A Little About My Work

The title of my blog best describes what I believe about my work, Mathematics after the Fall. Statistics and teaching and learning are not pure. A branch of mathematics obsesses over purity and proof, describing mathematics as art. To me, much of that is merely intellectual self-pleasure. I don't even like proof that much. Therefore, there's a little cosmic irony in that my academic position at Bellarmine University was as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics, and my current program at the University of Georgia is Mathematics Education.

How did I wind up here? It's the current path to my real goal, doing societally good work by helping people understand data. My mind naturally quantifies the world. When it comes to data and numerical models, I perform relatively well. In the 21st century computer world, that has good economic value. But good economic value is not what I want; almost all of the time I'm just a Lawful Good statistician. I moved into teaching and learning because I see the need, that numeric literacy is a public good and I want to help people develop those tools.

Professional Works by Project

Most academic listings order work in reverse chronology by type. Instead, to give a better idea of my interests, I decided to list my papers and talks by project, with a few clarifying notes. Except as listed, I am the sole author of the work. Where available, I provide a web link.

Statistics Teaching

Statistics and the Working Nurse. Contributed Talk and (soon to be) paper, International Association for Statistics Education satellite conference, Dublin, Ireland, August 2011.

Member of Advisory Panel, NSF Grant 1021584, "Discovery Learning Projects In Introductory Statistics." at the University of North Georgia.

Testing, testees, and tested: Practical lessons from the first years at a small teaching-focused university. Invited talk and paper, 8th International Conference on Teaching Statistics, July 2010.

Statistical Literacy as a Separate Course from Introductory Statistics. Roundtable discussion leader, Joint Statistics Meetings, August 2010. A roundtable is a group of people who spend time discussing an issue. I spoke about my experience creating Bellarmine's course, Math 200.

The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching Statistics. Collins, Linda, and Molnar, R. Adam. University of Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning, September 2006, Sept. 2005, Sept. 2004, and Sept. 2003. This was part of teacher training during orientation activities.

The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching Statistics. Larsen, Michael, and Molnar, R. Adam. University of Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning, September 2002.

Bus Arrivals and Bunching

Bus Arrivals and Bunching. Refereed Paper, Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 16, Number 2 (2008). This is an activity suitable for first or second courses in statistics.

Bus Arrivals and Bunching: A Data Collection and Analysis Project. Topic Contributed Talk, Joint Statistics Meetings, August 2010. This was part of a session that gave examples of JSE papers.

Homeless Ages in America

Since I believe in the proper use of figures, when positions are incorrect I try to fix things. Sometimes things even get fixed. If you're looking for summary figures, they're in the IASE Satellite paper.

The Homeless Average Age 9? A Curricular Example. Molnar, R. Adam, and Price, Jill. Refereed Conference Paper and Talk, International Association for Statistical Education Satellite Conference, Durban, South Africa, August 2009.

The Homeless Average Age 9? Examining a Bad Statistic. Topic Contributed Talk, MathFest, July 2008.

Interview by Jennifer 8 Lee, New York Times, June 25, 2008.

Social Science Research

Constructing Marital and Enrollment Histories from the NLSY79. Molnar, R. Adam, and Osborne, Lara. This was University of Chicago department of statistics Technical Report #567, June 2006. It appears to no longer be available online. This open project forms part of Ms. Osborne's doctoral dissertation in social work.

Chinese and American Self and Other: Calibration in Relative Rank on Everyday Tasks. Wu, Shali, and Molnar, R. Adam. Contributed poster, Joint Statistics Meetings, Aug. 2008.

Applied Statistics: Modeling Self-Evaluation and Culture. Invited talk, University of Puget Sound, Feb. 2007. This was my alternate job talk, on this psychology study where I assisted with some statistics issues.

Bayesian Neural Networks

This was my attempt at a Statistics doctoral dissertation; I gave several invited job talks on Bayesian models. The final result was an MS degree.

Bayesian Neural Networks and Variable Selection. Masters Paper, June 2010.

Bayesian Trees and Neural Networks. Invited talk, Cal Poly Pomona, February 2007.

Bayesian Neural Networks. Invited talk, Valparaiso University, January 2007.

Bayesian Models and Neural Networks. Invited talk, University of Central Florida, January 2007.

Bayesian Models and Neural Networks. Invited talk, Texas Tech University, January 2007.

Bayesian Neural Networks. Invited talk, Bellarmine University, November 2006.

Bayesian Data Mining: Trees and Neural Networks. Invited talk, Northern Illinois University, April 2006.

Bayesian Neural Networks and Variable Selection. Contributed talk, Joint annual meeting of the Interface symposium and classification society of North America, June 2005.