[Interview]: Dason - that guy that isn't a bot

[victorxstc]

Thank you very much for your time on preparing this detailed response. Such a lovely couple, thanks for your pic and your bride's kind permission to put your marriage pic here. Please give my (our) kind regards to her too. And glad her father is perfectly fine.

I might have taken an IQ test when I was younger but I don't remember. I don't particularly care for IQ tests though so I probably won't ever take one unless I'm required to for some strange reason.

You see? Don't you particularly care for IQ, or are you a BOT in disguise???!!!

Are we talking about main interest in general or statistically? I'll assume we're talking about in general and leave statistics out of it for the time being. If you meant statistically I'll be more than happy to answer that as well if you ask it later.

My main interest is in spending time with Kelley and Brutus (our beagle).

Yes I meant in general

Staying up late the night before I have to present results or turn homework in. Works like a charm

You still leak information that shows you are a bot Because no human can bear this, and still fulfill the expectations. But congrats actually.

So I guess I just can't see how anybody finds soccer boring.

I agree that it is the best or one of the best sports. But had heard that American people somehow dislike soccer, and consider it a boring fake sport compared to their own football.

Also congratulations for winning the national competitions I had heard that mathematicians do not like sport, but apparently it was quite wrong.

My first course on regression is probably what hooked me initially (I actually hated my first stats course but I took regression after that and finally saw the beauty in stats). I was REALLY hooked when I took the mathematical statistics sequence of courses.

Sincerely glad that you have chosen the best option.

I do enjoy helping people even though I don't think I'll ever meet them in person. I don't see why that should matter too much.

I don't know either. As I asked before, sometimes I wonder what could be your motive in helping passionately some "virtual" friends (or imaginary friends, as trinker puts). Maybe a bot doesn't need motive

I'm married to the woman I love and I'm currently being paid to go to school. Sounds pretty great to me! Success! I am quite satisfied with the way things are going right now. Grad school is great but to be honest I can't wait to get an actual job...

SO GLAD FOR YOU THEN. WISH YOU ALL THE BEST.

[Eugenie]

Are you from Iowa, or do you just work there, and you are actually from outer space?

[Dason]

What were you like as a teenage kid? What were you into?

I was very into soccer. It's what took up a lot of my free time. In middle school I actually skateboarded for a while (cause you know I'm totally badass like that) but gave that up after I sprained my ankle - I didn't want to keep injuring myself and ruin my chances of making the varsity team. My friends and I were a strange group though - we were all very nerdy and also into sports. We also were big into art. Visual Arts Classic (VAC) was an art "group" I guess you would call it (sort of like an art club that competes) that a lot of us were in during high school. I mostly made videos and did paintings. I loved drawing as well but it wasn't my strong point. I was also in a band with a few of my friends. We mainly did covers of Blink 182 and Green Day - that kind of stuff.

But like I said we were nerdy too. My friends played a lot of D&D but I never really got into that. I was more into video games. The N64 will always be the king of consoles to me - nothing can beat Goldeneye

Were you in the math club? What made you decide "yep stats is where I'm heading" and when did this happen?

In high school I guess I was in the "math club" but we didn't really have club meetings. We went to math competitions but didn't have any "practices" or anything like that. Although I do remember we had a "conference meet" at our school one time and I ended up winning the individual portion of it (but our team only came in second) and I remember my teacher was just beaming with pride - it was a good day.

During undergrad I was very active with the math/stat club though. In my second semester of my first year I became the club secretary and held that position for a year and a half. Those were good times - the minutes I wrote up weren't terribly official but they were filled with nerd humour. I later became co-President with another member. Although to be honest I don't feel like I had as much fun as President as I did as secretary - there was too much boring stuff to take care of as president but as secretary I just got to make stupid jokes... those were the days.

I already sort of answered the question about when I decided to go with stats. But I'll mention some more that I hated my first stats course. The professor was this adorable old lady but she didn't speak very loud so it was hard to hear her. That and the fact that I felt like there were so many different types of tests and I didn't really 'get' the difference between them and why we needed so many... it wasn't good times. But the next year I took a course on Regression and that made a lot of sense to me. It started to click more and since we weren't introducing a new test every seven seconds it made much more sense and I understood the big picture much better. I wouldn't say there was really a defining moment when I finally knew that stats was what I was going to go for. I loved both mathematics and statistics. It wasn't really until I sat down and said "**** - I'm going to need to start applying places in the next couple of months" that I really put my foot down and said statistics is what I was going to do.

