In August, I attended a class at Unite 2014 (on Unity game development) and the presenter said, “And some of you, your code won’t run and you’ll swear you did exactly what was shown in the examples. But, of course, all of the rest of us will know that is not true.” This perfectly describes…
Computing confidence intervals is one of the areas where beginning statistics students have the most trouble. It is not as difficult if you break it down into steps, and if you use SAS or other statistical software. Here are the steps: 1. Compute the statistic of interest– that is mean, proportion, difference between means 2….
A recent tweet about mixed martial arts decisions set me to thinking about probability. @Fight_ghost tweeted that a TV commentator made no sense when she said that she thought a fighter should have won by split, not unanimous decision. Others on twitter agreed with him that was a stupid comment, and asked did she think…
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of examples of this … Malicious obedience is discussed on the englishstackexchange page (who even knew this existed) as “….when people set their boss up to fail by doing exactly as he or she says even though they know in their hearts that their actions are incorrect or not optimal.”…
Last year, I went from teaching in classrooms in a pretty building with a library on the ground floor to teaching on-line. I also went from the semester system to teaching the same content in four weeks. This has led curious friends of mine, used to teaching in the traditional format, to ask , How…
SAS Enterprise Miner – Free, on a Mac – Bet You Didn’t See That Coming … but how the hell do you get your data on it? I wanted to test SAS Text Miner and was surprised to find the university did not have a license. No problem – and it really was, astoundingly, no…
Am I missing something here? All of the macros I have seen for the parallel analysis criterion for factor analysis look pretty complicated, but, unless I am missing something, it is a simple deal. The presumption is this: There isn’t a number like a t-value or F-value to use to test if an eigenvalue is…
I’m about to tear my hair out. I’ve been reading this statistics textbook which shall remain nameless, ostensibly a book for graduate students in computer science, engineering and similar subjects. The presumption is that at the end of the course students will be able to compute and interpret a factor analysis, MANOVA and other multivariate…
I’ve written here before about visual literacy and Cook’s D is just my latest example. Most people intuitively understand that any sample can have outliers, say, an 80-year-old man who is the father of a six-year-old child, the new college graduate who is making $150,000 a year. We understand that those people may throw off…
Since it is the weekend, I decided to blog about weekend stuff. Look for more statistics tomorrow. For most of the past quarter-century, I have been roped into being a volunteer for one organization or another. Here is a very, very partial list: American Association on Mental Retardation National Council on Family Relations United States…