statistics for graduate students

I don't know whether this should really go on my teaching blog, but we (Blanton, Cranmer, Tinker, Modjaz, and I) have started an informal (open to anyone, well attended, join us) friday-morning statistics for graduate students class. (The reason I think this class should go here and not in my teaching blog is that in fact I think this kind of seminar class is really a research activity; that's what makes it such a good idea.) Today was Kyle Cranmer talking about the properties of estimators, the Cramér–Rao bound, the bias–variance trade-offs, and other theoretical matters. He made some comments at the end about the best estimators being optimized with respect to the statistician's utility, which is an idea right up my alley; I will return to those ideas in my lectures, which come later in the semester.