my slides & survey

[Madelaine Gogol]

Hi,

Thanks to the new people who came last night, nice to meet you. Interesting to see some new stuff and talk about data, maps, etc.

I posted my powerpoint slides on our groupspaces page.

I'm curious about a few things regarding the group - like weeknights vs. weekend meetings, so please take my survey.

The next meeting is scheduled for Saturday, December 8th at 2pm in the Plaza Library small meeting room, but I could change it depending on the results of the survey. Anybody with something to present, let me know.

Thanks,

Madelaine

[Earl F. Glynn]

Thanks for the slides.

 

For the right problem, the radial plots are cool.

 

Thanks for the map links, especially the one for KS DASC.  I had no idea there were Highway Patrol areas and Parole Regions <g>.  The ZIP code boundaries might be useful for some future projects.

 

efg

---

From: kansas-city-...@googlegroups.com [mailto:kansas-city-...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Madelaine Gogol
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2012 12:10 PM
To: kcrusersgroup
Cc: kansas-city-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: my slides & survey

[Earl F. Glynn]

Perhaps some might be interested in these comments about coursera online classes using R.

https://www.coursera.org/

 

These or similar classes will likely be taught again at coursera.

 

Today I finished this class:

 

Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp  (7 weeks)

https://www.coursera.org/course/biostats

 

Calculus was assumed for understanding the lectures, homework and quizes.  A few were not easy to understand. 

 

R examples were given but not used all that much.  I don't remember any homework or quiz that required an R solution (but I used R to solve several of the problems -- in some cases I cheated by finding a numerical solution instead of an analytical solution).

 

I found these lectures the most interesting:

 

* Likelihood

* T Confidence intervals

* Jackknife

* Bootstrapping

* Logs (about working with log-normal distributions)

 

 

A few weeks ago I completed:

 

Computing for Data Analysis (4 weeks)

https://www.coursera.org/course/compdata

 

This class was mostly about using R as a tool for data analysis. For me it was a lot of review but I still learned a number of new R tricks.

 

The class forced me to look at lattice graphics, which I have not used very much.  For some exploratory problems it may be a good approach.

 

The two ~30 minute lectures about regular expressions were very good.

 

The last video lecture was about differences between S3 and S4 classes and methods.  That was very good.

 

 

An 8-week class, "Data Analysis", that uses R starts in January and runs for 8 weeks:

https://www.coursera.org/#course/dataanalysis

 

 

efg

 

Earl F Glynn

Overland Park

 

 

[Chris Seidel]

Sounds great Earl. Quick question: once a class is taught at coursera,
are the lectures archived such that anyone can go back and view them
at will? I've seen some nice lectures from classes at MIT that way,
but I had the sense that coursera courses aren't necessarily archived
in an open fashion.

-Chris

[Earl F. Glynn]

Hi, Chris,

I think the archiving varies by class, but I'm still collecting data points.

There was a note on the forum for the Computing for Data Analysis class that
access to the course site was to end a day or two ago (the classes ended a
few weeks ago), but I can still access the video lectures. That one sounds
like it's going away.

But in two other cases, I've enrolled in an old class out of curiosity, and
was still able to view the video lectures and grab the lecture notes as
PDFs. I watched enough to find out I wasn't interested, and then
unenrolled.

I'd suggest to try to enroll and see if you can get to the video lectures.
The two classes I completed have been fairly strict on weekly quiz/homework
deadlines, so you may not be able to access those after deadlines have
passed, but perhaps the video lectures are all you want.

There are a few MIT/Harvard/Berkeley/UT classes at the following link, but I
haven't tried them yet:
https://www.edx.org/

efg

[Madelaine Gogol]

Huh, I just assumed they'd stick around as archives... I started a few courses, but didn't keep up (one of which was the Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp). Thought I could come back and finish on my own schedule... I do plan on attempting the data analysis one in January.

If anybody still hasn't taken my R user group survey, I have 8 responses and lots of close calls or ties on questions... I'll look at the results and make some decisions soon.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/J387WHM

We got approved for 100$ sponsorship from revolution analytics again, I should be getting that sometime soon. There isn't a real consensus so far on what to do with our money, we're split between 3 things, but I haven't voted yet, so I may be the decider in the end.

Madelaine