Author Archives: jessica

lyrics of the day:

“Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug.”
~ Mary Chapin Carpenter, “The Bug”
’nuff said.

i’ll take sociology for 2.5 million, alex.

(or, possibly, speaking of snobbery part II)
I’ll start with a little history about why I was reading Psychology Today at all (although has anyone noticed it in the check out line lately? I saw it in a grocery store in Berkeley last year). I was reading the NY Times this morning and stumbled upon this. [...]

i need movement.

What song most “moves” you?

it’s more than pocket protectors…

…that divide physics undergrads from their sociology-oriented peers. Apparently, they’re much more likely to think ahead, too.

we have stars, they have punctuation.

The other day Omar and I were listening to an NPR segment reporting that leading economists were predicting a 50/50 chance of a recession in 2008. We immediately turned to one another and asked where our careers would be heading if we made a habit out of predicting 50/50 chances of anything.

‘fess up.

I know I’m not the only one who is currently working on my 2008 ASA submission.

get skooled at scatterplot.

At least they spelled plagiarizing right.

randomness hits close to home.

A few weeks ago, jeremy posted about the intricacies of randomness:
People have asked and, yes, the graphic is an actual scatterplot generated using Stata, although the data are random (and uniformly distributed on both the abscissa and ordinate.) Note the relatively large spaces of white adjacent to places where the points are densely bunched on [...]

the problem with optimism.

My parents called this morning to let us know they were leaving for the airport and to talk to B one more time (knowing my mother, this is because she’s always afraid she’s going to crash without saying goodbye to those she loves). At any rate, apparently my mom told B that she’d be in [...]

injury and impostors.

How long has this been a part of registering for the ASA annual meetings?
I agree and acknowledge that I am undertaking participation in ASA events and activities as my own free and intentional act and I am fully aware that possible physical injury might occur to me as a result of my participation in these [...]

i’ll bite.

No one wants to be the poster who posts after a wildly successful (or controversial) blog entry because nothing seems like it could possibly compare to what came before it. But, eventually someone’s going to have to post again. Plus, I want to say something related to all of this, and I’d like to hear [...]

(singing)

Happy Birthday to me, I’m thirty-three.
In honor of that, eleven trios about me.

go “elf” yourself

This is all over the internet, but now it’s here too: http://www.elfyourself.com.
We all know Omar can blog, but can he dance? Check it out as our household elfs it up.

diffusion or confusion

The other night I had dinner with a group of people. Two of them had only met me once before. One of those two runs around in a former social circle of mine, the other does not. Despite the fact that when initially meeting them some time ago I had introduced myself as Jessica, and [...]

with or without you (jeremy)

A little less than a year ago I joined Jeremy on a weight loss journey. We both eventually fell off the wagon.

foucault field day


allergic to conflict

Yesterday my son (B) - who’s eight - and I waited for an hour and twenty minutes to see a doctor. We weren’t in the emergency room or anything, we hadn’t been triaged to the end of the list. We had an appointment, and the doctor was an allergist.
While we spent some time working on [...]

[something nice here]

A number of my classes in graduate school incorporated peer review. It was “practice” for when we were further entrenched in the big, bad world of academia and would have to write real reviews. Now that I am a full-fledged member of that world, and responsible for reviewing a variety of papers, I’m thinking that [...]