The second time I taught statistics, I supplemented the textbook with assignments using real data, and I have been doing it in the twenty-eight years since. The benefits seem so obvious to me that it’s hard to believe that everyone doesn’t do the same. The only explanation I can imagine is that they are not…
Hint: It’s math! My last post, I ranted about the need for math if you are going to learn to code. I was thinking about that again today. Unity is the game engine that claims to be used by over a million developers. That may be true – it seems like everyone I ran into…
I’ve spent a good bit of my life living and working in places that many of my colleagues would not drive through in the middle of the day with the windows rolled up and the car doors locked, so you’ll have to excuse me if I am a bit cynical about the latest push to…
Visual literacy, being the word chooser of this blog, I have decided means the ability to “read” graphic information. A post I saw today on Facebook earnings over time gave a prime example of this. If you are a fluent “visualizer”, then just like a fluent reader can read a paragraph and comprehend it,…
If I had a clone, all of my code would be beautiful. Last week, I was a speaker at the Tribal Disability Conference in Turtle Mountain, where I spoke on starting a business. Then, I went for a site visit at Spirit Lake Vocational Rehabilitation followed by another talk on self-employment at the Tribal Disability…
When we started the Dakota Learning Project to evaluate our educational games, I wondered if we had bitten off more than we could chew. We proposed to develop the games, pilot them in schools, collect data and analyze the data to see if the games had any impact. We were also going to go back…
Here is a little note for people on customer service: Every company I have ever worked with that has terrible customer service apologizes a lot and makes soothing noises in lieu of actually doing anything. When your company fucks up it does NO good to say how sorry you are and you empathize. I really…
Our story so far … I suggested that people with disabilities who are successful in education, jobs or self-employment don’t define themselves as disabled, and neither do the people around them. It can’t be that simple, right? Have a positive attitude, look on the sunny side of life and next thing you know, people are…
I’m looking forward to speaking at the Turtle Mountain Disabilities Conference and not just because they have one of the best conference logos I have ever seen. This topic reminds me of a joke my friend told me. His specialty is geriatrics and one day one of his patients came to him and…
More notes from the text mining class. … This is the article I mentioned in the last post, on Singular Value Decomposition ftp://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/EMiner/TamingTextwiththeSVD.pdf Contrary to expectations, I did find time to read it, on the ride back from Las Vegas and it is surprisingly accessible even to people who don’t have a graduate degree in statistics,…