I was grading the quizzes from my Advanced Quantitative Data Analysis class. This is a class of really smart people in a doctoral program at a selective university. And yet, some of them still had problems with the quiz. Therefore, in however many parts I feel like doing, I am going to discuss how to…
Twenty-eight years ago, I won the world judo championships. Unlike almost everyone else who accomplishes that feat, I did NOT go into running a judo school, selling martial arts supplies, or, more recently, mixed martial arts. Photo courtesy of Hans Gutknecht of the Los Angeles Daily News On the contrary, I immediately went into a…
Several times on this blog, I have mentioned that the most common errors I make, and most programmers*, are the simple things like typing or forgetting to close a bracket or tag. Many of those errors are now automatically fixed by the intellisense of various IDEs (Integrated Development Environment), like Webstorm, but they still pop…
I’ve been somewhat of a fan of SAS On-Demand for Academics, but there are two problems. One is that it runs slow and the other is that it doesn’t run native on a Mac at all. Enter the SAS Web Editor. I just started using it yesterday and so far, I love it. It is…
For reasons I may explain later – or maybe not – I decided to analyze the TIMSS data, which is Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Use a colon: Nifty tip #1 ** Ran this first *** libname LIB ‘C:\TIMSS2007\Data’; proc contents data = lib.G4_ACHIEVE07; *** Modified to only keep math items ; data lib.G4_ACHIEVE07;…
Testing in the schools starts in a few weeks. We’ve been writing a computer game to teach math. Here is a look at some of the scenes. The poster is thanks to one of the awesome members of our graphics team, Justin Flores. You can find him at Jflo Productions. Of course, we will be…
Let’s say that all you knew about probability were some basic rules. Would it be enough to convince you that gambling is a bad bet? I think so. Let’s begin with these four: Probability of something not happening = 1 – the probability of that something happening P(Not X) = 1 – P(X) Since the…
Okay, young people, the time has come for us to have a serious discussion. When I was young, I was very annoying. Now that I am old, I am frequently annoyed, proving thereby that God has a sense of humor. I think pretty often the people who are annoying me are not doing so deliberately….
I’ve been fairly positive about SAS On-demand but I think the keyword in that sentence is “fairly”. One of the major advantages of SAS over R (which has no formal tech support) and SPSS (which, before it was bought by IBM you could wait 45 minutes on hold for tech support) is that if you…
My long-time business partner, Dr. Erich Longie, is a very experienced pool player. Today, we were discussing a business decision where someone had to choose between two potential employees. One was exceptionally talented but not particularly ethical – nothing terrible, mind you, like stealing out of the cash register, or sexually harassing the interns –…