Yesterday, I wrote a post asking if we really suck at math and questioning the value of spending 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from kindergarten to tenth-grade on the path to achieve a perfect math SAT score. Today, I read the last post by Derek Miller. It begins, “Here it is. I’m…
“If everyone knows a thing it’s almost for sure it aint so.” “It’s not so much the things you don’t know that hurt you as the things you know for sure that aint so.” I don’t take anyone’s word for anything. Take those quotes, for example, which I’ve both heard attributed to Mark Twain, Will…
The new structural equation modeling for JMP is pretty cool. It’s unfortunate that it requires both JMP and SAS/STAT to run it, the cost of the two combined being so expensive that you pretty much have to work for a huge organization that can afford a site license for both or sell a kidney to…
Mr. Chips is dead – and I think I helped to kill him. There has been a lot of backlash directed at universities over the past few decades. Some of it is very blatant – like the Wisconsin legislators who want copies of a faculty member’s email, or the Georgia legislators who attributed their university…
I had a lot of questions about structural equation modeling with JMP and when I was in Las Vegas at SAS Global Forum a while back, I was able finally to hook up with* speak to Wayne Watson and get almost all of my questions answered. This is Wayne. You should look for him because…
My father was born in New York City to two non-citizens who were in the U.S. for a few years, left and never returned. In his twenties, he returned to the U.S. and joined the military, I am pretty sure because it was the one thing he could think of that would most piss off…
I was disappointed to see that the Open Data community is pretty inactive over at data.gov. With 305,000 datasets and counting released you’d think there’d be more than a handful of people posting over there. I decided I would start on my own with the TIMSS data. This is the Trends in International Mathematics and…
As always, I learned a lot at SAS Global Forum this year. It is one of those conferences where there are always two or three sessions going on at once that I would like to attend. I stayed for a bit AFTER the conference because I knew that I would not want to waste any…
True confessions: I just don’t get the data hackathon I am old. If I was not aware of this by looking at my U.S. birth certificate (which, like President Obama, I do have), I have America’s most spoiled thirteen-year-old to tell me, “You’re old.” (sometimes followed by – “and stupid” if I have just told…
Anyone who tells you they know all of SAS is like that creepy guy at the fraternity party who swears that his father is the Duke of Canada, that is, they have a perception of themselves that is not in screaming distance of contact with reality. Even though I have been using SAS for decades,…