exit 42 Design is going to design pages for the courses and help me redesign the site by improving my CSS code.

I've known Dave for years, and I love his work for other sites. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he comes up with, and it's a big burden off my shoulders to have some help with the html for the site.

Stay tuned. I really think I can get my first course on the web in 2010.

ttfn

Nobel Prize to Paul Krugman

The Nobel Prize committee named Paul Kragman as the winner of the Nobel Prize in economics "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity." He is a professor at Princeton, I learned, but he also writes for the New York Times, and he's one of the people who has been giving advice about the current financial crisis and he makes a lot of sense, even before he won the prize. His ideas about injecting government capital into banks seems to be an idea that is catching on. Maybe more people will listen to him about this now that he's more famous.

So what did he do to be recognized by the Nobel committee? His field is in the area of economics called strategic trade theory which "argues that countries can subsidize certain industries to gain global market share. Others have praised his work on the development of clusters of related industries and his equations that measure how economic shocks affect the current account, exchange rates and capital flows." (from bloggingstocks.com)

It did seem a bit ironic to me that the prize for economics was announced in the middle of all this financial trouble. What do you suppose he's going to do with his prize money?

That Hat

My friend Kathy is not only a seasonal adjuster, she's also a knitter. She sent the following web site to a bunch of us yesterday.

"Seasonally adjusted for maximum effect—
that's That Hat"

http://www.morehousefarm.com/KnittingKits/Hats/ThatHat/

Our friend Brian responded that he thought that was seasonality because "there's DEFINITELY a peak."

:-)

It's finally here

It's been on everyone's lips all around campus for months and months. Preparations and security and have taken all our good parking spaces and made even walking around campus difficult. But tonight is the night, and I'm hoping that on Thursday I can find a good parking space again.



Belmont's tag line for the year: "The road to the White House runs through Belmont University."

The Joy of Keynesian Economics

I took economics in high school and learned absolutely nothing, except how really bad a class could be when the teacher came to work drunk. I didn't take economics in college because I couldn't imagine it could be much more interesting than my high school class because I couldn't imagine a professor at Furman coming to work drunk.

I have really enjoyed learning more about economics as I was involved more and more with economic statistics. However, I readily confess that the subject does NOT make me giggle.

So imagine my surprise, as we're watching serious news programs on television, that my girls (and especially my oldest), start to giggle at the phrase "Keynesian Economics". It turns out that one of my girls' favorite actors, from two of my girls' favorite movies, is actor Skandar Keynes (Edmund Pevensie in both The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian). Skandar is the great-great-nephew of famed economist John Maynard Keynes and the son of author Randal Keynes. It also turns out, according to IMDB, that Skandar is the great-great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, but that name doesn't make the girls giggle as much as the name "Keynes" (pronounced like "canes", for those of you unfamiliar with the movies or Keynesian economics).



Anyone interested in learning mroe about Keynesian economics should visit the site
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/KeynesianEconomics.html.
You can see if it makes you giggle.

ttfn

Time to focus on consulting

I really enjoy teaching, and I don't regret at all taking the job at Belmont University, and I feel so privileged and blessed to be able to teach my children at home. But Praise God for summer! It's so nice to have a break from the teaching and to be able to really focus on some time series projects for my consulting business.

One goal I have had for more than a year now is to get my courses on the web so that individuals could take the courses on their own computer. But my courses are copyrighted, so I can't just put them up for anyone to see. I've talked to several people, but no one who works in web design could quite catch my vision for the courses. So after more than a year thinking and dreaming and talking to people about this, I finally made a huge breakthrough today!!! I am learning PHP, and I'm finding some wonderful free code, and I'm finally beginning to think that I can really get this done this summer. My goal is to have the slides on the web, with notes and sound files of me talking, and have it all password protected.

I also found my notes on that user-defined holiday project I started while still at Census, and as I went through my notes, I realized that I was even farther ahead on this program than I had remembered!

So a very exciting day all the way around!

ttfn

Summer Break

I finished all my work for Belmont over a month ago, and it's been a relief. I really enjoy teaching, but I have some really interesting consulting projects, and I still had to get my girls through their school. And today, we're officially finished!

The two younger girls finished up a couple of week ago. My oldest finished up her last set of book reports today, and we put them in the mail.

I finished up my programming project (and was paid promptly). It was nice to be working in SAS again. It had been a long time. It was nice to know I could still work on SAS macros.

