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…
Ever wonder why with goodness of fit tests non- significance is what you want? Why is that sometimes when you have a significant p-value it means your hypothesis is correct, there is a relationship between the price of honey and the number of bees, and in other cases, significance means your model is rejected? Well,…
I was reading a book on PHP just to get some ideas for a re-design I’m doing for a client, when I thought of this. Although I think of PHP as something you use to put stuff into a database and take it out – data entry of client records, reports of total sales –…
I’ve been looking high and low for a supplemental text for a course on multivariate statistics and I found this one – The Multivariate Social Scientist, by Graeme Hutcheson 7 Nick Sofroniou They are big proponents of generalized linear models, in fact, the subtitle is “Introductory statistics using generalized linear models”, so if you don’t…
I find it weird when I make people nervous. I’ve had people shake and stutter so much that I thought they had some sort of disability, only to find out later that it was a reaction to meeting me! My family and friends say I’m intimidating, which I also find bizarre. I am, literally, a…
You might have gotten the misimpression from my previous post that I don’t think students need to learn all that much matrix algebra that I am a slacker as far as expecting students to come to courses with some prior knowledge. That’s not exactly the case. In fact, here are some things I just assume…
Every day, every week, I face the same question that all entrepreneurs ask themselves – “How do you know when you are done?” Most days, I start work around 10 am and finish about 14 hours later. Usually, I take off an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner, or take a few hours…
Following a discussion using matrix algebra to show computation in a Multivariate Analysis of Variance, a doctoral student asked me, “Professor, when will I ever use this? Why do I need to know this?” He had a valid point. I’m always asking myself why I’m teaching something. Is it because it interests me personally, because…