The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village…
It’s been a good week for the darling daughters. The Spoiled One graduated summa cum laude, also president of the senior class, and is heading to the east coast to attend a small liberal arts college where she has an academic scholarship and a spot on the soccer team. The book co-authored by Darling Daughter…
Where we left off, I had created some parcels and was going to do a factor analysis later. Now, it’s later. If you’ll recall, I had not find any items that correlated significantly with the food item that also made sense conceptually. For example, it correlated highly with attending church services but that didn’t really…
First of all, what are parcels? Not the little packages your grandma left on the table in the hall when she came back from shopping. Well, not only that. In factor analysis, parcels are simply the sum of a small number of items. I prefer using parcels when possible because both basic psychometric theory and…
Someone handed me a data set on acculturation that they had collected from a small sample size of 25 people. There was a good reason that the sample was small – think African-American presidents of companies over $100 million in sales or Latina neurosurgeons. Anyway, small sample, can’t reasonably expect to get 500 or 1,000…
In a very random life event, I was asked a lot of questions recently by people exploring making a movie about my life. This is not the interesting part, because in Hollywood people are always talking about making movies that come to nothing … The interesting thing was how many times the answer to a…
Since I already called my mom on Mother’s Day, I thought that I’d talk about another woman who was important in my life, a mentor, who I probably haven’t talked to in 20 years. (I know, I’m such an ungrateful bitch. ) Dr. Jane Mercer was not even in the same department as me. My dissertation was…
At first, I was thinking it wasn’t right to have a favorite paper, but then I realized that was idiotic. It’s not like these papers (or their presenters) are my children. My favorite paper was, Statistical modeling for large complex data: Five new directions from SAS/STAT software If you’re not a statistician, props to you…
In the past month, I have been in five cities and three states and met a lot of people. Lately, I’ve had conversations with several families that have adult “children” living at home in their 30s, 40s and even 50s. By then, the children’s girlfriend/boyfriend and children are also living in the home. Often, this…
The nice thing about going to SAS Global Forum is that it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Long after I have gone home, there are still points to ponder. Visual analytics is big and not just in the sense of there is a product out called that which I have never used but that…