It also inspired me to work on my Visual Basic program again for user-defined holidays. I had started it at Census as a SAS macro, but I want to get it into something more practical than SAS. I also want to do some research on different kinds of Easter effects and other related holidays for the Joint Statistical Meetings of the American Statistical Association in 2009.

Next week I hope to sign some contracts for another fun seasonal adjustment project. It looks to be a very exciting summer for me!

ttfn

Three-year Anniversary

Today is the three-year anniversary of the day I left the Census Bureau. To celebrate, I gave the girls a day off from school.

Mom was here for the weekend to help me celebrate my birthday and Daddy's birthday. We celebrated both by going to a scrapbook day at Rita's house. I'm working on a scrapbook for me about my dad.

But first, I do need to finish grading tests, and cleaning up some in my office so I have the space to work on scrapbooks. And then there are taxes to do, and lesson plans, and some programming to do for clients . . . .

ttfn

Driving Lessons

My oldest took her written drivers' test on Monday, and she passed, so she now has her "graduated driver's license", what used to be called a learner's permit when I was a kid in Tennessee.

On the same day that my oldest took her driving test, my youngest started high-school-level algebra. It's hitting me hard that the girls are really growing up. They are making fun of me, but it's more difficult than they think.

24

In early December, one of the pastors at the organ church told a joke that went something like this:

A young man is sent to a maximum security prison for larceny. As in many jokes and movies about prison, the young man ends up sharing a cell with an older, veteran prisoner who takes a liking to him.

The first night in the cell block, the younger man hears something strange. Someone calls out, "Sixteen!" All the prisoners laugh, except for the new kid.

"Twenty-five!" More laughter.

After a several more numbers and much more laughter, the new guy asks the older prisoner to explain what everyone's laughing at. The older man says, "Well, at night, we've got nothing better to do than to tell jokes."

"But they're not jokes," the younger man says. "They're just numbers."

"That's all you know," the older man replies. "The thing is, we've all been here so long that we've heard all each other's jokes so often that we've memorized them. So rather than tell the whole joke again, we've numbered 'em all. Now we just remind each other of the joke by calling out the number."

"Really? Can I try it?"

"Go for it, kid."

"Eleven!"

Silence.

The young man turns to the older prisoner and says, "I don't get it. What's wrong?"

The older man shakes his head. "Some people just don't know how to tell a joke."

The only thing that made the joke funny in church is that the person telling the joke messed it up so badly that people were really confused and no one really laughed --- some people really don't know how to tell a joke.

But I had heard the joke before, a long time ago, and this time it reminded me so much of my friend Kathy that I was laughing at the joke long before Pastor Tommy started getting confused, and long before he told the punchline.

When Kathy and I were working together at Census, several years ago now, the division chief of our division back then sent an email to the entire division that said, "There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't." We had heard the joke before, and we thought it said 11 when we'd heard it before. My friend John said that he though it was supposed to be 11 instead of 10. So Kathy and I sent a message to everyone in our address books on our home email accounts and asked them which number they thought was funnier, 10 or 11. We also starting asking people in person or on the phone. Several of our relatives wrote back that they weren't sure which number was funnier, but that they thought the two of us were crazy and/or insane. I remember my dad thought that 10 was funnier because it was a nice, round number, and Mr. West, the guard at the front desk thought that 11 was funnier because it was closer to midnight, and he got off work at midnight.

After that, there was a SpongeBob episode were Patrick goes with SpongeBob to boating school, and the kids and I happened to see it on TV while were were shopping for batteries at a Radio Shack. Kathy happened to see the same episode. Patrick gets nervous and tells the class his name is 24, and the class laughs. SpongeBob says, "You know what's funnier than 24? . . . 25!"

And there were times when someone would say a number, and Kathy and I would just start laughing, like the time we went to Bojangles for lunch and Kathy had ticket number 24 and I had number 25, or the other way around, and we both looked at our numbers and just started laughing. The lady who took our money asked what was so funny. I told her that I was doing my SpongeBob impersonation. She said, "Yeah, I like SpongeBob, too," but she still looked at us like we were insane.

My oldest and I were at the county seat the other day and had to take tickets to talk to the ladies. We had numbers 10 and 11, and we both just started laughing.

It's not exactly like the prison joke, but there are some numbers that remind me of people or of other jokes, and they just make me laugh.

So when I saw this speed limit sign, I had to take a picture, even if it was hard to take a picture of a shining sign in the dark. Where else was I going to see a speed limit of 24?

You know what's funnier than 24?