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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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 . . . .

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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?

A New Year

I have had several inquiries for my consulting business --- some really interesting seasonal adjustment work and some SAS program debugging. All of the potential clients seem to be easy to work with at this point.

I'm also trying to work out a way to get some of my courses on-line for people who want to pay. I need to talk to my computer support people about this again and see if he has any suggestions. I really also need to do a mailing, but I don't know when I'm going to find the time. I have some programming projects of my own I should be working on also.

I also found out this week that I will be teaching again at Belmont for the Spring semester, which starts next week. I need to redo my syllabus and get ready to teach again. I know it will be easier this semester, but right now it seems a bit overwhelming on top of everything else.

And I have a pile of tests to grade by the middle of the month when we need to send in the next batch of work to my oldest daughter's correspondence school.

I hope everyone is having a great 2008. Go Ohio State!

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Limbo

Work on the consulting side as been slow since November. That turned out to be a blessing as a fought a very bad case of poison ivy. I don't expect it to pick up until January, though I am very thankful for my few regular clients. I do have a few new prospects, so I'm not at all discouraged.

I finished all my grading for the Belmont courses. It's a relief to be finished, but I still don't know if I'm teaching next semester or not. It would be nice to teach another semester now that I have this semester under my belt, but it would also be nice to have a break. I'd really like to do a mailing, too, to drum up more business for my courses. Plus, I have some catching up to do for grading for the girls, and I would love to have more time to scrapbook (I still have a couple of pictures to paste in my Japan book).

On the other hand, I'm getting a lot of French done on the long commutes to Belmont. I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of sentence structure and basic verb forms. It's funny, though, what they've taught me and what they haven't. For example, I know the words for January, February, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but not the other months or the other days of the week. And we've learned the names for France, Belgium, Italy, England, and Canada. And I know how to ask about the time and the weather, but they keep making me practice asking about the weather in Canada or in England in January or February --- "Il faisait très froid au Canada en janvier et en février." And I can order coffee, beer, or wine, but I don't drink any of those, though I can order milk because they taught me that (I might need milk in my coffee). But, realistically, I do know that Diet Coke is "Coca-Cola Lite" in France, so I suppose I don't need to know anything else to drink. I've been renting French movies, and I'm really enjoying listening to the French. Maybe I'll learn the other months and some good things to eat that way.

I guess I'm feeling a little bit lost tonight. I should probably grade papers for the girls, but I think I'll read Dumas instead.

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Saxon Math

Things are finally settling down for school this year. My high school student and I really struggled with her math course. Her high school wanted her to put in 3-4 hours a day working on math, and yet it was 95% review. She was so discouraged. She's already had Algebra I and Geometry from books by Harold Jacobs. This was an Algebra II book, and our first time with a book by John Saxon.

I thought I should look ahead in the book to see when the review would end. I discovered that there were several topics that should be covered in Algebra II that aren't in the book at all.
Algebra II should be a study of functions, and Saxon math thinks it's a study of geometric shapes and polar coordinates. It's so frustrating to me. Besides the fact that my child was hating math, I was worried that she wouldn't be ready for higher math in later years if we continued with only the Saxon book.

So I bought another Algebra II book, one by Paul Foerster. She's doing problems in both books so that she can take the tests from the first book, and we're learning all the concepts in the second (more difficult) book. Though it sounds like extra work for my daughter, she's actually doing much better in school since we started this. She's still spending 3-4 hours a day working on math problems, but she's interested in math again. She completes her assignments quickly in the Saxon book because she knows that more interesting material is coming. It's been a burden on me to figure out a schedule that will work for her school and for her, but now that we're getting it settled, I'm feeling better, too. Also, I know that she won't be getting behind in math.

Darin worries that I push my kids too much in math. I don't want to require them to be math majors, but I don't want their future career choices to be hampered by inadequate preparation, especially in math.

Last Day of Summer Vacation

School starts for the girls tomorrow. And I now have two teenagers.

Maybe I'm just too tired, but I'm not so stressed over it right now. Maybe it will hit me when my oldest and I are going over her math assignment tomorrow that I have a girl in high school now. She reminded us tonight that it's less than six months before she'll get her learner's permit and be able to drive out on the roads.

The consulting business is picking up again now that summer is almost over, and I'm working on class notes for the course at Belmont for next week. When I think about what I have to do, I think that I should be really stressed about biting off too much, but right now it feels like I can handle this. We'll see how it goes. First, I still have to clean up my office and sort papers before the new school year gets too far gone.

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Trip to Belmont

I took a trip up to Belmont this morning to pick up my textbook and start some paperwork. I also got to see where my office will be. (I share with the other adjuncts.) The math secretary also gave me my keys and syllabi from other professors who have taught the course in years past.

