From the Gates Foundation 2012 Annual Letter:

I still find it hard to believe that 95 percent of teachers are not given specific feedback about how to improve. Even more important than a pay schedule that rewards excellence is identifying and understanding excellence so that teachers know how they can improve. In all the meetings I have had with teachers around the country, and in the surveys we have done, it is clear that most teachers want more feedback and will use it to improve, even if the financial rewards for performance are comparatively modest.

“Those who wish to protect natural ecosystems learn, to their stupefaction, that they have to work harder and harder — that is, to intervene even more, at always greater levels of detail, with ever more subtle care — to keep them ‘natural enough.’”

-Bruno Latour, in Love Your Monsters

“The history of the design professions is largely a history of overqualification, of men and women who have insisted on doing more than either clients or public ever asked for.”

-Ralph Caplan, By Design

Horace Dediu makes an important argument that Apple’s stock price has been based simply on the value of its latest products, whereas “the process of product development at Apple is worth nothing.”

In other words, from the market’s perspective:

Innovations are valuable, but there is no such thing as an innovation process. If there was such a thing, then we could measure it and put a number on its value. Until then, innovation is nothing more than a spin of the roulette wheel.

Dediu’s unspoken point, of course, is that the market is missing something huge: Apple has honed and demonstrated its ability to repeatedly design, produce, and sell innovative consumer electronics products. I am absolutely convinced that their success is not due to luck but rather to a finely tuned innovation process. That doesn’t mean they will never release duds, of course, but it means that on the whole they can be counted on to continue to disrupt markets with innovative products. The wider technology community misunderstands this ability so deeply that instead of trying to copy Apple’s innovation process, they insist that it is nothing but good luck and good marketing.

“There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.”

-Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College [TED talk]

“Statistics: that’s a subject that you could and should use on a daily basis. It’s risk, it’s reward, it’s randomness, it’s understanding data. I think if… all American citizens knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn’t be in the economic mess we’re in today.”

-Arthur Benjamin [TED talk]

“Children starting school this year will be retiring in [2070]. Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in even 5 years time, and yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. The unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.”

 - Ken Robinson [TED talk]

I thought this was worth coming back to. From an article titled “Heart Before Head: The Legacy of Steve Jobs.”

Jobs: ”Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

You: What do my inner-voice and heart want most for me to do with my life?

Jobs: ”Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

You: If I trusted that eventually the dots will connect when I follow my heart, what would be my vision and what would I do next?

Jobs: ”Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

You: What big choices would I make if I only had a short while left to live?

In high school, I made a website on ancient Roman architecture as a class project in world history. That was over ten years ago. A few days ago I got an email:

I recently came across your resource website at http://www.robinstewart.com/personal/learn/romarch/links.htm and I found it to be extremely helpful in some personal academic research I’m doing — I just wanted to say thank you.  As a student and an educator, it is a rare treat to come across such thoughtful and concise online resources like this, especially the older ones. In my humble opinion, this is one of the timeless treasures of the Internet.

I forwarded that along to the teacher of the history class, with the subject line “History project website still useful more than ten years later…” His response:

Hi Robin.  Wow.  That is really kind of awesome.  I wouldn’t have bet money that the site was still on-line. Bravo all over again.

I guess this is why I keep things around on my website.

To plan a statistical hypothesis test, specify the model you will use to test the null hypothesis and the parameter of interest. Of course, all models require assumptions, so you will need to state them and check any corresponding conditions.

When the conditions fail, you might proceed with caution, explicitly stating your concerns. Or you may need to do the analysis with and without an outlier, or on different subgroups, or after re-expressing the response variable. Or you may not be able to proceed at all.

-Intro Stats (De Veaux, Velleman, Bock)