Happy Birthday Normal Deviate

Today is the one year anniversary of this blog. First of all, thanks to all the readers. And special thanks to commenters and guest posters. This seems like a good time to assess whether I have achieved my goals for the blog and to get suggestions on how I might proceed in year two.

GOALS. My goals in starting the blog were:

(1) To discuss random things that I happen to find interesting.

(2) To discuss ideas at the interface of statistics and machine learning.

(3) To post every other day.

Goal 1: Achieved.

Goal 2: Partially achieved.

Goal 3: Failed miserably. I was clearly too ambitious. I am lucky if I post once per week.

THE BEST AND WORST. Favorite post: flatland. I still think this is one of the coolest and deepest paradoxes in statistics.

Least Favorite Post: This post where I was dismissive of PAC learning. I think I was just in a bad mood.

LESSON LEARNED. Put “Bayes”, “Frequentist” or “p-value” in the title of a blog post and you get zillions of hits. Put some combination of them and get even more. If I really wanted to get a big readership I would just post exclusively about this stuff. But it would get boring pretty fast.

GOING FORWARD. I hope to keep posting about once per week. But I don’t have any plans to make any specific changes to the blog. I am, however, open to suggestions.

Any suggestions for making the blog more interesting or more fun?

Any suggestions for inducing more people to write comments?

Any topics you would like me to cover? (I already promised to do one on Simpson’s paradox).