Anyone who has ever taught has probably had this experience … you are reading a student paper and think, “I really don’t understand what he/ she is trying to say here.” Like most professors, you probably assume that in these situations, the students aren’t very clear on the concepts themselves. You’re probably…
Today was a lesson in why one should always be a little leery of mean substitution. I had downloaded a data set to use as a logistic regression example for my class tomorrow. It happened to be the 2010 Monitoring the Future study and I was particularly interested in school drop out. This is a…
Let the buyer beware – that phrase certainly applies to open data, as does the less historical but equally true statement that students always want to work with real data until they get some. Lately, I have had students working with two different data sets that have led me to the inevitable conclusion that self-report…
It’s about time I got some recognition ! You can claim your own Love Stats award here. Careful, of undeserved awards, though. The last person who falsely claimed a Love Stats award had multicollinearity in his measures, a high VIF and died of complications of homoscedasticity. You have been warned.
I am tired of hearing that men in technical fields cannot meet women. Some stupid company even went so far as to say that they had hired hot women to work at their company so now they were going to have no problem attracting good programmers and engineers. This is stupid on so many levels….
Giving a whole new meaning to “computing in the cloud”, I finished up my paper “A gentle introduction to survival analysis” for the Nevada SAS Users Group from 30,000 feet up using on-board wi-fi and SAS On-demand. I was shocked to find that the performance was much better in-flight. Presumably, if you charge people $12.95…
I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as, in a way, against each other we are pitting them, And that is, don’t bother your head about the sins of commission because however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn’t be committing them….
Completely unrelated to statistics, software or, anything really, my darling daughter number three is ranked in the top ten in the world in mixed martial arts. She has been nominated for female fighter of the year, which is decided in a scientific, objective manner by how many votes the nominees get on the Internet. She…
Jon Peltier and I were going back and forth on twitter about why it is that people will post answers on a forum or mailing list that are completely incorrect. As Peter Flom says, “They are often in error but never in doubt.” Jon suggested there are three types; those who don’t know and admit…
I read Allen Englehardt’s post this morning, on R vs SAS/SPSS in corporations and it motivated me to set aside my infinite to-do list and write about something I’ve been thinking for a long time. Since Allen writes on R-bloggers, it will surprise no one that his conclusion was that R is preferable to SAS…