Śaunak Sen

If you are looking for places to drink beer, you might want to look at my note on Memphis brewpubs.

A list of Memphis brewpubs.

Many statisticians in American academic institutions have "soft money" appointments funded by a mutable portfolio of research grants. A fundamental aspect of holding such a position is proposing and negotiating "percent effort". We propose a few methods for percent effort estimation for use by soft money statisticians and scientists funding such statisticians.

Karl Broman's Twitter picture with 11 different socks from his laundry sparked a spirited Twitter conversation. We derive exact and approximate formulas for the probability of no matching socks. If there are $n$ sock pairs and $k$ are chosen the probability of no match in $k$ socks is approximately $\exp(-k^2/(4n))$ when $k/n$ is small.

Stata and R give different results for the Ranksum test, a widely-used non-parametric test. We investigate why that happens and make recommendations.

We derive Poisson approximations for the problem using a connection with the famous birthday problem. The probability of no mathching sock if $k$ out of $n$ socks are chosen is of the form $\exp(-c k^2/n)$, where $c$ is a constant depending on sock drawer composition.