Ever get a letter from your alma mater asking what you’ve been up to since you graduated? That data is used to see how well the college has been doing. It’s especially important for public colleges to see if most graduates stick around. Ever send one back? No? Well, most don’t. But that’s a pain […]
REC Estimates for Fiscal Year 2011
The Revenue Estimating Conference published their December predictions for fiscal year 2011 (July 2009 – June 2010). We know the margin of error for REC net revenue predictions for the following year 3.9%–higher than the ideal margin of error. REC revised, downward, their prediction to $5.403 billion in net revenues. Given their historical accuracy it […]
Accuracy of Iowa’s Revenue Estimating Conference
A lot of people have been paying attention to the Revenue Estimating Conference (REC) the last two years. By law, REC meets three times a year–March, October, and December–to forecast tax revenues for the next fiscal year (between July and June). The legislature and governor use the estimates to determine expenditures…
Wii Shortages and Myths (Pertinant to Econ 102)
Last Christmas there was a bit of talk on the shortage of Wii’s. There are a number of examples where people claimed Nintendo intentionally withheld supplies, I’ll highlight one made at EveryJoe: Nintendo claims the shortage is not manufactured as one might wonder. While Nintendo claims a manufactured shortage is not good business, it does […]
LaTeX for Undergraduates
The LATEX for Undergraduates tutorial has been resurrected and all of the broken links should be fixed on this domain. The tutorial describes the typesetting system in a way that can be taught in classrooms alongside another curriculum. The original tutorial was taught at Drake University’s freshman math seminar course.
Iowa Economy: Manufacturing Jobs in Iowa
Here mostly as a reminder. Source: Des Moines Register.
Applied Microeconomics
From a series of forum posts: Person 1: I wasn’t all that impressed with [Johnny Walker] Blue… it seemed to go so far down the “how smooth can we make it” path that it didn’t have a whole ton of personality… Person 2: People don’t drink Johnny Walker Blue because they like it… people drink […]
Fall Enrollment 2009 Presentation
The Iowa Department of Education released the Community College Enrollment Report for Fall 2009. Enrollment exceeded 100,000 students for the first time in the fall semester due to a dramatic year-to-year increase. Below is the presentation given to the state board and the full report can be found here. I’ll write later on the fall […]
Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce Presentation
This presentation was given at the MidAIR 2009 conference in Kansas City. An earlier post highlighted a poster associated with this project. This presentation highlights the methodology and reasoning behind the methodology. I’ve posted scripts and other materials to the project’s webpage.
Anatomy of a Standard Deviation
While reorganizing some old files I ran across this graphic I put together for a statistics 101 tutoring lab. Click the image above to get the full image [PDF] explaining how to calculate the standard deviation for a sample.