by Matt Spittal
This blog has been set-up as a forum for BCA students and has a focus on statistics. Naturally this isn’t the only website devoted to statistics and I wanted to share with you some other blogs that offer a tremendous amount of good stuff. Some of them are directly related to statistical analysis and programming; others offer either a broader view of the world or make a welcome distraction from long nights of studying.
The pick of the bunch is Andrew Gelman’s blog (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/). Along with John Carlin and others, Andrew has written the book Bayesian Data Analysis, which is the textbook for BAYs. His blog is updated constantly with interesting posts on topics ranging from Bayesian inference, modelling techniques, US politics, the use of graphs, sport, and so on. I recommend having a look at it at least once every couple of days.
A second website that I haven’t spent nearly enough time looking at is Gapminder (http://www.gapminder.org/). The heading at the top of the page says it all: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world. There’s a bunch of movies with fascinating graphs posted fairly frequently, and a lot of it seems to be in response to current issues. My goal for the next few weeks is to spend more time on this website.
A related website is TED (http://www.ted.com/). Its focus is much broader than Gapminder, with videos from people such as writer Alain de Botton and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. TED describes itself as offering riveting talks from remarkable people and this is a good one to look at when you need a break from study.
There’s a collection of websites that have been put together to help people learn statistical software. One of the most comprehensive is the Statistical Computing website at UCLA (http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/). SAS, SPSS and Stata are covered in a lot of detail, but other packages are mentioned too. If you are a Stata user, you can’t go past Stata’s support pages, especially the FAQs (http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/). This covers both computing issues as well as statistical issues. New R users with a background in SAS, SPSS or Stata will find Quick-R (http://www.statmethods.net/index.html) helpful. Another blog that has a bunch of useful tips, tricks and tools is dataninja (http://dataninja.wordpress.com/). Finally, although not a statistical package, there are some good websites out there to help people learn Latex. (Latex is a program for writing and typesetting documents – it excels at typing equations and is far easier to use than Equation Editor. See http://www.latex-project.org/ to learn more.) I have found Andrew Robert’s website to be one of the most helpful introductions to Latex (see http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/).
One last website that I want to mention is http://www.citeulike.org/. The principle underlying the website is that people upload their citation libraries to the web and share them with others. I guess it is a kind of social networking, or more correctly, knowledge networking. It doesn’t seem to be very useful if you are looking for articles in a certain area, since it is not a comprehensive database of the published literature, but it’s quite good for dipping into every now and then and discovering something you weren’t looking for. The tags seem to be the most useful way of navigating around.
So that’s my quick list of blogs and websites that I finding interesting or useful. What are some other goodies out there? Feel free to leave a comment and share your thoughts with others.
