First, my website has officially moved into Spot #1 on Google, so if you’re feeling lucky with “Hoxie Ackerman,” you get me! All it took was one link from another website to this one… Page Rank + unique name = awesome. In my second Bing search ever, it turns out that my Facebook page is still beating out my website in Microsoft Land, but I’m much more concerned with my Google standings.

Second, last weekend I had the pleasure of heading down to Quincy Market to meet up with fellow ex-Pine Crestian Caryn and The Touchtones, an all-female a cappella group coming to you straight from Cornell University. Despite the cold weather and the security guards who forced them to move after their first couple of songs (was it the out-of-control pyrotechnics and crowd surfing or the lack of a performance permit?), they persevered and sang some very cool stuff. Rock on! (I managed to snap two pictures on my cell phone before stuffing my hand back into my glove and pocket, check them out!)

And finally, although we still have a couple more weeks to go before it’s officially winter, it certainly feels/looks a lot like winter’s already here. We had some snowfall last weekend, and I’ve ridden my bike through single-digit temperatures to get to work at a couple of times. (Random phone pic I took of the Commons while riding by last weekend.) Brr!

Yesterday, I made a lot of progress with the website.  WordPress is incredibly powerful even when you don’t really know what you’re doing with it (like me), and I’m sure that I’ll discover even more utility as I become more familiar with the platform.  Lots more tinkering in store for today.

In other news, when I won the College Prize for Excellence in Statistics last month, I was given a nice little certificate and a wrapped gift.  The gift turned out to be The Elements of Statistical Learning (TESL) by Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman.  I don’t know which faculty member(s) chose this textbook for me, but he/she/they couldn’t have made a better choice.  Toward the end of the school year, when I was looking for math projects to do this summer, I visited Robert Tibshirani’s website after hearing his name mentioned in classes for years.  The topics of data mining and supervised learning are quite hot these days, and I thought his textbook would be a great introduction to the subjects.  I had downloaded the available course materials for the Stanford course he taught using TESL and was ready to go, except I didn’t have the book.  And *poof!*  There it was.

I started reading through it yesterday, and so far so good!  This morning, I spent some time getting R packages installed and configured on my desktop computer, so hopefully this afternoon I’ll be able to work through some of the examples.