It's a nice drive, and it's a nice campus, but it's really hot today, and all the walking around campus (like walking over to Human Resources) while carrying an armload of books around really made me tired. I suppose that I should have brought along an empty book bag, but I didn't think about it until it was too late.

I need to start working on my course materials for Belmont, but what I really want to do is work on scrapbooks. I ordered more pictures over the weekend. I'm thinking that with some careful planning, I can finish up 2006 before the end of 2007. I would really like that. Then all I have to do are baby books, my trip to Japan, anything before the year 2000, the year we spent in Luxembourg . . . . . . .

New projects always seem too big at first. One step at a time, and soon I'll be able to teach Statistics 101 with one hand tied behind my back.

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New school year

There have been several changes in the wind for this next school year. One change is my new teaching job at Belmont University. The other big change is that my oldest daughter is starting high school. We've been homeschooling the kids since kindergarten, but I wanted the kids to have a transcript when they finished high school. So my oldest daughter is going to be in correspondence school this year.

She and I decided on Christian Liberty Academy (CLA). I would have liked to send her to the University of Nebraska high school because of their really good reputation, but we couldn't afford it. On the bright side, we've been using some books from Christian Liberty for years, so we know what we're getting into. Also, we can take individual classes from Nebraska and still get them on her transcript from CLA. I think we might end up doing that for math. CLA only requires one year of math, so after this year, any math she takes will cost us extra, so maybe we can afford to pay a little bit more and get the course from another correspondence school.

For seventh grade for all the girls, I switched to a curriculum from Veritas Press that was more difficult than what we had been using for elementary school. This made for a big jump in time commitment and difficulty between sixth grade and seventh grade for the girls. The positive side of this is that the leap from eighth grade to ninth grade won't be so much of a leap. I'm generally pleased with the ninth-grade text books. So far my girls haven't read many short stories and poetry for the past two years, and not much American literature, and the new literature class will fill in the gaps nicely. I'm still a bit skeptical about the Algebra II book from Saxon Math, but I can supplement with my books if I need to. I think it's a bit light on the trigonometry.

We worked out a schedule for the year together, and I looked through the forms that CLA sent on a CD. Some of them I need to use for them when I send in materials for grading, but the scheduling forms were optional, and we didn't like them. I decided to program my own scheduling forms. I came up with something that the girls and I liked, and so I have the whole school year in the computer now. We can all access the calendar, and I can print out weekly schedules for all three girls. My husband thought I was completely obsessed with this project, but after years of writing out assignments by hand, I can't believe that I didn't write a computer program to do this years ago, and the programming for it took me just a few hours.

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ICES III in Montreal

Every time I look at this blog I realize that it mirrors how overwhelmed I've been feeling since Daddy's death.

I had a bit of a melt-down (again (speaking of Daddy)) the day we were supposed to leave for the ICES III conference in Canada, but to make a long story short, we did finally leave that day, and we went on the trip, and the conference was good, and the girls had a good time, and we got to see lots of friends. The next step for me, professionally, is to finish up writing the papers that I presented, before the end of August.

I sent in the paperwork I needed to send to Belmont, and I'm looking forward to starting my teaching gig there in late August. I'm even looking forward to the commute --- some quality time in the car to practice with my French CD's.

The consulting business has slowed down for the summer, but it's been nice to have a break, and it was nice to have the money in the bank already to pay for the trip to Montreal.

The other big issue for us this summer was getting my oldest daughter ready for high school at her correspondence school. I'll write more about that in a bit.

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About Daddy

This is the eulogy I gave tonight at Daddy's funeral:

When I was a child, I thought that everyone had the same kind of childhood that I had, and it wasn't until I was older that I learned to appreciate the uniqueness of my childhood. Let me tell you about my dad.

When I was little, before I could say the word "statistician," Daddy and I would pretend to be statisticians. We’d do little experiments in the kitchen, or we’d do a survey of words in the newspaper, and then we would graph our results. We discussed the properties of bell-shaped curves. We figured out the probability of drawing a pair of matching socks from my well-mixed sock drawer.

When I was in third grade, Mrs. Hoffman was teaching us multiplication tables, and I was bored. When I told Daddy I was bored in math, he said he would teach me a magic trick. He got out his book of logarithm tables (back in the olden days before calculators could do logarithms), and he showed me how to look up numbers in the logarithm table. Then you would take the logarithms and add them, but when you undid the logarithm they would really be multiplied. I tried it over and over for any multiplication problem I could think of, and the next day I told Mrs. Hoffman that my dad had taught me a really cool magic trick with logarithms. She called my dad later and suggested to him that he should stop teaching me at home. He ignored her suggestion.

