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Advice for Daughters on Succeeding in the Tech World

The third of my four daughters was being questioned about her training before the last Olympics, and answered; My mother was the first American to win the world championships, so I called her for advice, and believe me, Mom is always brimming with advice, whether you want it or not …     In fact,…

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Cigar-smoking won’t kill you if you’re already old

In my analysis of data on the oldest old from the Kaiser Permanente study, I started with cigar smoking because I have a friend who turned 65 last month. His annual physical went like this: Doctor: Do you still smoke cigars? Jim: Yep. Doctor: Do you still drink 8 or 9 beers every night? Jim: Yep….

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Travels through Open Data Land, with old people, flashlights & cigars

(Yes, that title does sound like a lot of the spam comments I get. ) Last year, at the Gov. 2.0 conference in Santa Monica, Jean Holm, from NASA spoke about some of the opportunities for open data. I left with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the best examples she gave were, I thought,…

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Racism and learning new languages- who’s a geek now?

After watching Black in America: The New Promised Land, about eight black entrepreneurs trying to get traction in Silicon Valley, I read some of the articles on line about it and some of the comments (always a mistake), comments which served up further proof that there should be some sort of IQ requirement to use…

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My happy adventure with SAS on-demand

Before the semester began, I debated about requiring SAS on-demand for my statistics course. In fact, after giving it some thought, I decided to make use optional rather than mandatory.  One reason for my hesitation was uncertainty about basing a major part of students’ grades on a project requiring an untested software package. I could…

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Why a business accelerator won’t work for me (and probably lots of other people)

I watched Black in America: Silicon Valley, The New Promised Land with Soledad O’Brien on the accelerator for black entrepreneurs. It was a terrific show and I highly recommend it. An interesting comment was made by one of the venture capitalists when O’Brien asked him why a white, wealthy male like him cares about diversity…

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Statistics Prove Who is Dumber than a Rock

      Anyone who has ever taught has probably had this experience … you are reading a student paper and think, “I really don’t understand what he/ she is trying to say here.” Like most professors, you probably assume that in these situations, the students aren’t very clear on the concepts themselves. You’re probably…