canoe.moore

I paddled the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore last week with my good friends, Darren and Jesse. What an amazing place! Several local paddlers recommended that I visit the Apostle Islands, but I had no idea how incredible it would be.

On the first morning we rented sea kayaks and took a safety course from a local outfitter. After a shuttle to to Little Sandy Bay, we paddled out into Lake Superior. Paddling on the largest lake in the world (by surface area) was intimidating at first. Thankfully, we had low winds and sunny weather to ease our fears.

Our first destination was Sand Island, which is notable for its sea caves, lighthouse, and old-growth trees. The calm weather allowed us to spend a lot of time exploring the caves. The lighthouse was picturesque from the water as we rounded the point. Our campsite was in Lighthouse Bay on a secluded, tropical-looking beach. After setting up camp, we hiked up the beach for a visit to the lighthouse and the old-growth stand.

On the second day we paddled about 10 miles from Sand to Oak, stopping at York for lunch. We faced relatively high winds and choppy waves at first, but the weather eventually calmed and we strategically paddled on the leeward sides of the islands. We covered the 10 miles quickly--much faster than hiking the same distance--and arrived at Oak for a two-night stay. We chose to take a layover day at Oak because it offered inland hiking, including a trail up the highest point in the islands.

On our first night at Oak, we shared the bay with two sailboats seeking refuge from southwesterly winds. The crew from one of the sailboats came ashore in their dinghy to check out the trailhead originating from our campsite. They were very nice folks from the Twin Cities, and they invited us out to see their sailboat. I took them up on their offer and paddled the solo kayak out to their boat to watch the sunset.

We woke up to beautiful weather again on the third day. We explored the beach, took turns paddling the solo kayak out to some rock formations on the northeastern corner of Oak, and hiked about two miles to the high overlook. From above, Lake Superior looked even bigger--much too big for kayaks. Another highlight from day three... practicing my kayak roll that I learned while attending Maryville College.

We packed up early on the fourth and last day and headed back to the outfitter where our car was parked. Our next stop was Duluth and Fitger's Brewhouse for food and a celebratory beer. My friends really liked western region of Lake Supeior, as well as Minneapolis. I hope they'll return for another adventure soon.

Google's statisticians routinely use randomized experiments to improve their products (and profit), but did you know they also conduct quasi-experiments when random assignment is not feasible? I receive the American Statistical Association's (ASA) membership magazine called Amstat News. Daryl Pregibon, a Google statistician (or "engineer" as they are called internally), was invited to write about the company's statistical practices in the May issue. He writes that Google users can be randomly assigned to treatment conditions, but

"it is usually not possible to randomly assign advertisers to treatment groups due to contractual obligations and/or their willingness to be 'experimental units' for a service for which they are paying. In such cases, we ... use statistical methods that try to tease out causal inferences. Propensity score matching, inverse propensity weighting, and double robust estimates are some of the methods established in social and biological sciences currently in use at Google when randomization is not possible."

That approach mirrors best practices in quantitative evaluation. Randomized field trials are considered the gold standard for judging the degree to which a program or its components cause a desired outcome; when random assignment is not feasible, quasi-experiments provide a valuable alternative. Evaluation researchers rarely have as much control over conditions as Google's "engineers." Consequently, evaluators must rely more on quasi-experiments to "tease out causal inferences." Another key difference is that no matter how enormous a program data set may seem and no matter how many parameters a client might want an evaluator to estimate, those amounts will never reach the terabytes of data or the millions of parameter estimates that Pregibon describes as commonplace in life of a Google statistician.

By the way, my master's paper involved applying inverse propensity weighting to account for self selection into a local public school district. Does that mean a career as a Google statistician is in my future?

It has been a while since I've posted any fun, canoe-related content. So I created a set of KML maps of the BWCAW. I was inspired to post these after I saw the UMN Borchert Map Library post a link to an interactive BWCAW map. Canoeists, enjoy.

With spring semester in my rear view mirror, I found some time to use the maptools package to make a proficiency map that can be displayed in Google Earth. It's essentially a choropleth map in Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format. Google Earth takes visualizing educational outcomes to a whole new level. Distributing proficiency maps in KML format would make it easy for parents, school district employees, policy makers, and students themselves to explore their district's test scores and those of nearby districts. Additionally, KML proficiency maps could help evaluators of educational programs involve stakeholders and frame questions.

Try it for yourself. You can click on the image below to explore Minnesota's 3rd grade math proficiency results with Google Earth. After you've gotten your fill of zooming around the map, try the following:

• Click on a district to activate a pop-up window containing the district's name and results.
• Click on the "+" sign next to "2007 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA-II)" under the Places sidebar. The district results will expand downward, showing results in tabular format with map links. Double-click a district name in the sidebar to zoom to that location.
• Use the Search -> Find Business section of the sidebar to find an after school tutoring program in a district of your choice.

Please leave a comment if you have any feedback about this approach.

Amy and I visited her brother in Boise, Idaho, over spring break. It was great to see where Brad lives and to meet some of his friends and co-workers at Boise State University. It was also nice to be in the mountains--Minnesota is very flat! Boise reminded me of Boulder, Colorado, but with a more relaxed feel.

I spent some of my break finishing proposals for the American Evaluation Association conference and a survey instrument for the North Star STEM Alliance. Nevertheless, we experienced a lot in just a few days:

• skied Bogus Basin,
• took a dip in the Pine Flats hot springs,
• visited the World Center for Birds of Prey,
• hiked around Camel's Back Park,
• picnicked along the Boise River, and
• watched Gran Torino at the cinema.

I highly recommend a visit to Idaho, if you've never been.

