Whenever you find yourself overworked or tired out, it’s easy to get upset out of all proportion when something goes wrong. The usual advice to avoiding stress – “Be sure you get enough sleep. Work-life balance is important.” – can be like telling runners at a track meet to run faster. It is correct but…
It’s almost 6 am here on the east coast, and after flying all day during which I worked on a final report for a grant to develop our latest educational game and make bug fixes on same, I landed and wrote a report for a client, because that pays the bills. In the meantime, over on…
SENSITIVITY AND SPECIFICITY – TWO ANSWERS TO “DO YOU HAVE A DISEASE?” Both sensitivity and specificity address the same question – how accurate is a test for disease – but from opposite perspectives. Sensitivity is defined as the proportion of those who have the disease that are correctly identified as positive. Specificity is the proportion…
First of all, you should all watch this video by the brilliant Cindy Gallop. Everything she says about recruiting women for jobs as Executive Creative Directors applies exactly to women, black , Hispanic or Native American men applying for jobs in technology or for investor funding. Did you watch it? Good! Let me reinforce one of her points….
Policy makers have very good reason for wanting to know how common a condition or disease is. It allows them to plan and budget for treatment facilities, supplies of medication, rehabilitation personnel. There are two broad answers to the question, “How common is condition X?” and, interestingly, both of these use the exact same SAS…
On twitter, there were a few comments from people who said they didn’t like to take interns because “More than doing work, they want to watch me work.” I see both sides of that. You’re busy. You’re not netflix. I get it. On the other hand, that’s a good way to learn. The data are…
Seven years ago, when I founded The Julia Group, I submitted a grant proposal to develop an online algebra course. After 18 years of writing grant proposals for universities, tribal councils and other organizations, I wrote one just for me, for something that was near and dear to my heart. I know that developing educational…
I find this scree plot of eigenvalues very helpful in identifying the number of factors. A scree plot is a plot of the eigenvalues by the factor number. I realized this is only helpful if one understands what an eigenvalue is. First of all, go way back to Stat 101 & remember that correlation is…
Start-ups are all about buzzwords – innovation! disrupt! billion! We’re going to disrupt the something something something with our innovation that will bring us a billion dollars! Hurray! VCs , give me money! That all sounds really good until it’s you that’s being disrupted. We’re part of the Boom Startup Ed Tech accelerator for twelve…
Previously, I discussed PROC FREQ for checking the validity of your data. Now we are on to data analysis, but, as anyone who does analysis for more than about 23 minutes can tell you, cleaning your data and doing analysis is seldom a two-step process. In fact, it’s more like a loop of two steps,…