Learning More... but where?

[Laelsa]

Hey y'all, I've been reading quite a few posts for awhile and it's been really neat to see people talking about statistics in such an invested manner. Wow, can't believe I just said such an amazingly dorky thing.

Anyways, my point...

Where would you recommend I look, to learn more about statistics, its practical applications, various techniques, academic theories, situations that might disallow any worthwhile analysis? And to narrow it down, I'm personally most interested in human behavior. (Most notably our physical movements and locations at different types of social gatherings and how we interact and flow.) Awesome.

I realize it's an extremely open-ended question but I'm just looking for ideas/motives to start learning more. I was a Math major, Statistics. I also took some actuary classes and am currently slowly working on my second exam. (The actuary stuff is mostly for job diversity in case I need career options.)

My current job benefits GREATLY from any statistics information/application I can use on our data, some of it human behavior. I do a lot of approximation with Excel/Java. I haven't done much with R, even though I have it installed. I don't want to go back to graduate school anytime soon, or ever, but I really want to continue my education in statistics in the real world. Sadly, there is no one at work I can learn from because I know more than everyone else.

I've thought about trying journals, magazines, text books, online classes, online resources, whatever. But I'm not sure where to start. I'm hoping some of you will have some ideas or opinions on what worked for you in continuing your education.

Thanks!

[pontipilat]

See what kind of techniques social scientists (sociology/psychology) are using to analyze similar problems (use google scholar to find articles on your topic).

I suspect some of the relevant areas could be: social network analysis, graph theory

[WhiteCog]

I have seen some great algorithms and models in books on programming AI for video games. The texts go into great detail with ideas that have not even been implemented yet, but which would add realism to NPC behavior for the next generation of games like Oblivion or Fable. I don't have any citations, but I've flipped through a couple of those books and been very impressed by how they conceptualize, quantify, and model social behavior. Some of the math was over my head, but maybe not for you.

[SUNSHINE09]

I think your heading in the right direction..keep the faith..
check some of the techniques from social scientists. Some are cool but some are weird but are using some similar problems..check out gogle scholar for some artical on your topic (s). graph theory and maybe some on social networking..

i hope this helps you..personally i dont get into too much of this...

[Laelsa]

Thanks for everyone's help! I have never used Google Scholar, fantastic resource so far.