Each year the Department of Educational Psychology holds Graduate Student Research Day to showcase research conducted by its graduate students. About 90 people attended this year. I was one of six students who delivered a presentation. My fellow presenters--Ruth Swartwood, Cengiz Zopluoglu, Alicia Ayodele, Ben Seipel, and Breanne Byiers--did an excellent job. Many other students shared their research via posters, all of which were outstanding.

My presentation, "A spatial analysis of school district performance in Minnesota, demonstrating spatially enabled evaluation," consolidated some of my earlier posts to this blog and summarized the paper that I am scheduled to present at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) meeting in San Diego.

By looking to other social science disciplines that have become spatially enabled, I identified some ways that applied educational researchers can make better use of geographic mapping and spatial statistics. For example, we could enhance survey data and minimize respondent burden by spatially referencing the primary data and joining secondary data from the Census Bureau. Extending the promising uses, I spatially analyzed school district performance in Minnesota in 2007 and found the following.

• Neighboring school districts influenced performance to a small degree in limited instances (i.e., reading proficiency of third graders in poverty).
• Several school districts were found to have outperformed their neighbors, including Randolph, Medford, Orono, and Royalton.
• Six clusters of adjacent, correlated school districts exhibited low reading proficiency, suggesting they should collaborate to improve preschool and early elementary reading efforts.

Click on the image to access the full presentation

I saw Rokia Traoré perform at The Cedar Cultural Center last night. My familiarity with Ali Farka Touré and other Malian artists had me expecting a good show. My friend, Shane, heard a good preview on Minnesota Public Radio (at minute 2:17) and was psyched, too.

Rokia and her band exceeded our expectations. They packed the house and had everyone dancing. Rokia's singing was forceful at times and sultry at others, such as when she sang Gershwin's "The Man I Love" to honor Billie Holiday. I looked around the audience and saw many jaws drop when she showed off her vocal prowess, not to mention her dance moves. The band was tight and having a lot of fun. As a Kentucky boy, I especially liked the banjo-like riffs from the Malian guitar. Their one encore song lasted about twenty minutes, segued in and out of Fela Kuti's "Lady," and featured a solo by each member of the band. Shane, Amy, and I went to Palmer's afterwards, where we sat around the bonfire and swapped concert reviews with other folks who had been there.

Don't miss her when she comes to your town!

Below are some video clips from last night's concert. In the first clip, watch Rokia get rid of her mic stand so she can dance freely. She plays guitar in the second clip.

If was a band, and if that band had a greatest hits album, and if the album featured R commands instead of songs, then the following commands should be counted among the greatest hits (or the most obscure hits).

• windows(record=T) #place this near the top of your script to record all charts; enables scrolling through and compare charts with page up and page down
• oldpar <- par(no.readonly=T) #assign default graphical parameters to an object, to be called back later with par(oldpar)
• windowsFonts(Garamond = windowsFont("TT Garamond")) #add a new font family to the standard database
• file.choose() #allows you to choose a file interactively instead of specifying the path and file name in quotes
• describe() #a better alternative to summary(); from library(psych)
• qq.plot() #plots a quantile-comparison chart with confidence bands; in library(car)
• prplot() #a function in library(faraway) that produces partial residual plots
• Make.Z() #normalizes all variables in a data frame, available in library(QuantPsyc)
• ci.rc() #calculates a regression coefficient confidence interval, in library(MBESS)
• hccm() #another from library(car); calculates heteroscedasticity-corrected covariance matrices for unweighted linear models
• lmer() #a function in library(lme4) that fits linear mixed models
• identify() #use this function in library(graphics) to label points in a scatter plot

I am the teaching assistant for EPSY 8262 Statistical Methods II: Regression and the General Linear Model, taught by Dr. Jeffrey D. Long. is the statistical software that we use in the course. Installing and using R can be difficult at first, so I've gathered some helpful resources for students and others who are getting started.

• Installing R video tutorials by Milton Mayfield
• Statistics with R video tutorials by Mohammad Ehsanul Karim
• Contributed documentation in many languages
• R Reference Card by Tom Short
• Simple R by John Verzani
• Practical Regression and Anova using R by Julian Faraway
• Using R for Data Analysis and Graphics by John Maindonald
• R-help search engine (highly recommended) by Seyed Reza Jafarzadeh, which searches the mailing list archives.
• For spatial statistics (not pertinent to EPSY 8262), I created an R-sig-Geo search engine to retrieve information from those archives.
• R Commander graphical user interface (GUI) by John Fox
• Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power, a New York Times article by Ashlee Vance

Minnesota newspapers have been covering a Wilder Research study that I helped conduct. Here are some of the news articles:

• Kids not ready for kindergarten cost Minnesota schools $113 million a year
• Unprepared kindergartners cost districts millions
• Study: Lack of early education costly
• New study estimates unprepared kindergarteners cost Minnesota K-12 school system $113 million annually

Bush Foundation commissioned the report because several experimental and quasi-experimental studies have shown that disadvantaged children and society benefit greatly from quality preschool experiences, but the costs and benefits had not been tallied for the K-12 system specifically. Temple and Reynolds (2007) provide a good overview of the larger costs and benefits.

Schools incur costs when students repeat grades or drop out before graduation ($66.4 million annually); when student behavior problems and low achievement lead to teacher absenteeism, turnover, and extra compensation ($28.9 million); when English Language Learners enter kindergarten with no educational introduction to English ($11 million); and when schools are forced to combat delinquency ($6 million).

Expanding quality preschool experiences in Minnesota would likely reduce the $113 million shouldered annually by the state's K-12 education system.