I have a meeting scheduled for Washington, D.C. that includes federal employees and government contractors. Many of these people are not working now and the building where it is supposed to take place is closed. I had to decide whether or not to buy my plane ticket today and take advantage of the three-week advance…
Maybe when I get even older than I am now, my retirement plan will be to go to really beautiful places and learn stuff. I could take a class in Hawaii, attend a workshop in Halifax or visit museums in Venice. Actually, that’s kind of what I’m doing now. Today, I had the opportunity to…
Hey, if you are a furloughed federal employee looking for something free to do on Thursday because you still haven’t received your back pay that Congress promised you, you can drop on into Salem, Oregon to the Oregon SAS Conference. I will be speaking on Categorical Data Analysis, Telling Stories with Your Data and How…
This past week was great. Like most weeks, I spent part of every day wondering what I ever did to deserve to be so blessed in life, and being grateful for the interesting, dedicated people I met, for the opportunity to learn more every day and aware of the real privileges I have. That I…
I am aware that the world is full of people who don’t know what a C-prompt is and who are unfamiliar with the concept of a path. Suppose you are one of those people (and no, I’m not judging you As Will Rogers said, “Everyone is ignorant, just on different subjects. He was a pretty…
Okay, I have finally come to a firm opinion on Wonder Women (I know you are relieved). It’s a good book because it has caused me to think, a lot. As I mentioned in an earlier post, much of it is literally foreign to my experience. This certainly includes every reference to feminism in the…
While I love teaching and am looking forward to be working in a completely new environment – teaching an online course to masters students – I was initially concerned that teaching a course on biostatistics in public health might draw too much time away to my work for The Julia Group. I really should have…
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…