DECISION STATS

The Digital Divide Hypothesis

This is a screenshot of last 1000 visitors to Decision Stats. Notice heavy concentration in US East Coast and West Coast, Latin America’s light visitors, Almost none from Africa, Some Israeli visitors from Middle East (but not many from Arab countries). Europe is visiting ,it tapers of in Eastern Europe but not most of Western Russia and China (language problems ? proxy walls ?)

It may also serve as a hypothesis for where internet is affordable enough and economies developed enough for people to surf analytics web sites. And where the digital haves and have nots stand. Either that or something wrong in Web Analytics software.

Bonus- Blog Boy cartoons on Weekends for levity in these interesting times.

The Unlucky President Quiz

Please answer the following questions about US Presidents.

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1) On which President’s watch, did America suffer the worst mainland continental attack in terms of casualties in over a hundred years ?

2) Who is the only President who was elected President after intervention from the Supreme Court, despite losing the popular vote ?

3) Under which Presidential regime did the United States of America become known more as a Christian nation rather than a nation which treats all faiths equally ?

4) Which President supported funding for challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution ?

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5) In more than 75 years , under which President did Wall Street have the biggest crisis ?

6) Which President was censured by the UN security general as launching an “invasion” which eventually killed more troops than any War since Vietnam.

7) On whose watch did the US suffer the worst rescue efforts on Hurricanes.

Who is more unlucky ?

The Unluckiest President or the people under him.

Think before answering the quiz.

Stats for Nerds

Google Chrome has a feature called Stats for Nerds.I personally would have preferred it called Stats for Geeks but customer feedback is not Google’s cup of tea yet. It basically measures memory consumption for multiple processing browser , including by other browsers. This gives the task manager functionality to the browser to kill specific pages, in case of crashes (like with Adobe Flash ). Here is the screenshot , in case you dont belive it.

This is another example of humour 🙂 by chaps who dropped out of Phd’s themselves.

(Note- Sergey Brin just blogged he has been tested and found genetically pre disposed to Alzeihemers disease , like his mother who is suffering already).

You can send him emails at sergey@google.com

OT :American Tie

A weekend poem on this week’s sub prime crisis.With Due apologies to the song American Pie by Don Mclean.

Bye Bye Mr American Tie,

Drove your balance sheet to the ground ,while aiming high

And good old boys were taking risky bets, why

Saying this will be the day I will fly

This will be the day I fly

It happened in a land far away,

Wall Street suits and ties went to play,

With exotic mortgages and collateral held sway.

The jesters they were, they passed securities

Bought and Sold ,each one in piece.

There was nobody to stop the band,

And music played ,and the players danced.

Collected fat bonuses and spent it at once.

Stock options had so much romance……….

Till I got the news the day the music died.

I started singing –

Bye Bye Wall Street Tie,

Drove your balance sheet to the ground ,while aiming high

And good old boys were taking risky bets, why

Saying this will be the day I will fly

This will be the day I fly

My hands were clenched in fists of rage,

Bad news from front to last page,

I was going to lose my mortgage,

My Stypid Indian bank had invested in that lucrative phase,

Now it kicked up my mortgage rate…….

And no one could tell me why.

The day the music died.The day the music ………DIED

Images -Google Search

Textbooks for free

If you wanted to learn without paying thousands of rupees for expensive textbooks ,help is here. This is an initiative by Rice University called connexions and I quote "

Connexions is:

a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

authors create and collaborate
instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
learners find and explore content "

The textbooks are basically mashups of modules by experts around the world. Especially check out the applied statistics textbook.

I kind of liked it better than Google Knol ,but lately

Google Scholar is a good way to search for knowledge too.

The site is here at http://cnx.org/

Tip :Regression Models using MS Excel

Did you know that you can create a regression tool in MS Excel for regression of upto 16 variables. You can automate it using record Macro feature even if you donot know Excel Macros.

SAS ETS and SPSS Trends can both make time series models. But so can MS Excel by linking up of cells. In addition you can use the solver add-in to minimize the square of the error term by changing the parameters of the exponential smoothening forecasts used.

Regression is one of the simplest technique to use, and is the industry standard for analytics, yet is sometimes overlooked for segmentation or decision trees to get even more simplicity.

R Graphics

A great book for R graphics is here. Its especially useful for people who are new into R and or using graphical function primarily.

http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/RGraphics/chapter2.html

This is a good textbook till the new edition November 2008 release of Bob Munchien’s R for SAS and SPSS Users (http://www.springer.com/statistics/computational/book/978-0-387-09417-5 )

The existing free copy is at http://oit.utk.edu/scc/RforSAS&SPSSusers.pdf