One of the questions I get asked a lot is “How do you get so much done?” I sometimes think that growing up without advantages can be an advantage. For example, when I was a kid, I never had my own room. I always shared it with my sister, or sometimes my sister and my…
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’ve written about the challenges of finding a mentor previously, Why the cool kids won’t hang out with you. Let’s be frank, if you are old and pumping gas, not too many people are interested in you as a mentor, but the last few years have been good here at The Julia Group, and the…
I’m looking forward to teaching my first masters level course in a lo-o-ng time next week. Since this may be the first course students take in their masters program, the question I’m faced with is, “What would you tell someone at the very beginning of learning about statistics?” I’m starting with this: Bias = bad…
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….
I was looking at one of the problems from the new common core assessment for mathematics at the fourth-grade level. To keep from being sued, I will change the numbers, but it looked like this: 4,0_7 1, 35_ – ——– 2,_99 The student is to fill in the blanks. I *suppose* that the question is…
What the hell is WUSS? Why would *I* ever go to anything with the name WUSS? It’s not just so you can get the cool hats which double as lunch bags, although that’s one possible incentive. It’s also not just so you can get your own original, signed illustration of the difference between ordinary least…
Since I am at the Western Users of SAS Software this week and on my sixth city this month in the traveling statistician/CEO tour, I drafted a guest blogger for today. Eric Ortiz wrote the following blog post. He is married to my oldest daughter, Maria. He also is the founder of Moblish , a…