Day eight of the 20-day blogging challenge was to write about a professional read – a book, article or blog post that has had an impact on me. To be truthful, I would have to say that the SAS documentation has had a profound impact on me. SAS documentation is extremely well-written (to be fair,…
The question for Day 3 is : “What is a website that you cannot live without? Tell about your favorite features and how you use it in your teaching and learning.” The first part is easy. Oh my God, I love, love, LOVE stackoverflow, a site where all of your programming questions are answered. It’s free…
Today I’m on day two of the 20-day blogging challenge, the brain child of Kelly Hines and a great way to find new, interesting bloggers. The second day prompt was to share an organizational tip from your classroom, one thing that works for you. The latest tool I’ve been using is livebinders . Remember when…
I don’t use AMOS for structural equation modeling all that often and every time I do I have to look up all of the steps again. 1. Install SPSS and AMOS. Fortunately, it seems to work on Windows 8. Yay! You can either open AMOS by double-clicking on it or you can open it directly…
Today was my most recent experience in the clash of commercial and academic cultures. For seven years, I was an assistant and then associate professor, teaching statistics and research methods, writing articles for academic journals. For five years before that, I was a graduate student at the University of California. I even did a post-doc…
I was reading the powerpoints that came with a textbook, you know, in the instructor’s packet, and I was already thinking this book was a little more focused on computation over comprehension for my liking when I came to the following learning objective: “Compute an Analysis of Variance by hand.” Are you fucking kidding me?…
This month, I’m teaching biostatistics for National University, and so far I am really enjoying it. There is just a really minor problem, though. While I received a copy of the textbook, I did not receive a copy of the instructor’s manual with answers to the homework problems. Since I am going to grade 20…
After a fine, productive evening of coding PHP and javascript respectively, The Invisible Developer and I were discussing how to find a developer. We’re making good progress on 7 Generation Games and we’re pretty happy coding our own stunts. We did have someone come in to pinch hit last year when we were running behind…
I was wrong. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that women did CSS and HTML and men did “real” coding like PHP, SQL, Python, Perl, javascript etc. Since life had taught me that predominantly male fields always paid better than female ones (construction workers get paid more than licensed practical nurses, for example),…
I am old. I remember punched cards, COBOL, dumb terminals and having to walk over to the computer center and load tapes on to the drive if I wanted to use large data sets – large back then meaning 100,000 records or more with a few hundred variables. We thought that was pretty big data….