Whatever I was going to do productive on the plane was interrupted by me reading Sh*t My Dad Says. This convinced me that I will never be a best-selling author because I will NEVER be that funny. The book is hilarious. Read it. Thankfully for me the book was so funny that it was either…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It started when I read an article by David Brooks where he actually gave a student at Yale an ‘A’ and approved her assessment that “Time not spent investing in yourself carries an opportunity cost, rendering you at a competitive disadvantage as compared to others who maintained…
I’m not perfect. God am I ever not perfect. I’ve been working on the Spirit Lake Game beta on and off for the past several weeks, adding, fixing, changing. In most of these cases we knew months ago as we wrote the game that we needed documentation or that we would need to come back…
It must be that time of year because I was asked to speak at two different schools in downtown Los Angeles this week, one elementary school and one middle school. The Perfect Jennifer probably won the coolest teacher award for getting her younger sister, a world champion in mixed martial arts and subject of a…
Last week I wrote a bit about how to get an exploratory factor analysis using Mplus. The question now, is what does that output MEAN ? First, you just get some information on the programming statements or defaults that produced your output: INPUT READING TERMINATED NORMALLY Exploratory Factor Analysis ; SUMMARY OF ANALYSIS Number of…
Many people have commented how ironic it is that I’m writing computer games these days because I’m one of the least playful people you’ll meet. I have a confession to make, although confession is perhaps the wrong word because I don’t feel the least bit bad about it. Playing with small children bores me. Don’t…
Previously, I discussed how to do a confirmatory factor analysis with Mplus. What if you aren’t sure what variables should load on what factor? Then you are doing an exploratory factor analysis. Really, you should probably do the exploratory factor analysis first unless you have some very large body of research behind you saying that…
Being able to find SPSS in the start menu does not qualify you to run a multi-nomial logistic regression. This is the kind of comment statisticians find funny that leaves other people scratching their heads. The point is that it’s not that difficult to get output for some fairly complex statistical procedures. Let’s start with…
Someone had a question about factor analysis with Mplus and even though it is not a piece of software I work with normally, we aim to please at The Julia Group, so I downloaded the demo version and away I went. It truly was, as my granddaughter says, easy-peasy lemon squeezie. You might not think…
Here are four more of Dr. De Mars 55 things I have learned in (almost) 55 years, and that is that there are four thing students should have learned in school but often didn’t. 1. Say what you mean. I don’t know who those teachers are who reinforce students for using longer words, longer sentences…