But math to my dad was more than just the kind of math you might use as a statistician, it was the kind of math you used in sports. I learned how to compute "yards per carry" and "runs batted in." There is never a time in my life when I can remember NOT knowing the rules to football, baseball, and basketball, and I've been a Nebraska football fan my whole life. Some of you might know that my dad knew Richie Ashburn who played major-league baseball in Philadelphia and later worked for them as a broadcaster, but my dad had other connections, too. When we lived in Vermillion, South Dakota, Daddy was friends with the announcer for the town baseball team. Daddy and Don and I went to a lot of baseball games in Vermillion, and sometimes I would get to sit up in the announcer’s booth, and one time I even got to run the scoreboard, to turn on the balls, strikes, and outs. Daddy took us to high school football, basketball, and wrestling, and University of South Dakota football and basketball, too. And when we moved to Tennessee, we started going to Science Hill and ETSU games and track meets.

Time with Daddy was more than just math. Daddy read out loud to us, everything from "The House that Jack Built" and "Oh How Do We Get to the Zoo?" to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burrows. Daddy taught me to sing the tenor part on the hymns with him before I could read well enough to read the words of the hymns. We took family vacations out west to see the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and trips in the east to every major Civil War battle site, and as many of the minor ones as Daddy could find.

Daddy loved to look for patterns in every day things, from the number of petals on wildflowers to odometer readings on the car. I remember calling Daddy on his 48th birthday and asking how it feels to be 48. He said it felt a lot like 47. I called him on his 49th birthday, and he was really excited. This wasn't just any birthday. I had just turned 25, and he was 49, and that was 5 squared and 7 squared. And to make it even better, on his mom’s next birthday, she was going to turn 81, so then we'd have 5, 7, and 9 squared. I remember that he said, "We couldn't have done better if we'd planned it." And I remember thinking, but who would have thought to plan this?

No matter what happened in our lives, I always knew, without any doubt, that my dad loved me and my brothers, even when (or maybe especially when) we were being punished. I also knew, without any doubt, that he loved my mom.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that not every child has this kind of childhood. Not everyone grows up in such a secure and loving home with such amazing parents. I also discovered that not everyone loved math and statistics like I did.

Now I’m married with three kids of my own, and this has given me a chance to see Daddy’s teaching abilities with the next generation. I remember very clearly overhearing my dad watching a Nebraska football game on TV, and hearing him explain the kind of plays you might want to run on second and 7. I went out to see who he was talking to, and it was daughter Naomi when she was only two months old. I asked Daddy what he was doing, and he told me that it’s never too early to start training the next generation. And it works. Much to my husband’s chagrin, all three of my girls route for Nebraska. Daddy loved watching his granddaughters play soccer and going to their piano recitals. And Mom and Dad took us all on a family vacation out to Yellowstone and Custer State Park to see Daddy’s beloved buffaloes in the wild.

Besides being a mother, you might have guessed that I’m a statistician by profession. Every day I use the lessons he taught me. I teach classes on time series, and I explain to people how magical logarithm can be. I teach my girls math and music and history, and we visit as many battlefields from the War Between the States as we can manage. I still sing tenor on the hymns in church. I still have a very well-mixed sock drawer.

I could never live up to everything Daddy did. I mean, we are talking about the man who had to walk through the snow barefoot to school every day, and uphill both ways. OK, so he liked to tell stories, and I was fairly gullible, but I did always work hard at what I set my mind to do. I always wanted to do my very best, not so that my dad would love me, but because I loved him, and I wanted to be just like him.

The most important thing that Daddy taught me was to be passionate about God. Finding patterns in nature wasn't some kind of hobby with Dad, or something to pass the time. It was just one way to marvel at all the amazing gifts that God has given us, to appreciate the world around us, to see God’s handiwork in even the little things. Daddy taught me that there is beauty in everything around us. There is beauty in every situation, even the bad ones, when we can see that God is in control. When something miraculous happens and other people chalk it up to coincidence or chance, as statisticians, we can figure out the probabilities and see very clearly the hand of God. Daddy taught me how to see the Power behind the chance.

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that if someone doesn't love math, it's only because they didn't have a good teacher. So every day, I can thank God that I had the very best math teacher, right from the start.

Daddy

Tonight I lost my dad to cancer. He was the greatest dad in the world, and my first and greatest math and statistics teacher. I'm so sad to lose him, but I feel so blessed to have had such a wonderful man for my dad and my mentor.

Today was the one-year anniversary of us moving back to the States. I'm so glad that we moved back to the States, and I'm so glad that we live so close to my parents' house.

Graphs

If there is anything I like better than time series, it's statistical graphs.

I had a client who asked me to make some graphs for his research report. It was the most fun I've had doing statistics in a very long time.

His supervisor suggested scatter plots. They turned out to be quite helpful.



He also needed a way to compare results over many questions. So I made graphs of the confidence intervals, taking into account that he was doing multiple comparisons. Though they are a little bit crowded, it was still a great way to look at the questions and see where the statistical differences were.



I could be really happy if I could get paid all the time to make graphs for people's research.

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