I’ve picked up the book Wonder Women, several times, read a few dozen pages and put it down again. Half-way through with it, I’m still not sure what I think of it. I make an effort to read books from people who have a very different perspective from me. Most recently, I finished “Tell My…
If you want to be a programmer, entrepreneur or a statistician, the best advice that I can give is, “Don’t believe other people are smarter than you.” Sometimes that is hard advice to take. I read an interesting blog post by Ali Berlinksi, “I miss being stereotyped”, about being Asian-American and moving to an area…
Years ago, I was teaching a course on psychological assessment in a program on Addiction Counseling. The counseling professors had a term for people who moved to another city or state in an attempt to solve their substance abuse problems, “going geographic”. The problem with that strategy, they said, is that wherever you go, there…
On October 3rd, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa is hosting the first ever (but to be annual) Tribal Disabilities Conference. The theme this year is “The World of Disabilities” and I am super-excited because I am going to be giving the keynote address along with my long-time friend and business partner, Dr. Erich Longie. …
I’ll be honest, I bought Debora Spar’s book, Wonder Women, in part because of a New York Times review that quoted her as saying, I was walking in National Airport, I had a very big interview. It was actually with the C.I.A. I was feeling very professional, and I was wearing my graduation suit, sensible…
Box and whisker plots can give you an understanding of your data at a glance – IF you know what you’re looking at. The BOX extends from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile. That line in the middle is the median, also known as the 50th percentile. The diamond inside the box is the…
What is item difficulty analysis and how is it helpful? Item difficulty analysis is simply examining what percentage of students answered each item correctly. Item difficulty analysis is one basic way to establish test validity. One would expect that items at the second-grade level would have the lowest level of difficulty, being answered by the…
I was going to write about item analysis today but all of the tweets and posts on sexism in the technology field distracted me. So, here are my comments on that and then I’m going back to work. 1. I think sexism is cowardice and bullying. Having coached and competed in combat sports for 43…
Sometimes the simplest things can make life easier. When I start exploring a new data set, the first thing I do is the Characterize Data task. With even modest-sized datasets this produces a lot of output. For example, the data from Spirit Lake: The Game, with about 80 variables and 88 subjects produced 93 pages….
I’m doing a Hands-On Workshop in Las Vegas at the Western Users of SAS Software conference in November. When they asked me for some topics, I thought about factor analysis or categorical data analysis, but I’m already doing a couple of other talks on those procedures. I really felt like one of the most overlooked…