Mid-January flotsam: teaching edition

I was thinking about new material that I will use for teaching this coming semester (starting the third week of February) and suddenly compiled the following list of links:

• William Briggs writes It is time to stop teaching Frequentism to non-statisticians in a paper submitted to The American Statistician. Clearly he doesn’t want to be controversial with an abstract that reads We should cease teaching frequentist statistics to undergraduates and switch to Bayes. Doing so will reduce the amount of confusion and over-certainty rife among users of statistics.
• Making the most of Google searches or a simple graphical explanation of search options for students doing online research. HT: Rafael Maia. I have to pass this link to our students doing Research Methods.
• Reading newspapers or other sources of news is often a frustrating endeavor for the scientifically minded person. Tom Scott makes the experience more bearable with his handy design for journalism warning labels. This would be the perfect complement to Stats Chat’s “Stat of the week” competition.
• Some honesty in statistics: footnote in a statistics textbook. HT: Vince Buffalo.
• R-bloggers, the aggregator of bloggers writing about R, has reached 300 bloggers. Quantum Forest is part of that ever-growing R orgy.
• I am currently sending new-to-R colleagues to Quick-R as a starting point. It is particularly useful if they already know how to run stats in another software (and then I’m not a slave on R-support duty). Thanks Robert for putting it together! Incidentally, I’m ordering a couple of copies of his book R in Action for our department.
• If you have to sell R to your colleagues, David Smith of Revolutions fame has good news: the popularity of R as a language has increased, overtaking both SAS and Matlab. Here are the TIOBE rankings.
• Currently re-reading: Experimental Design and Data Analysis for Biologists by Gerry Quinn and Mick Keough. It would be nice to have R code for the whole book; please let me know in the comments if you have seen it somewhere in the internets.
• In a double-blind study violinists can’t tell the difference between Stradivarius violins and new ones. HT: Tim Harford.
• P.S. Douglas Andrews reminds us about The big mistake: teaching stat as though it were math. HT: @AmstatNews. This commentary does link with Briggs’s rant, but it also smells of professional protectionism.

Enough procrastination. Let’s keep on filling out PBRF forms; it is the right time for that hexennial activity.