The past couple of weeks, I’ve been hearing my friends from Turtle Mountain and Spirit Lake talk about the election in North Dakota. I was particularly interested because this was the one election that Nate Silver predicted incorrectly. He had Heitkamp down by 3.9 percent, and yet she won. I have no idea how Silver’s…
On the long list of things that irritate me, few score higher than people who have “an idea” for a start-up and are then going to find “you know, people” to code it for them. I was cheered up when I ran across this youtube video where AngelList founder Naval Ravikant advises the winners of…
Here is a math problem: Hoksinato and Tasunka Ska are going to steal horses. They could steal the scrub ponies from the edge of the camp. The last 15 times warriors from the tribe tried to steal scrub ponies, they got away 12 times and were caught and tortured 3 times. If they…
Lots of random people give me advice. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because: I really do try very hard to listen to other people openly and, I go out of my way to meet new people. Neither of these traits come naturally to me and I have to put a lot of effort into…
I may expand this into a series on software products in general. Years ago, I wrote a post on the similarities between the Rocket Scientist and SAS Enterprise Guide. Neither made a great first impression, both revealed their brilliance over time, and I am still with both lo these many years later. Experiencing both SAS…
My problem as a professor has been how to fit everything into the schedule that students really should learn given that universities are under pressure to require less and less. There isn’t an easy answer. Unlike back when I was attending graduate school, riding in on my pterodactyl, most students are now working full-time, which…
I read an interesting question years ago, on the JMP blog, “What are 5-9 software packages you can’t live without?” That reminded me that when I started this blog almost four years ago, I wrote a post with the title “Nine software packages I can’t live without” . I never finished publishing the list, I started another list…
Last week, teaching my statistics class, I gave an example of regression using actual data. I had hypothesized that given the greater discrimination and poverty on the reservation 40 or 50 years ago, there would be a negative relationship between age and educational attainment within the adult population. That is, people over 60 would be…
I decided about a year ago that it was time to write an educational game to teach math. None of the languages I knew were an optimal choice for this. I’d been programming in SAS for 30 years and it’s an excellent choice for processing the data that come in from pre-tests, student answers and…
We shipped. Again. It was not everything I wanted to go into version 1.1 but we had four days to get it installed on all of the computers being used at our test site and one of those days was being taken by FedEx to get our flash drive to North Dakota and the other…