In an Ideal world where do you see the future Dason 5 years from now?

I would love to be teaching at a teaching university. I think I could work in industry for a while - but I don't think I want to end up at an R1 university where research is everything I do and teaching is just an annoyance on the side. But ultimately I want to end up teaching so if I could get there in 5 years that what I would love to be doing.

[Dason]

So why do you love slimey lizards who have been extinct for tens of millions of years?

I'm assuming you're talking about my hatred of raptors. That is simple - they are pure evil. They are killing machines that will stop at nothing to destroy humanity. They also tell terrible gossip.

To be honest it's a mixture of being freaked out in the scene from Jurassic Park where the raptor jumps through the ventilation ducts unexpectedly and my former main online community being the xkcd forums. In case you didn't know: xkcd is notorious for raptor paranoia.

[Dason]

As I asked before, sometimes I wonder what could be your motive in helping passionately some "virtual" friends (or imaginary friends, as trinker puts). Maybe a bot doesn't need motive

I am not a bot. I don't know how many times I need to say that for you peoples to believe it!

But I guess the reasons I help out have been outlined here. I'll just quote my response in that thread - the question being "Why are you here?":

1) I love teaching. I don't really get enough of it in my current position...
2) I know quite a bit about a few topics so I have the ability to help others.
3) I don't really know anything at all about stats (the more you learn the more you realize that you know nothing...) so I like seeing what other people suggest and have to say on certain issues.
4) I'll agree with CowboyBear... procrastination.
5) Now that I'm a mod I try to keep it nice and clean around here so it's not riddled with spam and questions are in sensible locations.
6) I don't ask many questions but there are quite a few very knowledgeable people around here that have some good insights.

[Dason]

Are you from Iowa, or do you just work there, and you are actually from outer space?

I'm originally from Wisconsin. I did my undergrad in Minnesota. And I'm in Iowa because Iowa State has a really good Statistics department. So I guess I'm in Iowa just for the school. We probably won't stay in Iowa after I graduate but it's possible. Although with the way things are going I'll most likely continue my tour of the Midwest and head over east into Illinois (Noooo!!!)

[noetsi]

I'm assuming you're talking about my hatred of raptors. That is simple - they are pure evil. They are killing machines that will stop at nothing to destroy humanity. They also tell terrible gossip.

To be honest it's a mixture of being freaked out in the scene from Jurassic Park where the raptor jumps through the ventilation ducts unexpectedly and my former main online community being the xkcd forums. In case you didn't know: xkcd is notorious for raptor paranoia.

There haven't been living raptors for tens of millions of years....

[Dason]

That's exactly what the raptors want you to think.

Just so it's clear - I don't actually think there are raptors around. But it's fun to pretend... especially when trinker goes along with it and sides with the evil enemy... **** raptors always being jerks like that...

[noetsi]

The evolved into those who wrote comprehensive exams (with the most powerful becoming those who wrote prelims). Note the special glee they get from making these closed book, when in reality no one would ever answer questions like this from memory.

[Dason]

The evolved into those who wrote comprehensive exams (with the most powerful becoming those who wrote prelims). Note the special glee they get from making these closed book, when in reality no one would ever answer questions like this from memory.

Depends on the question

I know when I was doing consulting I would look at a lot of output that people would bring to the meeting and I would do a bunch of stuff off the top of my head to check if their output even made sense.

Now doing the theory off the top of my head... I typically don't do that but it's still good to know. And Lord knows I wouldn't have taken the time to memorize some of those theorems as thoroughly as I did if the prelim would have been open book.

[noetsi]

I dont think I would have the courage to run any complex method without looking something up. Like say that the interaction and error term in a random effect ANOVA are confounded so you can't calculate interaction terms for random effects. Or at least that is what my class slides say. When I did HLM which also uses random effects we calculated a lot of interactions.

[Dason]

Well it wasn't necessarily that I ran anything too complex. But looking at output and seeing if it seems reasonable for what they say they did. For instance knowing what the data is we can check degrees of freedom for certain things and see if they match what we should get if the person described things adequately. A lot of times things ... didn't check out the way they thought they should so I would have to look at their code more in depth to see what they actually were running.

[Tabachnick]

What are your views on users creating sock-puppet accounts? Can it ever be justified?
>_>
<_<

[victorxstc]

Could you please rank the programming languages in order and give each a score on a scale of 100? Particularly I'm interested in your opinion regarding C/C++, R, JAVA.

[noetsi]

What will you do when the next EMP burst gets rid of all the computers and calculators? Ever used a slide rule?