Last night I received the Vice-Chancellor’s postgraduate supervision award at a function at Government House. I am deeply honoured that my students thought to nominate me for the award. I think I was as surprised as anyone to win, and some people…
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I am frequently asked how I manage my time, and how I manage to get so much done. I don’t know that my approach is right for everyone, but in case it helps here are some comments on how I work.
One of the main traps that people fall into is to do…
I gave a one-day LaTeX workshop today.
Here is the blurb:
LaTeX is an extremely powerful markup language for creating structured documents. It is particularly well-suited for documents containing mathematics, but can be used for any document. Those wh…
According to Andrew Gelman, we should avoid these words in research writing:
Note that
Interestingly
Obviously
It is clear that
It is interesting to note that
very
quite
of course
Notice that
I agree with him that all of these are overused, …
An expanded version of this post is available in my article on “Giving an academic talk”.
With conference season almost upon us, it is timely to discuss what makes a good conference presentation. Here is a suggested structure.
A motivating example dem…
People often ask me for recommendations on forecasting books and time series books. So here is list of eight good books to which I often refer.
(Updated 8 November 2017)
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There was an R workshop on 28-29 June, just before the Australian Statistical Conference. I put in an appearance on the second day giving two talks.
Time series and forecasting in R
handout slides Building R packages for Windows
handout slides
As you will have seen if you poke around these pages, I have a Google Library of books in statistics and forecasting. This is intended to be a complete copy of what is on the shelves in my office (about 400 books), plus books that I would like on my sh…
There is a great article in today’s Australian by my co-author Peter Hall on the crisis in mathematics & statistics education (with student numbers falling at the same time as the number of jobs is rising).
The most interesting comment is the…
A few years ago I did some forecasting work for a commonwealth government department and found that they were forecasting a $5 billion budget using the FORECAST command in Excel. Worse, they were fitting a regression through only three observations and…
I was thinking of writing a book on doing research in statistics. Instead, I decided to write a blog covering the same material, plus other things that might be of interest to my research team. Topics covered include LaTeX, R, writing and preparing a t…
I’m in the final stages of preparing my new exponential smoothing book for publication and have been learning about some LaTeX indexing tools.
The standard subject index is created using the following procedure:
Include \index{entry} commands wh…
(Updated May 2017)
Making tables in LaTeX is one of the few areas where LaTeX can be more difficult than a WYSIWYG editor.
Here are some pointers to tools and packages that I have found useful.
tablesgenerator.com: a web-based tool for generating LaTe…
Last week, Google books introduced a facility whereby users can create their own “library” containing a subset of books to search. I have set up a library of statistical books to aid in searching the statistical literature.
My Google librar…
Many R users seem to get themselves in a bit of a mess with R files and workspaces scattered across different directories. The R files themselves also get messy and hard to follow. So here is some advice on keeping organized with R:
Try to keep code s…
Anyone who starts writing serious R code (i.e., code that involves user-written functions) soon finds the need to use debugging tools. There are a few basic tools in R that are worth knowing about.
The function debug() allows one to step through the ex…
Learning LaTeX Introduction to LaTeX: notes and other materials from a one-day workshop.
Getting started with LaTeX: an excellent online introduction from David Wilkins.
Great reference book from the Indian TeX Users Group.
Excellent on-line tutori…
Most of these jokes were posted to Usenet news groups. People who read such things collected them and put them on their web sites. I have shamelessly borrowed them, edited them and posted them here for the light relief of other statisticians.
The Biolo…