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An interesting look at what drives people to adopt a particular statistical package, and what the future might hold for R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata.

The author's review of the readership statistics for his own papers has some implications for both open access and information literacy instruction.

Academic publishing house John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has teamed up with TED to produce instructor material for a recently launched series of videos called the "TED Studies." The link takes you to a press announcement from Wiley, in which there is a link to the first two inaugural courses. One of these is in psychology, the other is in statistics. The instructor material is online in these first two cases, but I cannot see where Wiley precludes potential print material in the future. I also cannot find the TED Studies area of the TED web pages, and I am trying to discover the difference between TED Studies and the previously announced TED-Ed initiative. I will update this comment when I can find more information.

Course evaluations - everyone does them and nobody is happy with them. A Berkeley statistics professor writes a thorough and readable run-down of why student course evaluations are mostly worthless at measuring what they purport to measure - teaching effectiveness. He also offers useful suggestions for better methods of assessing courses, but they are time consuming.