I) If there was a theme tune to your life, what would it be?
changes, to be very honest. so you'd need to tune in regularly to see what's playing. right now, my life is dancing to these following tunes:
for the day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi1mri-uoDc
and for the night:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2lkp_zsOy4
II) I'll always like asking nasty job-interview question; What are your strengths and weaknesses? What is your biggest failure? And what is your biggest success?
strengths: OBSESSIVE attention to detail. one of the things my advisor loves is that i'm not just "interested" in problems. i'm CONSUMED BY THEM, i become enamoured... if i'm interested in something i devote every single waking hour to finding an answer and pull out all of my available resources to find an answer.
weakness: everything i do must be done serially. you can't interrupt me when i'm doing something or i get super annoyed and do it wrong (sometimes on purpose). that makes me incredibly inefficient sometimes
failure: i couldn't land a spot in the gradprogram i wanted so had to make-do with my 2nd best option. it wasnt directly my fault and plan to re-apply when the time is right, but it is what it is.
success: my marriage to alex. no one (not even my own mother) thought it would last all the years it has lasted
III) I saw this written in a second hand book I bought in states ""If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." - Derek Bok . I wholeheartedly agree with the implications of this, therefore extending this to statistics, how do you feel about the pre-packaged "blackbox" type analyses packages that many students are taught? Would the world be a better place if we spent some more time teaching science students that math is not scary, and show em the real nitty gritty details? [Pretty sure this question will be tl;dr for trinker so now I' m sneaking in the most important question] In the same light as the previous, how do you feel about ggplot?
well... there're several parts to this question so i'll chop it apart, heh.
ready-made, black-box like packages: i used to hate them. the first couple of months when i jumped from my undergrad in the sciences to a master's degree in arts i was seriously considering quitting because i just couldn't handle all the hand-waving arguments and metaphors they were using instead of math. i even found out very quickly that an undergrad degree in statistics places you WAY AHEAD of most of your instructors in qunatitative methods in the social sciences. yes, that really awkward moment when you realize the instructor realizes that you know more than him/her. now i think i'm OK with it because of something a prof i used to work with told me: "i'm a such-and-such by trade, not a data analyst". it then dawned on me: not everyone can be a data analyst because they don't have the time, even if they want to... and they don't need to be. so now i think that as long as people have a vague intuition of what they're doing, i'm happy about that.
teaching of science: YES! OH HELL YES! honestly, even if people don't plan on becoming scientists i think being able to teach people how to think as a scientist, evalualte information critically, pause to reflect on things, etc. would do a great good to the world. sometimes the selfish side of me thinks "but if everybody knows this stuff, where does that place YOU?" but i think for the greater good of the world, i'm willing to take that chance. it'll never happen though. i work in the education dept of my institution so i know how math/science education is going downhill not only in north america, but in the western world in general. i guess that means i'll get a bigger paycheque when the time comes for me to apply for a job?
ggplot: i LOVE it. quick, easy, pretty graphs with lotsa colours for other people to enjoy. although personally, i feel more at home with tables of numbers
i'll take my jasmine tea to go please!
V) Where do you see yourself in 5, 10 and 20 years?
5 year mark: PhD on one hand and Canadian passport on the other (by then i'll be elegible for citizenship)
10 year mark: Alex and i have been talking about moving to Barcelona, Spain for a while so he can open an European branch of his business, plus real estate is dirty cheap there right now. so Barcelona, here we go!
20 year mark: uhmmm.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi1mri-uoDc
VI) Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once wrote; "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth". Do you think this is true in math? What about statistics?
i don't believe it's true about mathematics/statistics. i think many of the phenomena they describe relates to immutable, universal concepts (i.e. "the truth"). now as far as how does mathematics/statistics relates to the real world.... well, let's just say that's another story
VII) In your opinion, what is the role statistics play in most research? What role should it play?
unless it relates to research about statistics itself, i've always thought of it as a sort of 'gatekeepr' of sorts. appropriate data analysis helps mix and match the chaos that data can be into knowledge. although the most important part is, of course, how said results are interpreted into knowledge and that's up to the scientist himself/herself
VIII) You just got some fresh data. What do you do?
kill it with fire!!!!
nah, plot it. plotting is always good for new data
IX) Do you ever work spend hours working out the relationship within your data with equations on a blackboard, whiteboard, or piece of paper? (or on the window like in a beautiful mind? ) And only then start conducting the relevant statistics?
i think with data and the availability of computers, the process is simultaneous. you plan and analyze at the same time. because, sometimes, the way you intend to conduct an analysis changes drastically as you begin to explore your dataset.
X) What got you hooked on TS? A year from now, what is going to keep you coming to TS?
the people here. same answer to both
And one bonus Q: Why spunky? What definition of the word were you going for?
there's a PG-13 version of the story and a mature version of it. which one would you like? (only Dason knows both)
Extra bonus Q: Copy and paste the output of the R-command .packages(TRUE) below.
Code:
[1] "ADGofTest" "asbio" "bayesSurv" "Cairo" "car" "coda" "colorspace" "copula" "deSolve" "dichromat"
[11] "digest" "e1071" "ggm" "ggplot2" "GPArotation" "gRbase" "gsl" "gsubfn" "gtable" "igraph0"
[21] "labeling" "lavaan" "MASS" "Matrix" "maxLik" "MCMCpack" "memoise" "miscTools" "mnormt" "modeest"
[31] "moments" "MplusAutomation" "msm" "munsell" "mvtnorm" "nFactors" "normalp" "patchDVI" "pbivnorm" "plotrix"
[41] "plyr" "polycor" "ppcor" "proto" "pspline" "psych" "pwr" "quadprog" "RColorBrewer" "relimp"
[51] "reshape2" "Rlab" "rmeta" "sandwich" "scales" "scatterplot3d" "semPLS" "sfsmisc" "signal" "smoothSurv"
[61] "stabledist" "stringr" "truncnorm" "tuneR" "XML" "xtable" "zoo" "base" "boot" "class"
[71] "cluster" "codetools" "compiler" "datasets" "foreign" "graphics" "grDevices" "grid" "KernSmooth" "lattice"
[81] "methods" "mgcv" "nlme" "nnet" "parallel" "rpart" "spatial" "splines" "stats" "stats4"
[91] "survival" "tcltk" "tools" "utils"