This is a website of Gary Horlacher of Long Beach, California who is currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California (USC) in Gerontology. This website has changed several times as my goals and ambitions in academics have been evolving. Although I have a grand theory behind my work, I have decided it is much too broad and ambitious. Instead, I decided to try to limit myself to two goals as I continue to pursue becoming an applied statistician interested in developmental processes. I call these my two MAD goals:
Modeling Ambivalence and Dissonance.
Modeling Asymmetrical Distributions.
I think these two challenges to statistical modeling lie at the heart of developmental processes. Once the methodologies have been sufficiently established to deal with these complexities, they could then be used to advance understanding of variety of important developmental processes involving biological and social life (i.e. stress-coping with irresolvable stressor situations). I would like my life work to be focused on establishing the methodology needed to extend modern statistics in these two directions. All of the various social and biological developmental applications that are part of my grand theory could then benefit from these additions to statistical methodology. I believe that these two goals can be reached by continuing to build on the work of Loren Cobb in statistical catastrophe theory and its use of the exponential family of distributions in modeling social phenomena.
Last Updated: 05/09/2008